Outside of the Wire Read online

  “If you see this man, leave him alone. Get some salt on the way home. When you turn in tonight, pull your bed from the wall and pour the salt in a thick circle around it. That should keep the dreams away. Also, I’m told burning a fish will work, but I haven’t tried it.”

  “Is that all?”

  I tilted the plate, scooped up the extra syrup with an egg-yolk stained spoon and said, “Well, you’ll find the brooch.”

  “I mean is there anything else I can do?”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  ”No, I’m a Baptist.”

  “A Puerto Rican Baptist?”

  ”I’m Dominican. Why do you ask if I’m Catholic?”

  “I was going to suggest confession and a candle to the Holy Mother along with the salt, but I don’t know what Baptists do. I’m old-fashioned religion.”

  “We pray to our Lord and Savior.”

  Praying. Like that ever did any good. “Do that then.”

  I had nothing else for her and after a bit she left unsatisfied, but our stomachs were full. When we were alone I got a Styrofoam cup for the rest of my lukewarm coffee while Sarah gathered up the bills and stuffed them into her coat pocket.

  The rain was over but the streets were covered in thin puddles. The reflection of lights on the floor of the canyon-like street gave the night a subterranean feel. Sarah stopped beside a homeless man wrapped in garbage bags lying on the sidewalk and dumped her extra cracker packets into his lap.

  I stepped over his outstretched leg and said, “Someday that Good Samaritan thing is gonna bite you in the ass, sweetness.”

  The small smile she gave me made me feel even better than the full stomach.

  After a few paces she reached out and took my hand in hers. We interlaced fingers and I pulled her hand up to brush my lips against the back of her fingers, her nails all chewed and covered in chipped black polish.

  She asked, “What did you really see, Greg?”

  Maybe it was the coming down, or the positive vibe I was feeling, but I still shouldn’t have told her. In the three years we’d been together I had always told her the truth. I didn’t want to lie to her now, so I described the highlights of my vision.

  She didn't say anything at first. After the weighted pause she asked, “Why would they come for her?”

  “I don’t know. She’s special, the fact she dreams of them like she does tells you she’s got serious mojo. Funny they come in the flesh though. That’s so old-school for them.”

  “You can’t just leave her to that, Greg." Her voice caught a little, so she cleared her throat and said, "You need to help.”

  “I did help.”

  “The salt? Will that really do anything?”

  “Hell no. For the dreams yeah, but not if one comes in the flesh. Maybe slow them down and give her time to pray. Perhaps the big guy will help.”

  She pulled her hand from mine and stopped walking to give me that look of hers. When I stopped and turned back she said, “Greg, think of what you used to be.”

  I shrugged and said, “Sorry, my hero days were over long ago."

  "You can do something. I know you can. You have it in you to do great things."

  I just shook my head and gave a little shrug. The look she gave me broke my heart, but I’d gotten used to letting people down. She turned from me and ran into the cavernous night.

  I called after her to wait. To come back. I even threw my cup in frustration, but she didn’t stop. The rain picked up to a misty drizzle now as I turned back the other way and started home.

  The night was at its darkest. And I was alone again. A city of millions and I was alone. But then, I had been alone for a long time. Probably for the best, as the lives I touched never seemed to be better after, than before. The full stomach was a nice change so I focused on that. It would have been better without the ache in my joints so I started to plan my next narcotics offense while pretending not to think about Sarah.

  Three blocks down from the café, I stepped off the curb and noticed something small near the gutter. I reached down to pick up a dead sparrow. I sat down on the curb with my legs over the rush of gutter water and cradled the little corpse in my left hand. With my right I teased out the little wing.

  “No flying for you either, little brother.”

  I stretched out both the little wings and gently rested the bird on the stream of water and watched it not quite fly away. With the darkness the water was invisible but for snatches of reflected light. And the broken bird weaved first left then right on a glittering silver path through the detritus of the gutter.

  I pondered that after I got my bearings and started back toward the pad. The dead bird pushed along involuntarily as if by an invisible hand, on his way to an appointment with a sewer grate. It was too cold and wet to philosophize and I just wanted to get back home and crash.

  #

  A working girl sheltered in the alcove that led into my building. Her soul was twisted and forlorn gray, shot through with little crimson rivulets of spite, all stuffed in an overweight body in fishnets and too much makeup. She'd turned at least two tricks already and her pupils were little pinpricks in the dark.

  "Party, Greg?" With a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, she gave me her best impersonation of something desirable and I stifled a laugh.

  I tried to be nice because she'd been someone's little girl once. I saw the father who died and the succession of her mother's boyfriends that turned the little princess into a whore. The last decade she'd spent on the street had polluted and poisoned the soul she'd been born with almost beyond recognition. I knew a monk who would have called all those hard lessons opportunities for personal growth. I called it a shame.

  "All partied out, Miss Jimenez."

  Her eyes roamed freely over me and she said, "For you it's half price."

  "Hard to refuse, but you know how Sarah feels about that. Speaking of, why'd you dime me out to her about my score?"

  "You know, she can be persistent. 'Sides, she was all proud, telling me you were cutting back on the smack. So I jus' had to say to her, no sister, you're man is a junkie to the core."

  I nodded at her thoughtfulness and started toward the door. She stepped to intercept me and reached out a dirty hand.

  I grabbed her wrist and wrenched it sideways. Hard enough to move her along, but not hard enough hurt. She smelled of cheap perfume, cigarettes and that musky pungency of stale sex.

  "No touchy the goods, Anna." Skin to skin was rough on me. I was cool not being cruel to this broken spirit, but that didn't mean I wanted to be her friend.

  The used-up woman shot me a spiteful look but didn't press it. Instead she looked away and said, "S'okay, your loss."

  Loss. A common theme across the length and breadth of my existence.

  I brushed past her, not inhaling, and pushed open the unlocked door.

  Inside, I braced my hand against the wall where mailboxes were once mounted. I waited while the tingly little wave of post-high nausea swept through me. When I was sure I wouldn't puke up my pancakes I picked my way through the garbage in the dark hall to the room I shared with Sarah.

  The hinges gave a screeching protest as I pushed the door open. I flicked the light switch, forgetting the electricity was off. Or maybe the bulb was burned out, I forget. Enough red neon came in from the no-name liquor store across the street that I could make my way through the sparse furniture to the kitchenette. The light started with one letter and added one until all were lit and then it blinked on and off twice before starting again. It wasn't quite a strobe, but the effect was great when I was lit. Not so good when I was trying to hold down my pancakes.

  I opened the refrigerator and got a whiff of something old, but no light came on. So it must be the electric. I found a stash of fast-food ketchup packets behind the jug of vinegar I used to cut my smack, and slammed the door shut.

  I should save them for when I was hungry, but I wanted to get the acidic taste of bile out of my mou
th. I bit in and sucked a few down.

  I spun at the sound of a little thump on the counter. Disembodied yellow eyes stared reproachfully at me. As the U-O-R blinked on, the rest of Milton came into view.

  He gave me a low rumbling meow, followed by a shorter, louder one for effect.

  "I'm not in the mood, cat."

  Milton continued to stare and then slinked his inky-blackness across the counter, sitting on the edge, facing me but looking away. The cat pulled away as I tried to scratch him between the ears and repeated his short loud meow.

  "Didn't Sarah feed you?"

  I rummaged in a cabinet while the cat paced the counter, watching. I finally found the last little pull-top can of tuna and left it open on the counter for him.

  The overcoat made a rustling swish as I dropped it in the hall. I went into the bedroom and flopped down on the thin mattress resting on the floor. I rolled over on my back and tried not to think of Sarah.

  The blood red neon went through its brighter, brighter, off, and on routine and I stared at the archipelago of dark moldy splotches on the ceiling.

  Sarah was liable to do something stupid. I didn't see it, but I knew she was going to warn that Dominican girl. This was a really bad time to play the Good Samaritan.

  Milton padded in the doorway and hopped up on to my chest. His breath smelled of fish and his yellow eyes bored into me.

  "She made her own bed cat," I said.

  Sometimes I think cats are tuned into something the rest of us can't see. Other times I think they just serve as a really good vehicle for our own guilt.

  "I'm not the hero she thinks I am."

  Milton never blinked.

  I rolled the cat off and said, "Fine. But you owe me for this one."

  I grabbed my overcoat on the way out to rescue my friend. The friend that had saved me so many times from falling any further than I already had.

  #

  Five blocks and a bridge later, and I’d left the multi-storied tenements for a real neighborhood. A row of small frame houses huddled together in the dark.

  I could tell Sarah was close, but not exactly where. I was good with general directions, but not so good with specifics. I slowed and tried to concentrate. Her soul was masked to me, so it was hard to place her. I recalled the image of the Dominican girl’s soul and reached out with my mind to find it. The blinking lights of all of the other souls bound in flesh in this crowded city masked hers. Ahead and to the right. I skirted a row house blocking my way and went into the alley beyond.

  I paused and closed my eyes. The crash of glass and a scream led me to where I needed to go. I stumbled on a length of rebar protruding from a tidy heap of garbage in an alley and grabbed it up. I vaulted over the sagging chain-link fence and stumbled through a cluttered yard to the rear door of a house. Locked.

  Another scream, muffled and in pain this time, but it wasn't Sarah. I kicked the door in, ran through the empty kitchen and knew I'd be there again. Creaking floorboards indicated movement above. I rounded the corner and bounded up the stairs. There in the hall, half out of a doorway loomed a vision from Maria’s dreams. Maria knelt in the hall beyond and called out to me.

  It stood taller and broader than me. Great leathery wings stretched out from the second set of scapulas. One wing in the hall, the other reached back into the room. The smoky gray skin was thick and covered in oozing boils where the ancient words had been written. It turned to me and paused, the eyes were dead, the pupils blown. The skin of the lower face had torn away and the yellow-white mandible shown through.

  “Araqiêl? Is that you, little brother?” His voice rasped like a file being pulled across a steel pipe.

  “Semjaza. It’s been a long time.” I stood ready on the balls of my feet.

  “You look terrible,” it rasped.

  “Yeah. Not so bad as you, though. You look like hell, Sem.” The nausea, the after effects of the drugs, all extraneous thought drained away as my body readied itself for battle.

  Semjaza shrugged and the upper half of the face smiled. The lower half didn’t have enough skin to complete the expression and it leered. “What can I say? Brimstone is bad for the complexion.”

  “I can’t let you take her,” I said abruptly. I flexed my fingers on the rebar held down at my side.

  The demon looked at the girl, and then back at me. “You always were a sucker for the pretty ones, Ara. Capital vices and all.”

  I shrugged and turned the motion into a twist as the demon shot out a twisted reptilian claw. Eight feet in an instant. It cut through the fabric of my coat, but didn’t touch skin and I slashed down with the length of iron.

  His skin blistered and hissed where the bar struck, leaving a thick wide burn. The iron rod smoked and glowed red where it had touched Semjaza. Iron was good for that with demons. Something about a fire elemental being struck with an earth element. Like a metaphysical game of rock-paper-scissors.

  Semjaza hissed at me. I had seen him leading hosts of angels to war once, and now he hissed like a cat.

  The hallway was too narrow for this slugfest. The demon was bigger and stronger than me. I wouldn’t last long if I couldn't maneuver.

  “How did you come to the middle world, Sem?”

  “Crack in space-time, little brother. Same as before, you remember that Ara, don't you? What you did to me? To your brothers?”

  I backed slowly to the head of the stairs.

  “Ara, don’t go away mad. Or is it Greg? Isn’t that what the sweet-meat called you?”

  “Yeah. It’s sort of a nickname. Short for egregori.” I didn’t know whom he meant by sweetmeat. Sarah? The ward hid her soul, so that Semjaza and his friends couldn’t take it but it also meant that I didn’t see her well.

  “Ah, the watchers. That was the job wasn’t it? Before the fall?”

  I nodded and felt for the steps.

  “That is where you lost your wings. Did Gabriel take them from you? Clip you?”

  “Nope. Gideon, with his terrible sword.” I didn’t care to rehash this with him. I just wanted to keep him engaged.

  “Gideon. I hate that sanctimonious bastard. I was cast down by then though, wasn't I? Missed all the fun and games.”

  I took the stairs slowly. One at a time. I noted the inner phalange of his wings had a thick, hooked talon, two thirds up from the base to the end.

  “We don’t have to fight Ara. Sêmîazâz made you an offer to join us and it's still good. Bygones and all?” The laugh which followed was hollower than his speech.

  “Sorry, I’m not interested in your team.” He couldn’t finish what he had come to do with me here. I would either have to be run off or destroyed.

  ”You owe them nothing Ara. They turned their backs on us.”

  I reached the bottom step and kept backing into the little foyer, and said, “We turned away, Sem. Not them.”

  Even though I saw it coming, I couldn’t avoid the wing as it snaked out. The talon sunk into my neck with a wet sound. A thick rope of blood fell out onto the tiles as the talon retracted. The hole it left in me fizzed and I swung the iron rod at empty air.

  The second wing snicked out impossibly fast, the talon sank into my shoulder, and back. Again I swung the length of iron at nothing. Bubbling ooze ran down from the holes in me.

  “Time is coming to an end, Ara. We’ll bar the crack and then we will feast on the children of clay.”

  He lunged at me again and I dodged. I saw a plastic grocery bag on a sideboard. Through the plastic I could see the little girl holding an umbrella on a blue background and knew it was the salt I had told Maria to get.

  I feinted with the iron rod and twisted to grab the bag. Semjaza’s index and middle fingers stabbed into my flesh below the ribs. I twisted away, but his talons scraped against the underside of my rib cage and pulled me in. The pain pulsed as I twisted like bait on a hook. The wing talon pinned me through the bicep as I tried to raise the iron rod.

  "Where will you go when you die, little b
rother?"

  I had no answer.

  “It ends now, Ara.”

  “Yes,” I exhaled. I briefly contemplated letting him have me. If only it could be so easy. I sank my fingers through the sides of the little round box and the salt spilled out of the holes I made. I slammed my hand into his face and packed the salt into his eyes, his shattered nose and the gaping hole of his mouth.

  He screamed and released me. His flesh bubbled and fizzed where the salt touched him. It was like salting a snail. I held the iron rod with both hands and stabbed it into the left side of his chest as deep as I could. I rode him over, still holding the rod.

  The flesh smoked. A red ring formed in his chest around the iron spike, and I pushed harder, pinning him down to the step like an obscene butterfly.

  My hands burned. I had to hold. If he got the spike out, he might still heal. The hot red halo spread outward, leaving gray, charred coke behind.

  He thrashed. The talons of his wings slashed my coat and sliced strips of flesh from my back. My hands blistered with the heat of the rod. Semjaza stiffened and let out a rasping exhalation as he emolliated. I leapt back and watched him turn to dust and ash.

  I bounded over his outline of melted acrylic carpet and scorched wood and up the stairs.

  Maria still knelt where I had left her. I hadn’t seen it before, but she cradled the body of what must have been her mother in her lap. Her body wracked with sobs, but no sound escaped.

  Where’s Sarah?”

  Maria didn’t respond.

  “Did Sarah come?” I asked with more conviction.

  Maria didn’t respond but instead cast a glance at the doorway in the hall. I followed her eyes and saw Sarah crumpled just inside the broken window.

  “No. No-no-no.” My wounds were forgotten as I crossed the small room and dropped to my knees. I reached down and pulled her broken little body to me.

  “Oh no. Not her.” I reached down and brushed the wild dark hair with the red-brown roots from her blood-smattered face.