Black Lotus Kiss Page 4

  “It was a frag grenade. Something more modern than I’ve used. Got shards in my rump if you need them.”

  “Jesus,” Dixon said, pointing to an ambulance in the parking lot. “Get some medical attention.”

  If I did, I’d lose the Black Lotus under my suspended sole. And something told me that a three-thousand-year-old flower might be a clue worthy of holding on to. “I’m standing under my own power, most of those guys can’t. Let them have first dibs.” Then I summed up the points I was willing to share with him: there were protesters, there was an award ceremony, someone threw a brick to break the window, a grenade dropped, I tackled a woman, took shrapnel in the rump, and then ran out here when Cactus ordered I find the monsters who did this.

  Nothing about the gentle giant with the ticking hand and the rabid biker, or the handful of kids with skateboards who had vanished before I started joyriding. Nothing about the magic underfoot.

  “And then?” Dixon said. His notepad was crinkled, black and white.

  “And then I started looking for anyone who might be responsible.”

  Dixon glared.

  “And I tripped on my own feet and boom, you appeared like a genie.”

  “The woman you covered?”

  “Wife of one of the vets.”

  “These people have names?”

  “Yeah, Carruthers.” He kept talking notes, but his jowls shifted slightly. Good on Dixon for trying to hide his “tell,” but I’d been reading card players and scamming marks longer than he’d been a member of The Thin Blue Line. I wasn’t as good a lie detector as Edgar, but he had trained me to con and see cons in every walk of life. Most of the sheep of this world are liars who, at once, think themselves cleverer than all, and also want to be caught and punished by Mummy and Daddy. I shivered, hating how much of Edgar was still with me, denying me the total freedom I’d hoped faking his death would provide.

  Dixon clearly didn’t want me to know who they were, and playing dumb is so much easier when your interrogator holds you in contempt . . . and can’t rip your fingernails or eyelids off in public without getting fired. “What about who you were running after here?”

  “Nothing. All the activity I saw was at the transformer station that looked like it got nuked. Could that be the same people as the mailbox bombers?” I said and waited.

  Dixon shrugged as if he couldn’t give a shit. “That’s for the beat squad. I’ll look into it, though.” Good. He didn’t know yours truly was responsible. Not yet, anywho. “Anything else?”

  There wasn’t. But if I moved with his eyes on me I’d never get the Black Lotus from underfoot. He needed to leave of his own accord. Time for the simple art of deception and distraction. “Dicky, I’ve got shrapnel in my tush, a five-alarm headache from a grenade, and my best friend is keeping death’s door open with one toe. Worse, my new wingtips are ruined and—goddamn laces.” I kneeled, the storm of sick in my guts rolling with the fast drop, which surely made me look even more haggard. Dixon’s gaze followed me down as my peripheral vision caught sight of Alan Carruthers and his wife beside the ambulance. I yanked my laces loose with frustration. “What about the guy in the wheelchair?”

  Dixon turned, but not as fast my hands, which had been shuffling decks and rolling coins since we were rolling our own smokes outside the Oakland Public Library. I cup-palmed the ancient petals as soft as I could, but they still bit my skin like razors.

  “Him? Just some vet who served his country.” I was amazed at how poorly Dixon lied. He must know. “God, what a shitpile. Starting to think we should pull a Canada. Those Mounties are sending troops into that French capital of theirs to catch a bunch of ratbag terrorists. I don’t like their prime minister much, but at least he has guts to get things done.”

  The newspapers had been running banner headlines about those actions from our friends to the north. Some French separatist group had kidnapped a couple of politicians and were now on the run. “I heard. Trudeau just declared Baby’s First Martial Law. No habeas corpus. No reasonable doubt. Pick up anyone who looks guilty. If that’s your bag, Dicky, why not follow the Soviet model, say, Hungary in fifty-six? Perhaps Prague sixty-eight?”

  Slow as a last kiss, Dixon turned to me, face a shade paler than scarlet. “Don’t even try to pull that liberal shit on me. You calling me a KGB thug? On my salary? Trying to find who blasted your friend into pieces? You think I’m still some ignorant runt from Oakland who joined the PD because I got mommy issues and need to beat people up because my old man beat her and I couldn’t stop it? You think, for one second, that I ain’t actually a cop because I want to help people, that I’m just a goon squad captain with a couple more letters near his name because I go to the library? How fucking dare you toss that commie shit my way, when I’m hunting for the guys who did this to not only those vets, but their wives and children, and even hurt those protestors, who, by the way, I think are cowards and idiots and full of shit but are still my responsibility.” He exhaled so hard I thought I saw steam. “You get to call me these things, Jimmy, because you pretend to be doing my job. Only you do it alone, unaccountable, and can cast aspersions on me from the safety of your privileged position. Now fuck off. I’m sick of listening to your smarmy act. Go check on your Apache buddy, get the scrap out of your backside, and let the professionals get to goddamn work.”

  For a fifth of a fifth of moment, I was stunned, but played it off as if this was the kind of reaction I expected and gave a smug sneer in return before I let my shoes march toward the ambulances.

  Dixon’s words slapped my back.

  “Just remember, Jimmy. You’re in my house now. Best tread light. Especially in those wingtips, especially when they magically un-tie themselves.” This war of words ended with Dix taking a victory lap, and me getting schooled on underestimating Detective R. Dixon—and how easy it is to do that with people that you hate. A temptation I’ve used to my own advantage more times than a rube loses his pennies at a five-and-dime.

  I passed the paddy wagon, the back doors open as they hustled in another hippie, two lines of scraggly kids already inside, all of them shouting with hands restrained behind their back.

  “This is a set up!”

  “Fucking pigs fixed us!”

  “I want my lawyer!”

  The doors slammed. But the muffled voices still punched through as I passed them by and found myself in the circle of cops and medics. Reporters would be next, so I had to get busy quick. Last thing I needed was some crime-beat nobody shadowing my every move.

  “James?” Alan said. He waved me over and I approached him and his wife, who was dabbing his face with alcohol and cotton, a first aid kit sitting on his lap. He sat next to an ambulance with its doors open wide, parked at the entry of the hall so they could ferry out the wounded. They’d leave the dead for the cops and, eventually, the morgue.

  “Can someone help me get the scrap out of my keister?”

  A tough old tank of a woman with face gaunt and monstrous stalked toward me, bandage and scissors clamped in her hand. “Let’s see the damage, hero.”

  I presented my rear. “OW!”

  “Stand still, princess. Now, drop your pants so I can bandage the boo-boo.”

  I did, but before I could cover the awkward silence by saying something clever, she grunted. “Rookie, I served in Sicily before joining the Peace Corps. Save the smooth talk for someone who gives a shit. Now stand still or so help me I’ll nail this bandage in with a hammer.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good.”

  Seconds later she was done, my pants were up, and she’d returned to her buddies in the ambulance pool, laughing at what I can only presume was my pathetic nature. “Just hold your ass!” she said over the laughter. “Bleeding will stop soon.”

  Outside of some cuts to the face and bandages on his numb legs, Alan looked the same. His wife’s countenance, however, was altered—and strangely. Still carried the stiff and sharp presence of a former Connecticut debut
ante, but with runs in her stockings and disheveled hair, she looked like she’d finished filming a “roughie.”

  “You two okay?”

  “Yes,” Alan said, face taut. “Thanks to you. I . . . can’t thank you enough for saving Veronica’s life.” For the second time today, a man with more courage and who’d faced more challenges than I had stuck out his hand and offered me a sign of respect, while I inhaled the scent of his wife’s freshly spritzed perfume without making eye contact. I took his hand, and again felt his iron-clad grip.

  “Some reflexes never die,” I said, and instantly the iron turned to clay as Alan drew back his hand. I’d just told a man who could not save his wife that what I’d done was something all of us could do. “What I mean to say is—”

  He waved away my awkward retraction. “I’m grateful, James.”

  “Yes,” Veronica said, bringing her eyes up to meet mine. The ice had melted in those brown orbs, as had the serrated edge in her voice. “So grateful. I had no idea you were a veteran.”

  “Given the relaxed nature of my attire, I don’t blame you. I was running late and god, I’m just glad I was able to make it.”

  “Me too,” Veronica said. “James, your hand is bleeding.”

  Wounded by a petal, not a grenade. I quickly shoved the Black Lotus in my pocket. “Could have sworn I had a handkerchief.” I removed my bloody hand and Veronica dropped to her knees, stretching her ripped stockings, and grabbed a bandage from the first aid kit before rising back up in a single, well-executed motion from someone who probably visited Montauk and had finishing lessons and probably kissed a girl in her college days, just so she had material for her class on short stories inspired by John Cheever. “Give me your hand.”

  “What? It’s just dried paint from the horror show,” I said.

  “Let her help,” Alan said. “It makes her feel useful.”

  She fired a look back at him that would have frozen gasoline. “We can all do our bit.”

  I stuck out my right and she took it. Almond-shaped nails on hands that were as delicate as the pink of her nail polish, but strong. My callus, the healed bullet mark in the dead of my palm, was an ugly rock cradled by her slender fingers. And I could almost hear her wondering, based on what she was now seeing, who the hell I was. She looked up. I quickly gave Alan all my focus because Veronica was now undressing me with her eyes right in front of her crippled husband.

  “You okay, Alan?”

  He nodded. “I was out of the kill zone, and the nicks I took didn’t cut anything I was using.” He smiled against the irony. “Cactus is still inside. They’re moving him now. Sent in more medics than they know what to do with. They’re being real gentle—”

  A war cry that skinned a year off my life blasted from the building’s doors.

  Into the maw, my nose filled with the iron sharpness of fresh blood, bright and wet. I ran into a battleground nightmare, as two ambulance attendants hit the ground from one massive hammer strike. Cactus was sitting bolt upright on a gurney, streaked in red, dress uniform shredded, hair wild. There was only one thing animating his eyes: the warrior spirit of the Apache.

  “Subdue him!” a medic screamed before eating a fist.

  “Bad idea!” I yelled.

  Five ambulance attendants and one plainclothes cop were slipping across the bloodied floor, dodging Cactus’s bricklike fists as they protected him from the scourge of the white man who had taken his people and brutalized their elders and women and children, tried to break them from their past and stick them in the all-American blender so they could not resist what Uncle Sam and Company had to offer. The man before us had endured spits, fists, sticks, and guns on three continents—and come back to become a success despite the white man’s hate by using the white man’s weaknesses against him. Economic guerrilla warfare that would have done his family proud.

  Of course, that didn’t soften the blows he threw, one after the other, dropping the descendants of Custer and Cooke one by one. In the growl and froth of his mouth you could also tell this was the lineage of his Mexican roots, of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and their cadre causing havoc for maximum impact, of fighting giants with a smile, knowing they will lose and still charging into the fray.

  On my best day, I might be able to flip Cactus on his back, giving me enough time to run the hell out of Dodge and take the first ticket to the Black Hole of Calcutta and hope he never finds me.

  On Cactus’s last day, which might very well be now, no one man could stop him without a bullet.

  So, I would have to go with Plan C.

  “Cactus!” I yelled as I approached the ring of blood and fallen medics.

  He had one in his hand, held up off the ground, his teeth bared and eyes so narrow you couldn’t wedge them open with a dime.

  “Cactus, this is Private Brimstone! Reporting!”

  He snarled. Which, all things considered, was a good sign.

  “We need an evac, Sarge! Ridgeway bought Easy Company time to cross the Chosin. They got artillery on this position, but we have to move. Now!”

  The ambulance attendant dropped from his grip. “Brimstone?” Cactus said, wet and red.

  “It’s coming in hot here, Sarge. I’ve done the recce and we need out of this kill zone before they light it up.”

  “Brimstone, you contrarian shitbird.” He lurched forward. “I can’t . . . Brimstone, I can’t move my legs!”

  “Roger that. On it!” I ran behind him, and when the blond medic tried to stand I dropped an ax kick that gave him a broken nose and a first-class nap. “I got you on the gurney, Cactus,” I said.

  Then I saw Cactus’s back.

  Death by a thousand cuts. Blood was leaking out of wounds that should have been far wider than they were . . . until I tasted electric sand . . . magic . . . the kind that leaks between worlds when a warrior is headed toward the other places. Cactus was holding himself between life and death, past and present, and if he didn’t get medical help soon, he’d leak into oblivion.

  I pushed and Cactus’s voice screamed, “Brimstone, you can’t push a gurney by yourself, you fucking idiot!” The blood ran fresh . . . as if my lie was coming apart and forcing Cactus’s wounds to burst, too. Given his people’s religion, beliefs, and more, I asked myself: “What would Coyote do?”

  He’d make a lie bigger so that it would hold and change the world.

  “Arrows!” I yelled, then kicked another medic, a black-haired fella with two front teeth missing, out of the way.

  “Screw you, man!” he yelled as I passed, so I looked at the farthest guy, a rail-thin fella with glasses and red hair. “Arrows! You racist, no-account shitbag, grab the gurney or when we die I’m coming back to life just to feed your corpse to the Devil himself!” I winked, hoping to soften the blow and keep the con alive and, thank Glycon, the fake god of the ancient world and his love of luck and hijinks, the redhead figured out I meant him and found the mana in himself to stand up and grab the rails of the gurney while the others moaned around us.

  “About time!” Cactus yelled. “Now, hustle, you goons! We ain’t keeping Ridgeway waiting.”

  Like some live version of a horror-show rendition of The Three Stooges, we hustled our wounded leader through the minefield of blood from old soldiers and new vets, slipping and sliding and holding steady while Cactus chastised us like we were shavetails straight out of Basic.

  In the glare of L.A.’s afternoon sun, Cactus came alive. His gooey red fist grabbed my lapels and pulled me close, his breath like death and fire. “Brimstone, you find them. You find the no-good commie bastards who snuck up on us. I don’t care if you’re out in the mountains for a month eating grubs and dirt. You find them, and you kill them.”

  I’d been ordered to kill before. By Edgar, my mentor. By Cactus, my NCO. I’d killed to save myself more times than most. I hated it. Every. Time. Because I knew enough about the netherworld to be scared of what happened when we weren’t in charge of our fleshbags and brains. I posses
sed a deeper fear of what happened to those of us who filled those spaces with the spirits of the living, nightmare gods, and creatures of supreme darkness who flitter into our world for shits and giggles to remind us we are not only alone, but also insignificant. I knew the need to kill, but I was damn sure clear the price was almost never worth the cost. But Cactus had saved my life as part of his own code of honor and sense of responsibility to me—a guy he thought so little of he wouldn’t want to be seen with me if he was driving his Rolls. Mother had given me life. Cactus had been the only person I’d met who would save it. And he was dying before my eyes.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  His fist clenched, and his breath was like dying coals. “Chickenshit answer. Kill them, or I will haunt you until the end of time.”

  “I’ll do it.” I pressed two more words past the gaps in my teeth, ones I loathed to offer. “I promise.”

  He nodded, then fell back on the gurney as we closed in on the ambulance where Alan and Veronica stood. When the redhead pulled Cactus away, I was dragged along. His fist held my lapel in a death grip. When I finally pulled free, my jacket was torn and bloodied.

  The doors closed and that fierce taste of magic died. Cactus’s people and culture had kept him from crossing over. Now, it was up to Western medicine to patch him back. There was a sick sense of mutation in the idea that made my stomach twist.

  “Will he be all right?”

  Veronica had walked within flight-or-fight distance and I’d barely noticed. I chalked it up to the fact of being so goddamn close to magic. The taste of the other worlds of this universe could sometimes startle me, which was a great way to leave our world by slipping on the banana peels of the mundane around me.

  “James?” Alan’s voice shattered the fantasy as he rolled up beside his wife. “Are you okay?”

  I adjusted my jacket, surprised the rip was so minimal. The pattern even disguised most of the bloodstains. Quality polyester. “No. I’m not. Somebody just tried to ace my friend and killed or injured a bunch of old men and women. Nothing about this is okay.”