Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

But Dannette was laughing too hard to answer.

More sweat. And look how these poor hands shake.

Ah, momma, can this really be the end?

Sonny walked through the construction site across from the burned-out building on Thirty-sixth Street, which, he’d decided, was rapidly becoming one of his favorite jobs of his whole career. A trophy job. Despite Pellam, the faggot Joe Buck midnight cowboy hee-haw. Or maybe because of him.

To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again…

Sonny paused, looking for Pellam. No sign of him. He kept hearing the music in his head, thinking of his mother, dead five years now. Thinking of her walking around the house, listening to Dylan on that thing, that turntable . All those records she had! LPs. Funny things, scratchy and jumpy and when you burned them they melted into weird shapes. His mother played Dylan, Dylan, Dylan all night long, month after month after month.

For a moment now he actually heard the music, thought his mother was back. He spun around. No, she wasn’t there. He saw only workers, yellow hard hats, stacks of Sheetrock.

Tanks of diesel oil and gasoline and propane. Nice…

He continued east until he came to a grating over the subway tunnel at Eighth Avenue. He crouched behind a series of small Dumpsters, wiped the sweat from his face with his trembling hands.

Can this really be the end?…

Not yet, no, but soon. The end was looming. The moment of his death was approaching and Sonny knew it. While most people are consumed by a vision of what their lives might be – as egotistical as those visions were, as wrong as they’d ultimately prove – Sonny was possessed by the vision of his death .

This made him, he felt, Christlike. Our Savior, born to die. Our Flesh, our Blood, counting down the minutes to Calvary. Indeed, he resembled Jesus, at least the Vatican-approved, souvenir shop, Cecil-B.-DeMille version: lean, narrow of face, wispy goatee, long blonde hair, hypnotic blue eyes. Skinny.

Whoa, we’re getting pretty dramatic here, Sonny thought. But when you’re in love with fire, your thinking can easily become apocalyptic.

The image of his death was a complicated one and had been forming since he was a young boy. Unable to sleep he would lie in his mother’s silent, still house (sometimes in her silent arms, sometimes her restless arms) and picture it, embellish, edit. He’d be in a large room, surrounded by thousands of people writhing in agony as gallons of marvelous juice, his sticky concoction, flowed over them. He’d be in the middle of the chaos, listening to their screams, smelling their burnt flesh, watching their agony as the substanceless yet undeniable fire caressed their hair and groins and breasts and fingertips. And he’d be grappling with his enemy – the Antichrist, the creature that had arrived on earth to take Sonny away. Quiet, tall, dressed in black.

Just like Pellam.

He pictured the two of them chained together as the flowing, fiery liquid surrounded them. Strong, sweating bodies entwined as the flames removed their clothes then their skin, their blood mixing. The two of them, and ten thousand others, packed Broadway theater, a coliseum, a school auditorium.

Sonny was filled with energy and purpose. He had to tell the world about the coming conflagration.

And so he did. In his special way.

As the subway rumbled into the station and screeched to a stop beneath him he glanced around and poured the two gallon canister of juice through the ventilation grate. He lit and dropped in after it a novelty birthday candle – the kind that can’t be blown out – stuck in a wad of modeling clay.

With a subdued whooosh , the flaming liquid flowed into the vents of the subway cars and inside.

“Happy birthday to you,” he sang. Then regretted his flippancy, recalling that he was engaged in important work. He stood and left slowly, reluctantly, sorry that he couldn’t stay longer and listen to the screams rising through the black smoke, the screams from those dying underground, beneath his feet.

Momma, can this really be the end…

The sirens seemed to come from all around him. They were raw, urgent, hopeless. But Sonny thought all the fuss was silly. He was just getting started; the city hadn’t seen anything yet.

Hatake Imaham was holding court in the Women’s Detention Center.

“Now listen here,” she told the young women gathered around her. “Don’t buy that crap. High John Conqueror root? Black-bat oil, lodestones, Bichon’s two-hearts drawing candle? That be bullshit, all that crap people be trying to sell you. Just to take yo’ money. Y’oughta know better.”

Ettie Washington, across the cell, listened with half her attention. She hurt more today than she had right after the fire. Her arm throbbed, sending waves of pain into her jaw. Her ankle too. And her headache was blinding. She’d tried again to get some painkillers and the guards had merely stared at her the way they sometimes stared at the mice scurrying around on the floors here.

“But I know it work,” one skinny woman said. “One time mah man was cheatin’ and what it was-”

“Listen to me. If you got the sight you don’t need them oils and candles and roots. If you ain’t got the sight then there’s nothing gonna do it. You come to make a sacrifice at my honfour, you leave a few pennies for Damballah. That’s all you gotta do. But mosta the mambos and houngnans in New York’re just out fo’ money.” Her voice lifted, “What about you, Mrs. Washington? You believe in Damballah?”

“In?-”

“The serpent god? Santeria, hoodoo?”

“Not really, no, I don’t,” Ettie said. She didn’t feel like explaining that Grandma Ledbetter, bless her heart, had squeezed every shred of religion out of Ettie by her fierce lectures that mixed Catholicism and fiery Baptist dogma. Which, come to think of it, didn’t seem to Ettie very different from the crazy stuff Hatake was talking about. Incense and holy water instead of High John Conqueror root.

Hatake tugged at her naked, punctured earlobe and continued to expound on the silliness of man-fetching spells and law stay-away oil. What was in your heart was what was important, Hatake said. Ettie’s mind wandered and she thought again about John Pellam. Wondered when he’d come to visit her again. If he’d come. That man ought to be a hundred miles away by now. What the hell was he helping her for? She thought with horror how he’d almost been trapped by the fire. Thought about little Juan Torres too. She said a nonbeliever’s prayer for the boy.

Then a noise from the front of the cell. The clank of metal on metal. Some of the women shouted hello to a new prisoner.

“Yo, girl. Weren’t out but one day? You got yo’ ass busted that quick?”

“Shit, Dannette, yo’ bad luck. I staying away from you, girl.”

Ettie watched the young woman with the pocked face and the beautiful figure walk uncertainly into the large cell. She was one of the prostitutes who’d been released just yesterday. Back so soon? Ettie smiled at her but the woman didn’t respond.

Dannette walked up to the circle of women sitting around Hatake Imaham, who nodded to the woman. “Hey, girl. Good to see you.”

Which sounded a little odd. Sort of like Hatake had been expecting her.

And the woman continued her lecture on hoodoo, talking now about Damballah, the highest in the voodoo order. Ettie knew this because her sister had dabbled in that craziness some years ago. Then the huge woman’s voice faded and the women began talking among themselves, very quietly. One or two of them glanced at Ettie but they didn’t include her in the conversation. That was all right. She was thankful for the quiet and for a few minutes’ peace. She had many things to think about and, as the good Lord, or Damballah, she laughed to herself, knew, there were few enough moments of peace in here.