An Excerpt from the upcoming fourth Joe Pitt Casebook: EVERY LAST DROP
RIPE FOR THE TAKING.
That’s all I can think as I watch them.
The crowd pouring out of the Stadium, tens of thousands
cramming out onto River and the Concourse, flooding the street
under the 4-train tracks as the trains screech in and out overhead,
more people packing the cars sardine tight, tripping up the
steps, cascading down into the tunnels, mashing into Stan the
Man’s, northbound traffic making for the Cross Bronx Expressway
and the Triborough stalled out from all the people wandering
the street. Drunk and half drunk, ecstatic from a win or enraged
from a loss, a blue-and-white pinstriped mass of thousands.
All of them full up.
Each of them enough to keep some sad son of a bitch on his
feet for weeks. For months if he has some self-control and knows
how to go about his business. Most of them strangers to the
South Bronx, never seen more of it than this one subway station
or the parking lot and the Stadium itself. Each one full to their
pumping heart with quarts of blood.
Any wonder every fucking game brings trouble?
Sure, no big secret. That’s why the cops are out there. Cops
keep the traffic moving in fits and starts. Cops keep the Bleacher
Creatures from chewing the ears off any Sox fans stupid enough
to stay through the ninth inning on a night their team came to
town and won. Cops keep an eye out for pickpockets and for
drunks falling under the buses and for snatch-and-grab artists.
If I gave a shit about any of that stuff I’d give them a hearty pat
on the back and maybe buy a boy in blue a beer sometime.
But I don’t care.
What I do care about are poachers. What I care about are
starvelings. I care about the greedy and the weak, the foundering
and the lost and the plain stone stupid. I care about them so
much that I try to show my face around here after every night
game. Just to make it plain and clear.
Clear that they should get off this turf before I come up behind
them in an alley one night and put two in the back of their fucking
skull before they even know I’m there.
The halt and the lame. They got no place. Not as long as I’m
stuck up here.
Up here.
Stand up top long after a game, well before sunrise. Stand on
the 4 platform and look south and you can see it. You can see the
City right there. One stop over the river.
Fucking China to me.
Coming down to the street, iron bars walling stairs and turnstiles
and platforms, arching overhead, meeting the steel undercarriage
of the tracks, like walking circles in a cage.
My cage.
No one shits in my cage.
So after a game I make the scene. Truth to tell, figure I’d make
it even if I didn’t have practical concerns. Figure I’d be out there
on River just to take advantage of pretty much the only time I can
stick my face out of doors in the neighborhood and not pique
someone’s curiosity.
A white face in the South Bronx after dark, it draws a little attention.
During the day, around the courthouses on One Sixtyone,
you see plenty of them. Cops and lawyers and the occasional
plaintiff. But they all go home come night. Closest any of them
live to One Sixty-one and the Concourse might be Riverdale.
More likely Jersey or Queens.
Still, during the day I could blend in real easy eating a Cuban
from Havanna Sandwich Queen on one of the benches next to a
statue of Moses bringing the Ten Commandments down the hill.
Look at my build, my face, my black boots and black Dickies on
a summer day, with my leather jacket draped over the warm stone
bench, and someone might naturally think undercover. Think I’m
some cop up here to testify.
But that would require I was out during the day.
Which isn’t on my agenda. Ever.
Not until I develop a serious taste for dying from instantaneous
eruptions of bloody pustules on my eyes.
So if I desire to take the air, my promenades must come betimes
at night. And, man, there just ain’t no other fucking white
people in these parts after the sun goes down. And drawing eyes
is not something I have much desire to do.
Who that guy?
Seen him around?
Gotta be Five-0.
Naw, see him for months. Never make a move on no one.
He ain’t livin’ up here.
Don’t know, could be he is.
What block? What building?
Next thing you know, go down a block on a hot night: Old
guys got their card table and their wives’ favorite kitchen chairs
out on the sidewalk to play dominoes; young guys standing
around someone’s leased Escalade, bass beats rippling their
baggy shorts, shooting texts to the shorties looking down from a
fire escape across the street; windows open, rice and beans and
stewed chicken smells coming out, mothers and grandmothers
and pregnant girls inside laughing and sipping sangria made
from jug red and 7Up; someone catches sight of me and the
party just shuts down. Hear nothing but my boots on the pavement,
see nothing but sideways eyes scoping me out all the way
to the end of the street until I turn the corner and they all look
at one another.
Who the fuckin’ white guy?
Figure a question like that can drive some people crazy. Figure
some people got to know. Figure sooner or later someone gets in
my face. Figure that doesn’t end well.
Figure that isn’t the real fucking problem anyway.
The real fucking problem is when that question circulates too
far, rumors start, people tell stories, stories spread.
The river, I can’t cross it, but any of these people can. And they
can take questions and rumors and stories with them. And once
that kind of shit is over there on the Island, no telling where it
ends up. Ends up in the wrong place, maybe someone hears it.
Someone hears it, maybe someone decides to look into it. Someone
looks into it, maybe someone sees me. Someone finds me.
And once I’m found by someone from the Island, figure my game
is played out. Figure me dead.
Well, that’s on the agenda, but I’m trying to see if I can’t attend
to that matter at a later date. More pressing business at the moment.
Places to go. People to see.
And kill.
Goals. Ambitions. They keep a man going.
Any case, all the restrictions my new neighborhood puts on
me, figure I’d stroll over after the games just to mix with the
crowd. Just to be out. Anonymous. Free is a word you could use if
you like. If you like a good laugh, that is.
And while I’m there stretching my legs, I take a look around,
take a sniff of the air, see if I maybe smell something I don’t like.
I smell something I don’t like, I can make a point of finding who
it is. Maybe find an intimate moment when the crowd eddies
around us, lean close and make myself clear.
I had such an opportunity tonight.
Waiting on the last couple outs of the ninth inning inside
Billy’s, nursing a plastic cup of tap beer, mentally adding the last
of the singles and change in my pocket to see if I could make it
come out to enough for a real drink before I wrapped up. I
smelled something waft in from the street. I knocked the bottom
of my cup against the bar and watched the foam rise, watched it
boil down, drank the last of it lukewarm and headed out to the
street where the crowd from a not very close loss was already
pouring surly out of the Stadium.
Want to smell rank? Smell a few thousand baseball fans on a
hell-humid night after a bad loss. Sweat-soaked jerseys, urinesoaked
sneakers, dribbled pump-cheese, a cloud of exhaled
peanut breath and hot dog farts.
Unpleasant.
And still, I can smell it.
Scent like slightly diluted acid, cutting my nasal passages.
Hard sharp poison. Venom.
Vyrus.
I start cutting the crowd, working my way back and forth
across the street on sharp diagonals, looking for the scent. And
finding it. Finding it over and over.
The dildo somewhere up ahead of me must be following a similar
path, but cutting for signs of different prey. Looking for a
mark. Someone who will cull themselves drunk from the herd
and wander down the wrong long street, into an absence of light
where any old bad shit can take place.
I can be patient. Wait till he starts moving in a straight line.
That will be the sign, when he stops blundering back and forth
leaving trail after trail, that’ll be the sign he’s found what he
wants. The idiot, out here making a spectacle of himself, hunting
in the open like a bag-snatcher.
Or.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, who’s the idiot now?
Right. Me.
It’s not a single trail zigzagging the crowd.
It’s trails.
A pack. A fucking pack in the crowd. A fucking pack of youngbloods
working the crowd after a game. Cocky in numbers, ignorant
of fear, dumber than dirt.
Christ, does that ring a bell.
Like my own bell tolling away before I learned a thing or two.
I can’t tell how many. Their lines are all stirred together in the
dead air by the shuffling herd. But the scent is strong. So make it
three. Maybe make it four. No more than that. Four together is
pushing any kind of balance. Four can’t last together for long.
Tear each other apart.
No more than four. More likely three. Two?
That’s wishful thinking.
But Christ, let it be no more than three.
More than three and I just won’t have enough bullets. Three
bullets being all I have at the moment. Three bullets, a likewise
amount of dollars, and maybe that many days I can get through
healthy before I need to get my hands on some more blood of my
own.
Well, not blood of my own. More like blood of someone who
can maybe spare a couple pints. Those people, they tend to be a
rare commodity. Most people need all they got. And some of us,
some of us need all we can get our damn hands on.
Every last drop.
—Now! Now! Clear the fuck off now!
—Fuck you!
—Yeah, fuck you!
—Not your fuckin’ street!
—Gonna meet the street in a second. Gonna be assumin’ the position
gangsta style, face in the gutter in a second.
—Man, fuck you!
I swing round and watch some cops dealing with four kids
whipping through the crowd on bright little pocket bikes, knees
jutting high from the two-foot-tall cycles, engines rising and
falling as they give little pulses of gas to keep themselves in motion.
The cop on point adjusts his gun belt.
—Say that word to me again! Say it again! Taser your ass right off
that bike. Know what happens I hit you with a Taser? Make you
shit your pants, kid. Lie there crying mami, mami and your pants
full of shit just like when you were a baby.
One of the kids guns his bike, the tails of his do-rag flapping
behind him.
—Man, Taser you mama.
—What? Say what?
The kids cut back and forth between cars and pedestrians,
never losing balance, staying just far enough from the cops that if
the officers get serious the kids know they can get away.
—Say you mama need a Taser for her stinky pussy.
The cops are half smiling as they walk slowly, herding the kids
away from the heart of the Stadium outflow. Enjoying the distraction.
But clearly not above busting a little skull if they can get
their hands on the fuckers.
The point cop fingers the handle of his baton and tilts his chin
at his partner.
—Kid’s clearly never met your mama, Olivera, otherwise he’d
know how sweet her pussy smells.
Olivera hoists a middle finger at him.
—Not as sweet as your mama says my dick is.
Do-rag rises on his pegs.
—Cops be all in each other mama’s pussies. I wait till you at it
and fuck you daughters.
The point cop’s fingers curl on his baton.
—That ain’t fuckin’ funny, you little shit.
Olivera adjusts his hat.
—I ain’t even got a daughter and I don’t think it’s funny.
Do-rag shrugs, weaves around a clot of baseball fans watching
the scene play.
—No problems, man. I fuck you wifey instead.
And the two cops run at the kids and the two other cops that
had been working their way over from the north end of the street
where the new Stadium is going up run at the kids and the kids
hit the gas, the tiny 49cc engines whining and the crowd scatters
and the cops scream and when the dust settles the backs of the
kids flick out of sight around the corner, one of them waving the
cap he snatched from the head of one of the cops.
The crowd rustles back into its former rhythm and shape,
everyone avoiding eye contact with the cursing cops. The cops
stand in a circle and ask one another if they’ve ever seen those
kids before, what block they maybe live on, what building they
maybe live in, discussing how much ass they’re gonna kick when
they catch up to them.
I wander across the street, crossing the path the kids took as
they rode off, knowing the cops will be lucky if they never see
that particular group of little shits ever again.
Poison in the air.
Poison left hanging by that pack.
Kids no older than thirteen. Could they be older? Sure they
could. If they were heavy feeders they could be old men on the
inside. But they’re not. Old men wouldn’t make a spectacle like
that. Old men wouldn’t bait cops. No, they’re new.
New to the life.
Jesus, thirteen, they’re new to everything there is. And destined
to never get old to it. Not the signs they’re flashing. Big
signs, neon and bright: KILL ME NOW!
I cross to Gerrard, the crowd thinner, the traffic for the CBE
and the Triborough heavy, past the long low bunker of the parking
garage.
Thinking.
Yeah, I’m thinking about the kids. But I got other things on my
mind as well. Like I’m thinking about who made them that way.
Who bled into them. And how many must have died ugly on the
way to infecting those four.
And I’m thinking how life isn’t an easy thing. Nasty, brutish
and short, so they say. And how you got to take your pleasures
where and when you find them. Because they may not come
again.
And I’m thinking just how much pleasure I’m gonna take from
scalping the guy who infected those kids. How much fun it’s
going to be to peel his skull and shove the rag of skin and hair
down his throat to muffle the screams while I figure ways to
make him live as long as possible as I yank his ribs out.
Any wonder I’m so distracted I don’t register the stink of them
as I pass the gated mouth of an alley until I’m twenty feet past it?
I pull up and walk back. The alley is right next to Cassisi and
Cassisi Accident Cases. Se habla español. Like any of the ambulance
chasers in these parts don’t habla español.
I look between the red-painted bars of the gate, down the narrow
space between buildings where old stone walls topped by
curls of razor wire separate good neighbors. There’s a concrete
staircase climbing to the backs of buildings that face on Walton.
A splash of red much brighter than the paint on the gate at the
foot of those stairs.
I push the gate open, the chain that’s meant to keep it closed
dangles, links snapped clean. At the end of the alley, a sound. Reminds
me of a cat I saw once, had its hindquarters run over by a
bus. Cat’s forelegs kept reaching out, claws rasping the asphalt,
trying to get purchase, pull itself away from the pain. People
stood on the sidewalk, stared at the mutilated cat. I stepped on
its neck and it stopped moving. Way people reacted, you’d have
thought I did the wrong thing.
She’s where they left her, on the pavement, blood bubbling
from her lips, red fake fingernails raking the ground. Her eyes roll
as my shadow falls across her. Looks at me, wheezes, says something.
—Ee iunt aigh ee.
It takes a second, but I get it.
She’s right. They didn’t rape her. A hard thing for her to fathom
about a gang of rabid kids who just bit her tongue out.
Her eyes roll again, up into her head this time, and she’s out.
I look around. Lights in the back windows of the tenements. A
collection of overfull garbage cans with a chain running through
their handles. The kind of alley where people steal fucking
garbage cans. Up the stairs it’s darker, a little alcove huddled at
the bottom of one of the buildings, a door leading into a basement.
I pick her up and put her over my shoulder and go up the stairs
and down into the alcove. The door is steel, the lock is cheap. It
pops the second time I put my shoulder into it. I take her inside
and dump her in a corner.
She’s stopped bleeding. She’s stopped bleeding for the same
reason I’m not drinking her blood right now. The kids infected
her. Could have been on purpose. Could have been an accident.
Biting off someone’s tongue, figure there’s a good chance you
might get your own lips bit. However it went down, she got some
of the kids’ blood in her.
And she liked it.
Or something in her liked it.
Or however it works.
If it hadn’t worked, if she wasn’t the kind can take the Vyrus,
she’d be dead in a puddle of white spew already. As it is, the
wound in her mouth and the various scratches and scrapes she
got in the tussle are closed up. Vyrus going to work. So I settle in.
I could kill her.
I should kill her.
I don’t and she’ll either end up drawing attention to her new
condition and making things harder for everyone else. Or she’ll
take to it and be another mouth that needs to feed. More competition
for everyone. Not that I care about everyone. Still, fact that
she’s likely got no future that doesn’t involve making my life
harder in one way or another is enough that I should kill her now.
But I don’t.
Someone had a chance to make that call on me way back and
he passed on the option. I don’t talk to that guy anymore. Not
since I stuck a nail in his femoral artery, but he did right by me
once.
Least I can do is try the same.
Give her the score.
Let her decide.
So I smoke. And wait. Wait for the Vyrus to finish working her
over. Then we can have a talk.
Christ I hope she doesn’t scream too much when I try to explain
it to her.
—Here’s how the rest of your life works. You’re fucked. Your family,
you don’t get to see them ever again. Same with your friends.
Your job is over. Wherever you live, you don’t live there anymore.
You see someone on the street that you used to know, you go the
other way. You see those people, you get tempted to talk to them.
Try to explain. What you try to explain is that you’re sick. You try
to explain it’s not what they think. It’s a virus. A thing living inside
you. It makes you sicker than they can imagine. And there’s only
one way to treat it. To treat the symptoms. That’s to feed it. And
there’s only one thing to feed it. That’s blood. People blood. Know
what happens when you tell them that? They get the same look
on their face that you got on yours right now. Know the difference?
They’re not infected. They didn’t just get jumped and
beaten and have their tongue bitten out by a pack of wilders who
proceeded to suck on their mouth like it was a water fountain.
And because that didn’t happen to them, they can’t feel what
you’re feeling. That burn inside, the heat and tingle around your
wounds. They can’t look at the cuts on their bare arms and see
they’re already closed up, turning pink to white. They can’t feel
the scab grow over their stub of a tongue, feel it flaking away, feel
how smooth and perfect it is now. Feel that it almost seems to be
growing back. Unlike you, they hear a story like that, they got no
reason to think you’re anything but out of your fucking head, and
get you locked up. And that’s the happy ending. The unhappy
ending is if they should believe you. If someone should somehow
find out you’re telling the truth. Because they sure as shit won’t
think you’re sick, they’ll think you’re a goddamn monster. And
won’t it be fun to see that look on their faces. So, no more life. It’s
over. Other things are over too. You’ll never see the sun again. Not
unless you’re about to die a horrible death. The virus in you goes
crazy if it’s hit with shortwave UVs from the sun. Your whole body
becomes cancerous. Fast. Good news, none of the other crap is a
problem. Crosses, holy water, garlic. That shit, it’s shit. You’re infected,
not damned. Or maybe you are. I don’t know. A stake
through the heart will kill you, just like any asshole. But when it’s
fed, the Vyrus will crank up your system. Stronger, faster. Heightened
senses. And tough. But keeping it fed is the thing. A pint a
week. Blood. Human. More if possible. Think about drinking
blood. Not a happy thought. Now think about getting it. The kids
that attacked you, they’re not the norm. Well, up here they may
be a little more normal, but still pretty fucking baroque. The City,
Manhattan, it’s organized. Clans got it carved up. Coalition,
Hood, Society, others. Each one’s got an agenda. A Clan takes
you in, they’ll help you get settled. Adjusted. Not a joiner, you
can go Rogue, stay the fuck off Clan turf. That means staying off
the Island. Means getting blood on your own. Means hurting
people, mostly. Means sometimes someone gets killed. But better
if they don’t. Better if you develop a system. Find a junkie on
the nod you can tap him for a pint. Vyrus doesn’t care about the
junk. Doesn’t care about any kind of illness or poison. Keep it
healthy, it keeps you healthy. And maybe I’m wrong about your
people. Maybe you’re special close to someone. Could be your
boyfriend. Could be your sister. Someone that’s got a taste for
being used. You know the type. Maybe they got it in them to let
you cut into a vein every few weeks. That makes things a lot easier.
Still need to make some moves, but you have someone like
that, a Lucy like that, and things get easier. Not that easy is a
word gets thrown around much in this life. What else? People
know about us. Not a lot, but a few. Well, some know about us,
others just hope we’re real. Some, they want in on the game, want
to make the scene. Fucking Renfields. Others, they got an axe to
grind. Some of them got real axes. Van Helsings. A real one is bad
news. Someone who can go around in the day, poke into things,
has a credit rating to buy guns and bullets and stuff, and who also
knows the real score on us, that’s a serious danger. And? What?
And there’s some infecteds think the Vyrus isn’t a virus. Like
maybe it’s something, I don’t know, something supernatural. Enclave.
They’re crazy. And there’s a bacteria. Kinda like the Vyrus,
’cept it turns people into brain eaters. Zombies. But that’s pretty
rare. So. I don’t know what else. I don’t usually talk this much.
I blow some smoke at the ceiling.
—I feel like I’m forgetting something. Vyrus. Clans. Zombies.
Stay out of the sun. Don’t get shot. Abandon your life. Drink
blood to survive.
I shake my head.
—No. Guess that pretty much covers it.
I flick my cigarette butt away.
—So, question is, can you take it? I lay it out like that, do you
think you’re the kind who can take it?
She wipes at the drying tear tracks in the grit on her cheeks.
She sticks a finger in her mouth and touches her healing tongue,
takes her fingers out of her mouth and looks at me.
Says nothing.
I nod, point up at the barred window at ground level, the night
sky above.
—Look up there.
She looks.
I pull out my gun and use my last three bullets.
EVERY LAST DROP
Joe Pitt Casebook Four
Out September 30, 2008
