James Baldwin - Stained Glass

Zane and I both kept looking back behind us, expecting to see flashing lights in the distance, but finding nothing except orange-lit damp nothingness. When we realized that we weren’t being tailed, that we’d somehow gotten away with it, we both settled into our seats. The cabin was now thick with the odor of processed beef, sauce, onions and French fries. It was bad, in that it was junk food, but it covered up the lingering smells of blood and burnt powder. Takeout from the big burger chains somehow always masked every other smell in a room.

I got given a burger. Zane looked uncomfortable but stoic as he ate, gazing at the street through his window. Duke and Jenner talked about things which held no interest for me, mumbling around mouthfuls of food. I held my shivering cat with my free hand, and when I was done with ‘dinner’, I carefully and gently examined her wounds. They were filthy, but living in an alley next to Eee-Zee-Pawn for a month had basically inured me to filth. I was more concerned by the burn injuries. Several of them were infected, oozing when I squeezed.

“Why’d you do it?”

I looked up to find Zane watching me. For a moment, I thought I saw the big cat in him. The way he lounged, ankle crossed and foot twitching, reminded me of a leopard in a tree. “What?”

“Take them out,” he said. “Back there.”

“It was actually kind of an accident. I was planning to start a normal fire, but the buyki arrived back before I could and charged the kitchen.” I turned back to Binah, picking over her as I cataloged her wounds. She endured it placidly, purring all the while. “I had to search for some things.”

“Right. What’s in the bag?” He motioned to it with his head.

“My annotated Mishnayot . Agrippa’s Book Two, a very venerable Occult reference. Magician’s tables, my own studies of gematria. A rare book by Carl Jung.” I reached down, still stroking Binah’s ears with my other hand, and fumbled around in the plastic bag. I searched for the folder I had stuffed into the photo album, feeling through the pages. When I found it, I drew it up through the opening of the bag and accidentally pulled a photo of Vassily and Mariya with it. They were sitting together at a table bristling with bottles, food, and a small two-tier cake. Vassily was grinning from ear to ear. He had his degree scroll in his hand, his eyes fixed confidently on the camera. I remembered taking that photo. It was our private family graduation celebration for his MBA.

A small shock and a sharp, tight pain lanced through my gut. I slid the photo back into the album pages and cracked open the Manilla folder instead, trying to focus on the words through the sudden wave of gray fatigue that washed over me. The man beside me leaned across, peering down at the pages.

“This is a transactional record,” I said, before Zane could ask. “Pick-up and delivery instructions. I paused to grab them from the desk, and that’s why I got delayed… but they could be useful.”

“What’s it say?” Jenner turned around in the seat, looking back at me. In the dark, her bony face was deeply shadowed.

I flipped through the pages, digesting the contents. Delivery instructions, when written down, were generally coded in Russian military shorthand. It wasn’t exactly the Enigma code, but the truncated Cyrillic worked well enough in an English-speaking nation like the USA. Even native Russian speakers couldn’t make heads or tails of the abbreviations and prison slang terms that were passed on from Kommandant to soldier.

The first few pages of notes had annotations from both Vanya and Nicolai. Ivanko’s unit was shuttling heroin through my old house, a fairly common tactic. Drugs and other hard assets were ‘washed’ by cooling them down in safehouses. It was a cycle of storage and delivery: orders were placed with suppliers in Mexico, Miami and Canada, who delivered by sea or overland. The hot product was rested after delivery, then distributed to street managers who further distributed it to dealers. The managers kept a stable of thugs to make sure everyone got paid properly, and they had to report back to the command. This document was to advise Ivanko of the dates and locations for delivery.

“They were going to drop off bundles of heroin to some of our management-level dealers,” I said, scanning the list of addresses. No names, of course: just addresses. I don’t see anything about trade in children, or a kidnapping or transport job… just drugs. Though there is an address in Yonkers.”

“What’s the address?” Zane leaned in a little curiously.

“734 Broadway,” I read it out.

“What?” Duke said.

Zane stiffened. Jenner knelt up on the front passenger side. “Wait. Read that again.”

“734 Broadway, Yonkers.” I tapped the page with a finger. “Do you know who lives there?”

“Yeah,” Jenner replied, her eyes solid black in the gloom of the cabin. “Lily and Dru Fucking-Ross.”

We split at the clubhouse, tired and stunned. Zane was apparently living here, because he disappeared into the top floor of the house while Jenner and Duke went to call John Spotted Elk and Michael to tell them what we’d learned. That left me, my suitcases, and my cat in the Twin Tigers M.C flophouse. There was no time for me to rest: The night’s work had only just begun.

The first thing I did was have a shower and put on real clothes. After weeks and weeks of greasy jeans and worn t-shirts, the sensation of fine wool and clean, smooth cotton was the closest I had ever come to physical ecstasy. I had to tighten my belt by two extra holes, but when I looked at the mirror and saw a clean man, a well-dressed man with a collared shirt and tie and proper leather gloves, I recognized my face for what seemed like the first time in years.

The next thing I did was walk to the nearest convenience store and buy cat food. Binah ate like a starving wolf. I sat by her bowl, cross-legged, watching on as she cleared the dish and licked out every crumb of minced chicken. My once beautiful and sleek familiar was now nothing but skin and bones.

Nothing could be done for her injuries until she was clean, but I had never bathed a cat before. She was my first pet, and while I had a working knowledge of the habits of felines, animals are not a big feature of the Murder, Inc lifestyle. There are a lot of things that cats, hitmen and mages have in common, though… neatness, caution, patience, the predatory instinct. One thing I especially liked about her – and about cats in general – was her fastidious nature. She was sure to enjoy a bath the same way I had enjoyed my first recuperative shower.

Dutifully, I stripped back down to undershirt and trunks and ran a shallow warm bath. I added some shampoo and some hydrogen peroxide to the water, then lay a couple of towels beside the tub before I went to the kitchen and fetched her. Binah licked her whiskers in satisfaction as I carried her to the waiting bathroom and shut the door. She was still weak from her prolonged incarceration, and did not resist me as I lowered her into the water… where she promptly exploded into a howling whirlwind of claws and teeth.

“Binah, stop kvetching. ” My first instinct was to hold her in the tub to try and get her adjusted to the water. The cat slipped through my hands, launched herself at the side of the tub, and sunk her claws a quarter inch into my forearm. “Bin-AAARGH!”

Let it be noted that when your familiar is wet and covered in soap, she is automatically stronger, faster and more capable of defending herself than you are of restraining her.

Using my flesh as leverage, Binah hauled herself from the bathtub in a wave of water and suds and bolted at the closed door, howling like a firetruck.