Ginny says. “A few blocks down from the park.”
I close my eyes. She’ll let you know how to find her when she’s ready to be found. Mama Esther’s words whisper through me. “Thank you, Ginny.”
“Be careful out there, Carlos.”
* * *
Brooklyn’s beautiful tonight. I stroll down a quiet residential block, enjoying the warm air on my face. I can almost ignore the nagging sensation that Sarco looms in every tall shadow. A wrinkled old man sits on his stoop, enjoying a cigarette like he’s done every night before bed for the past forty-something years. He’s dying and he knows it, better than his doctors even, but he could give a shit. It’s been a long and glorious life, full of hard work and good love and he’s pretty much ready to go. So he sits there grinning out at the night and tips his battered baseball cap as I pass.
“Evening,” I say. A few cars go by. The trees swirl and gossip quietly above me. No ghosts, no Sarco. No one at all, in fact, once I pass Old Dying Guy. Then I turn a corner onto Ocean Ave.; the block is alive with mommies and children, teenagers flirting, street vendors selling knickknacks. Smoke billows from those big barbecue vats, and you can smell jerk chicken getting brown for blocks and blocks and blocks. The whole neighborhood is celebrating another day of life.
I’m pretty sure Sasha had no interest in buying weed, but just in case I’m wrong, I walk up to the dude with a baseball cap and puffy jacket on the far end of the block.
“TiVo?”
“Who the fuck wants to know?”
“I do.”
He sizes me up, squinting through whatever calculation makes me coplike or not. “Come,” he finally says. We walk between two apartment buildings, past a trash dump, and into a small back office where a little white guy sits typing on a laptop.
“This dude came looking for you, T. Want me to pop him?”
I’m working out my own calculations—how fast I can unsheathe my cane-blade and slice both these motherfuckers—when TiVo waves a hand without looking up from the screen. “Nah, it’s cool, Melo. Thanks. Hang on one”—he types one last thing and then looks up at me—“sec. There. Hey, what can I do for you? You want some weed? Meth? Red? Purple Haze? P-funk? I got it, homeslice.”
“No,” I say. “I’m straight. Did a pretty girl come through today, looking for weed?”
Melo wiggles his eyebrows. “Did she! Ay . . .” I shut him up with a glance, look back at TiVo.
“She did.” He smirks. “Sold her a dime bag.”
“She say anything?”
I’m wondering when it’ll kick into TiVo that I could be a cop, a rival gang member, anything . . . but he just shrugs. “Nah, just bought the dime and peaced.”
“See where she went?”
“Nah. You sure you don’t want some weed, man?” His eyes drift back to the computer screen.
I shake my head and see myself out.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
I stand perfectly still across the street from Sasha’s building. It’s another of these giant, antique-looking beasts that fill up Flatbush with their vast lobbies and rickety old elevators. I’d given up staking the place out when it was clear she’d vacated the place. Now she’s let me know she’s back and I have no idea what to do. There’s a little Mexican kid sitting outside wearing a Spider-Man outfit and talking to himself. I’m trying not to see myself in him.
This is supposed to be fun. I was born to hunt, dammit. But instead, for the first time, I am that creepy guy that people so often mistake me for. I’m a stalker. And my stalker’s mind is cluttered with endless irritating debates about what will happen next—a hundred hypotheticals, none of which do me any good whatsoever. I could walk right up there. We could have it out, settle our differences, have amazing sex, and then fuck up Sarco’s plans. In whatever order makes the most sense, of course. But then I could walk up there and find Sarco waiting instead of her. Or Sarco waiting with her, infinite ughh, and then that’d be that.
Across the street, mini-Spider-Man is having a whole debate with himself in Spanish.
What if, he’s probably saying, Sasha really is behind the whole thing?
Bullshit, he replies, shaking his head. She’s had every reason in the world to stab you without being a supernatural criminal mastermind.
But she reeled you right in too, didn’t she? Worked it just right. You think it was