every damn near-dead guy that falls across my path.”
“So why’d you come back?”
“I helped Dro sort out the house-loving homeboy. He really just needed a firm talking to and made himself scarce by his own accord. Then we headed to Mama Esther’s, as a matter of fact, cuz I was a little spooked by the whole night and pissed about something—some Council bullshit, I’m sure—and I told her about what I’d found.”
“And?”
“And she threw a shit fit and made me go back and get you.”
“Did she say why?”
“Just went on about our brethren and not leaving ’em out for the wolves to chew on. It was all pretty cryptic, but you know how she can get when she’s moody.”
I nod, but I’m thinking about something else. An idea is gestating somewhere in me and I can’t quite articulate it yet. Apparently, Riley recognizes the face because he takes one good look at me and stays quiet.
“All right.” I look around. I’ve been cooped up in this house for who knows how many days. My midsection still aches where the blade went in and where it came out too, but I’m mostly healed up. The cleansings, the herbs, Dr. Tijou’s wonder pills all musta done some pretty serious work on me. Baba Eddie had laid down his heavy-duty spiritual blocks on my place. I briefly entertain the image of Sarco’s shadow, hovering just outside my door, claw raised. Then I shake my head. “Let’s go,” I say.
“Where?”
“Grand Army Plaza.”
“What, now? It’s three thirty in the morning.”
“I know. I have a hunch about something.”
“Carlos . . .”
But I’m throwing on my coat and heading out the door.
CHAPTER FORTY
Feels good to roam the streets with Riley again. It’s a certainty that travels with us, that I have his back and he has mine, and if some mess should go down, we will go down with it, cursing and stabbing all the way to Hell. Also, it’s nice out. A warm wind blows my overcoat as we slip through Bed-Stuy, pass the colossal Marcy Projects with their ill hospital lighting and scattered characters stoop sitting through the graveyard shift. We pass the hustle and bustle of Fulton Street, still alive with crackheads, drunks, and occasional hipsters even at this late hour, and reach Atlantic Avenue. I realize we’re retracing the steps I took with Sarco not long ago, and so instead of taking Franklin, we cut over to Washington and then Underhill, which drops us onto the parkway within sight of the brightly lit plaza.
Civil War soldiers glare out at the darkness from their frozen battle positions at the top of the arch. Traffic speeds around the rotunda where Flatbush Avenue smashes into Prospect Park and then divvies off into about six other streets. The Brooklyn Public Library looks on solemnly, a vast square structure with ornately carved front pieces and an elegant open-air entrance. The arch itself is a dazzling, European-type structure, pale against the night sky with dark statues of horses, angels, and warriors bursting like lichen on either side and along the top.
“What you looking for, man?” Riley wants to know.
I stand beside one of the huge legs of the thing. My eyes are closed, and all my sensory satellites are fully charged. I shush Riley and hear him shrug and scoff and then stroll around to the other side. A memory, a smell . . . anything to trigger my mind to what happened here, to the last scrap of life before my death. But all I hear is the late-night wind, the passing traffic, the soft buzzing of streetlights.
And then there’s something else. Something dead. Of course, the surge of spirit activity writhing around in the park fizzes along in an endless drone, but this isn’t that. This is . . . much closer. Much larger. Much older. And still vague, somehow.
“Riley,” I whisper-shout. “You feel that?”
“What?” he says; then he shuts up. “No. Yes! What the ever-loving fuck?”
“Shh!”
It’s growing, coming closer. It’s fuller in the air around us, a sensation more than anything else, a heaviness, a presence. And it’s peaking. Riley’s beside me, and we’re looking at each other with our what-the-fuck faces. “Did you know there was something here?” I whisper. I don’t even know why I’m whispering; it just seems appropriate.
He shakes his head. “I don’t really fuck around in the plaza unless they send me here.”
And then it’s on us, all around us, arrived. A humongous pale face blanches the darkness between the two