Rob Thurman - Deathwish

“Forgive me. I shouldn’t have doubted you. You seem so much more at peace.” Instead of the hands on the ankle and the wrench I expected, his leg twisted around mine and took me to the ground. The knuckles of his fist pressed just hard enough against my larynx to make the memory stick. “By the way, sometimes the fish sticks were fried zucchini,” he added, “and cartoon Great Danes don’t actually solve mysteries.”

“So you were born a diet Nazi.” I waited until he moved to sit up. I didn’t try anything else. There was no countermove to having your larynx crushed. Choking and dying tended to take up the rest of your attention. “And now you’re talking trash about Scooby. You are one evil bastard.”

“So I’ve been told.” He held a hand down to me. “By you. Repeatedly.”

I took his hand, got to my feet, and dusted off the jeans I’d borrowed from him. Black, of course. “It’s hard to be a ninja-slash-samurai-slash-Buddha-loving bad-ass in regular blue, huh?” I muttered. “God forbid.” I picked up the bag from the ground and started deeper into the piles of metal and trash that surrounded us, following the zigzag path. I didn’t limp as I went, but I wanted to. “I thought Buddha was about harming no living creature,” I grumbled on.

“Buddha was a wise man.” He walked beside me, apparently unaffected by my blow to his stomach. “I am not.” He didn’t seem particularly affected by that either.

“Maybe you should work on that.” I went ahead and limped as the muscle in my leg spasmed. What the hell. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know.

“It’ll pass,” he assured me, not especially sympathetically, as I limped on. “In approximately sixty seconds. And next time you’ll remember.”

A few seconds of discomfort were worth a few extra years of staying alive—because staying alive or sane was looking like an easy option now—but the smell out here? Nothing was worth that. Saturday in a Bronx junkyard—what’s not to love? I pulled the sleeve of my shirt over the heel of my hand and covered my mouth and nose. In reality, it wasn’t the junkyard so much as the waste station just up the river. But smell or not, this was where Mickey lived, and Mickey was who we needed to talk to. Which was why we were once again separated from the others in the loft. With Oshossi and the Auphe, it had come to the point where it was impossible to stay together all the time, not if we wanted to eventually get our asses out of the gigantic frigging sling they were in. I didn’t have to tell Niko that sooner or later the Auphe were going to seize the chance and attack the others while we were gone. Or us. More likely us. You didn’t need Auphe genes or a crystal ball to see that coming. Just a brain cell, and you were set there. But our choices were pretty much nonexistent, and sucking it up was the only thing left to do.

We’d run into Mickey two or so years ago when looking for parts for Nik’s decrepit car. You wanted parts for a decrepit thing, you came to a decrepit place. Mickey wasn’t decrepit, though. He could find pretty much anything you wanted. Nothing too new, of course, but anything used showed up in a junkyard sooner or later. Mickey had seen us walk in back then, smelled the difference on me, and offered up his services . . . for a price.

Luckily, Mickey’s price wasn’t as steep as Boggle’s tended to be. Where Boggle loved jewels and gold, Mickey was all about the food. He wasn’t your typical junkyard rat, content with rotting leftovers. He wanted the real thing, he wanted it fresh, and he wanted a wide variety. Chinese, Greek, Italian, Mexican, whatever; he liked it all. That didn’t mean he didn’t catch his own meal on occasion if times were hard. In that he was like your typical junkyard rat.

He ate his own.

“Smells good.”

The voice was oil spreading across concrete, smooth and slick. Very slick indeed, which was Mickey all over. I slowed and looked up at a pile of cars to see liquid black eyes reflecting the setting sun. Cool and cunning, I couldn’t be sure if they thought it was the Mexican food that smelled good or me. So far, the preference had been for takeout, but it didn’t pay to take anything for granted. “Hey, Mick. Brought you tacos this time.” And about a dozen burritos. Mickey had an appetite. A tamale to go wasn’t going to get it for him.

“Been long time. Yes, long, long time.” Black fur and skin slithered over shattered safety glass and rusted metal to hit the ground next to us. He was the same inky color as a cadejo, but where they had been doglike, Mickey was what I’d labeled him: a rat . . . if a rat crouched four feet high, had dark-skinned human hands, and talked. Niko said that there were old Rom legends about a shobolon, a giant rat with human characteristics. There were also legends of wererats. Whatever Mickey was, he wasn’t saying. Although considering the thick accent, I was betting he had something in common with Nik and me. And we weren’t part wererat.

Besides the accent, Mickey had a sense of humor. Okay, maybe not so much, but he didn’t have a bad temper, which wasn’t always the case with our informants. He was fairly mellow, considering what I called him. I doubted it was even close to the name he’d been given at birth.

A thick-skinned hand dropped the gnawed dead rodent it was holding and took the bag from me. Within seconds, red sauce was dripping from wickedly large yellow incisors. A naked gray tail wrapped around his feet as he ate. After the first seven tacos, he slowed down and licked his hands clean. “So, so, valued customers, picture of part. Picture of car.” Mickey wasn’t a mechanic by any means, but with a picture he could track down what you wanted in a matter of thirty minutes. Sometimes less. In a yard this size, that was something.

“It’s not about a car part,” Niko said. “Not this time. It’s something a little more . . . interesting.”

“Interesting.” The round eyes took us in with sudden calculation. “That is new word from you, this interesting.”

“Yeah, interesting.” I leaned against the cold metal hood of a totaled car. “Because you know what, Mickey? You sound bored. You probably are bored.” I thought about adding that he could get a nice big wheel to run around in, but didn’t figure that would help our cause. Maturity; it was no damn fun. “We’re here to help you with that. Wouldn’t you like to get out? See some trees. Frolic in nature. Good times.”

“Frolic.” Another dead rat tumbled from above where Mickey had been perched. It was the size of a beagle, and it landed on my foot. Mickey clicked yellowed teeth in a rat smile. “But, as see, frolic fine here.”

I eased my foot from under the heavy weight. The fur was spiky and stiff with dried blood, the mouth frozen in its last snarl. There was one poor damn bastard that wasn’t going to be working at any theme park. “Yeah, I’ll bet you do.” I wondered what would happen if Mickey were to meet Robin’s new cat. You wanted interesting—that would be interesting.

Niko picked up the strand of persuasion since I didn’t seem to be accomplishing much. “This would be an entirely new endeavor for you. Spying versus procuring. It would pay well. Lunch every day for three months.” And while I had my suspicions that I’d be the one making that daily delivery, Niko went ahead and filled Mickey in on the details. Oshossi, the basics of what we wanted to know, the zoo . . . cadejos, ccoas, and who knew what else.

Mickey had finished the tacos and started on the burritos, as Niko finished. “South America?” Whiskers slick with either blood or hot sauce bristled dismissively. “Tourists.” With his accent, that wasn’t quite fair—I doubted he had his green card. But either way, he didn’t seem impressed. It was a good sign. If we could get Mickey on the inside for a day or two, long enough to find out where Oshossi was—Central Park with his animals or elsewhere—we’d be ahead of the game. For once.