James Baldwin - Stained Glass

Bullets by themselves aren’t enough to trigger an explosion. Unless you’re using steel jacketed rounds, ammunition doesn’t spark – but dodgy third-hand Russian submachine guns with worn out snub noses most certainly do. The right mixture of methane and oxygen and a moment of muzzle flash was all it took.

The detonation blew Ivanko off the balcony in pieces. Broken glass and chunks of meat rained down over the street, and then a second, duller explosion tore through the rest of the house. It would burn. My house was full of books, after all.

The throaty roar of the Buick’s engine and the squeal of tires pierced the roaring of the fire. Duke – still naked – pulled up hard right in front of me. Zane flung open the door as I staggered up with my hammer and the books and lunged in over the seat. Duke tore off with the door still flapping open. Two other Organizatsiya men were running up the road, guns raised, but they were too late. Even better: there were sirens in the distance, getting closer.

“FUCK!” Duke roared, and slammed the wheel as we took off down Banner Avenue, hurtled out onto Coney Island Avenue, and sped up towards the intersection of Coney and Avenue Z. When we rounded the corner, I seized the chance to reach back and slam the door closed.

“Slow down, Duke! Come on, show some fucking sense!” Jenner, just as tweaked as Duke, was flopping around in Vassily’s overlarge trench coat and yelling at him from the passenger’s side.

“You fucking drive!” He snarled back. But he did slow, and the back of the Buick stopped fishtailing as we headed for the empty intersection. At this time of night on a Monday, the only people out were the ones staring at the conflagration behind us. It made the oncoming sirens all the more audible.

“You need to turn left at Avenue Z, then left at Hubbard,” I said. “Turn right on the Parkway and we can lose them. Slow it down, take everything legal, and we’ll make it.”

Duke laughed, the high, hysterical laughter of someone high on adrenaline and speed, and slowed sharply at the end of Banner Avenue to merge into the traffic. “We are so fucking lucky. SO fucking lucky!”

“What the hell happened back there?” Zane was fighting his own adrenaline high with a locked jaw and deep breaths. “What caused the explosion?”

“Russian Mafia meth lab.” I bent down and reached a shaking hand out to my cat. Binah stared up from between Zane’s feet, ears flat, eyes wide. “That’s what the police report will say.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Duke replied.

“What about this fucking Russian mafia kiddy porn studio, with our damn kids?” Jenner turned in her seat, eyes flashing. “How are we going to prove anything now?”

I couldn’t answer her for a moment. The adrenaline was wearing off, and I was hurt. My arms felt like I had torn something in them from the multiple impacts on the way down. The gut shot had been a close quarters full-impact round. I felt like I’d been bludgeoned in the chest with a mallet.

“The video was worthless. We could have taped a confession and saved enough of the footage if your man hadn’t lost his cool.” I settled back and scrubbed the sweat and ash from my forehead.

“Did you know?”

“I had no idea they had kids. One of the reasons I left the Organizatsiya is because I knew that our Pakhun – the ‘Don’, so to speak – wanted to assign me to a job that involved human trafficking. He didn’t mention children. He didn’t even hint at… at movies. I assumed he meant adult women and men for labor.”

“So did you tell anyone about this?” Zane’s eyes narrowed. “That he was getting involved in this shit?”

All three of them were tense with hostility. I drew myself up, ready to fight. “What was I supposed to do? Walk into the nearest Supernatural Support Unit and say ‘Good Afternoon, I’m an illegal mage with the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya, an organized criminal outfit you’ve never heard of. I’d like to report the hypothetical activities of men who have never been arrested in America, who are discussing trading people in Thailand’. There is no evidence they intended to do this kind of work in the USA.”

“You could get them under RICO,” Zane replied.

“Prosecution under RICO still requires hard evidence,” I said. “A two-month old conversation is not evidence. Even wiretaps can fail as evidence in court.”

“I have to say, Rex,” Jenner said. “This really doesn’t look too good. Like, for you.”

“Why? Because Duke ruined a perfectly good interrogation?” I replied, coldly.

“Jesus, get the fuck over it,” Duke snarled.

“Shut your cockholster, Duke.” Jenner turned on him for a moment, and then back to me. “I didn’t say the whole fuckup was your fault, Rex. But it’s going to be real hard to convince Ayashe of that.”

Binah crawled out from her hiding place. She struggled and failed to get up on the back seat with Zane and me, so I bent down to help her up so that she could sit in my lap, staring at Jenner the whole time. The Siamese folded herself against my body and followed my line of sight to glare haughtily at her, one royal cat to another.

“We can’t convince her of anything, but I killed them,” I said. “Every one of those pedarasti motherfuckers is dead.”

Zane made a sound that was half exasperation, half unspoken curse. Jenner’s eyes narrowed. And then she snorted, a strange half-smile pulling up the corner of her mouth on one side. “You know, I like you, Rex, but I don’t trust you. Nothing personal.”

“You’re well within your rights.” I jerked my chin up, stroking Binah from neck to rump. Her remaining fur had a dry green whisper through my palm, another sign of her ill health. “But now you’ve fulfilled your part of the deal, I’ll commit to the contract.”

“There was a contract?” Duke was calming down, but his voice was still shaky. “Does it have a random explosion clause?”

“It has a ‘shut the hell up before I turn you into a leopard print man-thong’ clause,” Jenner said. She sounded a little more like her usual self. “So anyway, now that we’re not being shot at and-or blown up, did you and Ayashe have a good one-on-one?”

“Yes. And now we have multiple leads into the case, mundane and Occult.” Though I wouldn’t be able to do much unless I could remove the… thing that was cutting me from my Neshamaic link. A terrible thought occurred to me, then. What if I died with this parasite in me? Would it stop me from leaving my body? Would it turn me into an upir , like Sergei?

Suddenly, I felt very foolish for having charged into the kitchen under a hail of gunfire.

“Oh. Well, that’s good.” As if nothing had happened at all, Jenner turned and plopped down into her seat, huddling down in the trench coat. “Let’s go and get burgers!”

“No.” Zane and I said at the same time. We looked at each other, and he spoke. “No burgers.”

Duke bounced excitedly in his seat, which caused the car to jerk to the right and dip into the next lane. “Hell yeah! Burger King!”

“No!” Zane clutched onto the back of the driver’s seat as we righted again. “You don’t have any goddamn pants! Neither of you have pants!”

“C’mon man, lighten up. We’ll go through the drive-thru. The little red rocket is all shrunk up from the cold—”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” It was the first time I could remember hearing Zane swear.

“—so they aren’t gonna see anything if they aren’t looking, and if they’re looking then they’re totally into me anyway—”

“Shut up, or I swear to God…”

We managed to get on the Parkway without incident, and sure enough, we ended up passing through the Burger King drive-thru. Duke conceded by laying a t-shirt over his lap, but the exhausted woman who served us, her bouncy hair crammed under a cheap plastic visor, barely gave us a second glance as she handed over two very large paper bags of junk food and a tray of soda. Whatever we looked like we’d been up to, she’d seen it all before.