Half-Resurrection Blues_ A Bone Street Rumba Novel - Daniel Jose Older Page 0,42
archival library when he was researching some shit.”
“There’s no label on the tape or nothing?”
“It’s hand-written. Just says ‘PLEASE’ in all caps.”
“That’s kinda sad.”
“Or beautiful.”
“Both.”
Then we shut up, because the woman’s voice hits this particular note that is everything and just hangs there while the band trundles their cool blues beneath her. You can tell they all know they’re making magic, got that divine swagger like nothing matters but each single note as they play it and then the phrase and how they all wind together and become one.
Halfway through the song, the woman drops out and a trumpet takes over. Sasha puts her head on my chest, and I can feel my slow heartbeat against her face. The trumpet blurts out a note, stops, blurts another, swings into a melody something like what the woman was singing and then takes off into a wild, burgeoning improvisation that leaves me breathless. “Damn,” I whisper.
“Right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
The woman comes back, resanctifying the space, and Sasha’s moving against me. I’m hard again, and I know if I just lie here, her slowly gyrating body will find what it’s looking for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Council will blast one of their stupid messages through my head any second now. I can feel the vibrations of imminent ignorance like an oncoming freight train. Sasha smiles in the blissed-out sleep of the fully fucked, I notice with satisfaction, and I’m enjoying a few quiet moments before my mind and unartful employers catch up to me. I slip out of bed so as not to pervert the peaceful air with their bullshit, and the transmission comes as I’m walking into the kitchen.
“New York Council of the Dead to Agent Delacruz. Your presence is required immediately at Council Headquarters for a hearing in regard to yesterday’s events, the extinguishing of a Council agent and the injuring of a soulcatcher prime during the course of duty. Please respond posthaste to room 849 in the headquarters main offices immediately.”
Respond posthaste immediately? Dickheads.
“End transmission.”
* * *
She wakes up while I’m sliding my belt on; blesses me with a groggy smile as she watches me lace up my boots. I take her face in my hands and kiss it, once on the lips, once on the forehead, once on each cheek. A rumbling inside lets me know that if I linger any longer, I’ll be here all day, all week probably; so I stand, nod, and stroll out the door into the snow-covered morning.
* * *
Bureaucracy’s got its own special language. It’s trifling, of course, the lowest order of poetry, and manages to divest words of all meaning and still weigh them down with extra banality. After a while, you get good at it. Riley’s reached legendary status the way he spits that shit out like it’s scripted in him. Makes it look so easy.
I’m not there yet.
I still gotta bounce my mind back and forth along the highways of implications that burst out of each sentence, so my rhythm’s off and I come a little clunky with it. But I’m getting better.
In a chilly, mostly dark room up in some corner of the Council’s industrial warehouse headquarters in Sunset Park, I lay down the story in the best bureaucracy-talk I can muster. The committee is a semicircle of shrouds around me, indistinct in the foggy gloom. Somewhere, the ever-watchful eyes of at least one of the seven ignoble chairmen must be watching us.
“At this point in time, I withdrew from the premises with Agent Washington.”
“Why,” an icy voice cuts me off, “Agent Delacruz, did you not make an attempt to intervene on behalf of Agent Arroyo?”
You see that? Poetry. The most overindulgent, self-important use of language ever. I stifle a curse-out and then say, “The situation with Agent Arroyo had deteriorated beyond any point where intervention would have been . . . useful.”
Where’s Riley when I need him? The motherfucker has a way with words. I can only imagine how he knocked ’em out after the last basement debacle. But Riley’s unconscious somewhere, recovering from the ngk poison. And I’m floundering.
“And by that you mean?”
“The ngks had already dealt mortal injuries on Agent Arroyo, and he was, by my estimation, in a state of Deeper Death. Unsalvageable.” I cringe at the word because it makes Dro into an object that must be thrown away.
“By your estimation.” I sense precise intonations being recorded forever in that endless ghost memory.
“Also, I had no idea what possible intervention I could’ve performed to release Agent Arroyo from the ngks,