James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“What a mess.” I stretched the muscles of my neck, popping something in my shoulder. “What about The Deacon? Vanya?”

“We made some arrests,” Ayashe said, “But we can only hold the men that were in the pictures. We nabbed Ivan – Vanya – and about ten other guys. We’ll probably be able to charge four or five of them once we verify they match the pictures.”

“There is some merit to the way I do things.” I smiled a thin, grim smile.

“Maybe. If the images are admissible in court.” Ayashe seemed to waver between speculative approval and irritation, which I suspected was as much a rhinoceros thing as it was an FBI agent quality. “We have no fuuu-freakin’ idea who this ‘Deacon’ is. He’s not in any of the photos. There’s some texts from a ‘Deacon’ on the UseNet logs on the computer, but no way to follow them back to a sender. All his messages are encouraging the others to keep things down low, too.”

I bowed my head. “Unfortunate. From my own experiences, I can warn you that he is an extremely powerful mage, one that Vanya knows personally. Besides that, the Organizatsiya has excellent lawyers. Be careful.”

“You ain’t got no idea how careful I’m gonna be.” She pointed at the girls. “See those two fluffalumps? They’re ten. I’ve worked this job for twelve years and I’ll work it for twelve more. By the time they’re twenty-two, they’ll be some fine young women and I’ll be looking to retire. Anyone comes near my kids, I don’t care how powerful they think they are. I’ll trample the son-of-a-bitch.”

“Momma, you said a bad word.” Mary turned around, solemn in the way that only children admonishing adults could be.

“Yeah, momma.” Jenner called out from the bar, a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand.

“Uhhg.” Ayashe rubbed at her eyes. “Fine, yeah, okay. You got me. Just ignore your momma’s fat mouth and go back to playing with your horses, baby.”

The girl nodded, satisfied. “When’s daddy coming?”

“He’ll be here at six to pick us up, sugar.” Ayashe waved her back to her game with a hand.

Both Josie and the boy on the ground tensed visibly at the word ‘daddy’. I understood all too well.

Neither Zane or I were really feeling the cowboy-pirate Legos and parenting thing, so we withdrew into the inner part of the house, leaving Talya to play and Jenner to drink herself blind. Angkor had the good sense to sneak away and was already asleep in the bunkroom, half-naked and snoring. He had a washcloth over his eyes, and he was lying on top of the covers. Like a bum.

“My GOD, that’s annoying,” I said, glaring at him on the way past.

“What? Why?” Zane glanced down as well, but his expression wasn’t so much one of disapproval as open admiration.

“Covers are meant to… well… cover things.” I gestured at Angkor’s recumbent form, trying very hard not to look. He was well-muscled and entirely too aesthetic. “Like shirtless Korean men.”

“Lighten up, Mrs. Grundy.” Zane smirked, the first real humor I’d seen out of him since my first night at Strange Kitty.

I sat down heavily on the edge of the opposite bed and set my bag of ruined clothes and knick-knacks on the floor. “You really do come from an academic household. Where did you pick that up? Nabokov?”

“Uhh…” Zane cleared his throat, and rubbed his hand back over the dense stubble on his head. “ Absolutely Fabulous , actually. TV show.”

Zane’s discomfort was mildly intriguing, but not as much as the letter I’d picked up from the hospital. I took it out of the bag and tapped it against my hand. The envelope was stiff. “I see. So, in matters unrelated to television, I was wondering: Can you teach me to ride a motorcycle?”

Zane perked up a little, turning back from his locker to face me. “Sure. Be happy to. We can go do it once you’re back on your feet properly. I mean… I guess we have a few spare bikes now.”

“I wouldn’t want to use anything that belonged to someone’s estate.”

“Duke’s chopper is still in the yard.” The light in Zane’s eyes dimmed, and he turned back to pull out his towel and shower kit. “He didn’t have anyone else in his life besides the club. He’d want someone to use it… it’s a great bike.”

“I’ll put it to good use.” I ran my nail under the seal and opened the envelope. There was a Polaroid photo inside, face down. Handwritten on the back, someone had scrawled: ‘Thanks for all the help. Your move.’

I turned it over, puzzled. My ears began to ring. I stood up from the bed slowly, my face stiff and cold, skin tight.

Vassily and Mariya Lovenko were buried next to each other under their own headstones: tall rectangles of black granite laser etched with their names and portraits, and flat slabs of stone laid over the top of their graves. Vassily’s cover stone had been moved to the side and shattered, exposing the sarcophagus wall and the mound of soil inside. Beside the grave was a small Bobcat excavator. Sitting inside of it, his foot braced up on the frame, was Nicolai. He was looking at someone out of the frame, grinning, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

“What?” Zane had stopped in the middle of the room, towel in hand. His brow was furrowed. “What’s the matter?”

“They’re dead.” I ground out each word, fighting the urge to crush the photograph in my hand.

Zane stared at me, dumbfounded. Angkor sat up, startled awake by the rage in my voice and in the energy of the room.

“Every one of these motherfuckers is dead. Sergei, Nic, this Deacon. All of them.” The cold was spreading through me, blooming through my limbs like ink in water. “I need a ride to Green-Wood Cemetery.”

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I have known several pathological liars over the course of my life, the preeminent one being my own father.

My dad’s big thing was lying about his medical training and experience. His lies rarely deceived me, because I knew not to trust him, but he constantly and effectively bullshitted his way into everything from crime scenes to car accident recovery scenes. He made friends with policemen and EMTs, learned their language and shorthand, found clothes that matched that community, and slipped into it with hardly a ripple.