I headed up the two short blocks to Penn South. There were only a few windows lit, and I didn’t have to count the floors to know that it was my apartment, my parents waiting up for me. My mother had been at work when the shit had gone down between me and my father. By now, she had to know.
I chewed a piece of Dentyne to mask the booze and dope.
The apartment complex was quiet, the lobby empty. When I got off the elevator I could see light under the apartment door.
I knew I was in for it. I took a couple of deep breaths and opened the door.
There were two men standing there, detectives who worked with my father. The minute my mother saw me she started crying.
At first I thought the cops had come looking for me, but that wasn’t it. She asked them to tell me. She couldn’t speak.
Your father’s been shot, said one of the cops.
Looks like a drug bust gone bad, said the other.
Must have happened spontaneously, something going down that he tried to stop. The cop laid his hand on my shoulder and said my father was a brave man.
I had to ask. And they told me.
Two shots in the chest. One in the head.
But only I knew what had happened-that it had been my fault.
I never told my mother. How do you tell your mother that you killed your father, her husband?
I forced the memory out of my head and listened to my grandmother.
She said that after she had the vision she’d sought out the gods. She should have warned him, but knew that her son, a nonbeliever, would have scoffed at the warning.
“Still,” she said, “I should have tried. Es un arrepentimiento.” There were tears in her dark eyes.
I wanted to tell her that it had been my fault, not hers, but couldn’t find the words.
She patted my hand and started talking about the egun, the dead, and how they interact with the living. We all have a specific number of days on earth, she told me, and those who are killed before that allotted time hang around as ghosts until their time is up, until their souls, their ori, can rest.
I wondered if my father’s ori was looking for me.
She tapped my drawing and her face grew dark. “There is something in that room, algo malo.” She looked up at me. “And now you are here to see it again. Por qué?”
“It’s nothing, uela, like I said.”
“Nato, por favor, do not lie to your abuela.”
“It has to do with a case at the police station, that’s all. It doesn’t concern me, not personally.”
My grandmother’s face showed me I was wrong. “You must stay away from this case, Nato. Es muy peligroso para tí.”
“Sí, it is dangerous, uela, but not for me.”
She shook her head. “I see you, Nato, in that room.”
Now I was listening. “What else do you see?”
She leaned back into the couch and closed her eyes. “I see you in that room with a man.”
“What sort of man?”
“No lo veo. It has been too long since I had the vision, but I still…feel him. Entiendes?”
I told her I understood, and to relax, and her shoulders sloped a little, the muscles in her face eased. After a minute she said, “Las llamas, the flames, remember? In the room?”
I turned back to the sketch I had made.
“What about the man?” I asked.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I see a dark face. Un hombre en máscara.”
A man in a mask. I shivered.
“There are-¿cómo se dice?-holes for his eyes and nose, his mouth too.” She was pointing out the features on her face with her eyes closed. “I can see the eyes, light eyes, con una mirada fria.”
I found the sketch I’d made and asked her to look at it.
“Madre mía.” She crossed herself and mumbled something under her breath about Chango.
“Is there anything else?” I asked, feeling like I was in some paranormal thriller like The
Omen, things I had always claimed I did not believe in but were now impossible to deny.
“The eyes,” she said, describing them while I made another drawing.
I showed her what I’d drawn.
She took a deep breath and crossed herself again. “Sí, those are the eyes.”
But how could my grandmother, up in Spanish Harlem, have any idea about the man we were hunting?
She suddenly grasped my wrist. “Nato, ten cuidado.”
“Sure,” I said. “Of course. I’m a careful guy, a born coward, a cobarde.” I tacked on a fake smile.
“Don’t be a wise man,” she said, meaning a wise guy, which made me smile, and she shook a finger at me. “Do not make fun, chacho. I have seen you in that room. I do not know what it means, but…” She got up and crossed the room to the bóveda.
I looked back at the symbol my grandmother had described, which I had drawn from her vision, the almost identical symbol on Carolyn Spivack’s belt, and it gave me another chill.
My grandmother scooped up seashells from the bóveda. She was humming to herself while she moved the shells from hand to hand, “Ten Cuidado con el Corazón…” That favorite song of hers, a love song that came with a warning: Be careful.
24
I folded myself into a hard-backed chair opposite Terri’s desk. I’d done some research and needed to tell her, but there was a question stuck in my mind since she’d pushed me into Denton’s face.
“So what’s up between you and Denton?”
“What do you mean?”
“It seemed to me that there was some history between you two.”
Terri’s eyes flashed. “I have no history with that man.”
That was essentially a declaration that she did have a history with “that man.” I remembered a lecturer at Quantico saying that people became impersonal when they wanted to distance themselves from something and it’s usually because they are hiding something or lying. It was like Bill Clinton saying, “I did not have sex with that woman.” I remembered hearing that and thinking, Oh, Bill, you so did. Which, by the way, was fine by me. If the president of the United States can’t get a blow job, who can? Though, perhaps he should not have gotten it in the Oval Office, from his intern.
“So you’ve got no history with that man. Fine.”
She tried to neutralize her face while maintaining eye contact. People tend to think if they make eye contact you will believe them.
Terri let out a held breath. “Oh, fuck, what the hell do I care if you know I once had a five-minute fling with that son of a bitch? So what? It was before he was chief. Ancient history.”
“Oh, ancient history. Sorry, I guess you thought I was asking about modern history.”
“Screw you, Rodriguez.”
“I was kidding. What are you getting so pissed off about?”
“You were not kidding. And I’m pissed because you’re condemning me for something that was a mistake and meant nothing, and is over, and by the way, is none of your fucking business.”
I put up my hands. “Sorry. And I’m not condemning you.”
“I see it in your smug little face, Rodriguez. And why the hell do I care-why the hell do you care-who I’ve slept with?”