The Clarity of Cold Steel

BROOKLYN TAKES ANOTHER HIT from his ghost pipe and closes his eyes. When he opens them, his pupils twitch into vertical serpent slits, and his nostrils flare wide. He holds it a long while, just gazing off long, then lets it go, bone white smoke sinking in heavy looping coils to the wood beneath us. The kid’s about fourteen, skinny as a twig, skin so dark he makes me look albino by comparison. Round his neck, he wears a leopard-skin ascot. A tribal thing, maybe? Gang thing? Style thing? I don’t know.

“Your boy Gortham?” Brooklyn points out across the skeletal miasma of dead Arabian naval vessels teetering with rot, tied off for miles till you hit shore. A stirring nihilistic vista for some reluctant suicidal cat needing incentive for that final push. “He’s gone.”

“You sure about that?” I lean my mono-scope on the crow’s nest parapet and aim it down across the channel and at the wide deck of the Cartagena.

“Like hopes and dreams, my man.”

“Preaching to the choir.” People come and go from the Cartagena all morning. I’m trying to find a chink in the armor, get a feel for the biz. Not much luck so far. “So how’s this usually go down?”

“It don’t.” Brooklyn takes a sip of rum, swishes it in his mouth, spits it out. There’s a Zulu consortium in the Boneyard that owns a couple hulks moored just off of the Seep. Brooklyn’s one of their favored sons or so he claims. He claims a lot, though. And if it is true, what the hell’s he doing peering for pennies for a sad sack like me? “Not now anyways.”

“When, then?” I ask as Mac Heath takes a stroll around the Cartagena’s deck, arm in arm with her paramour, the lovely Sable. Like watching some New Memphis promenade. It doesn’t last long and soon it’s just the typical foot and boat traffic coming in and out.

“Clients usually don’t come crawling in grey-light.” He points at the sky. “Later they come, when the sky falls.”

“How do you know they ain’t donors?” I nod to a trio stepping off a gangplank and onto the Cartagena’s deck.

“You got eyes?” He rears back, fixes me a discerning stare. “Naw…” Shakes his head. “You got eyes, but you don’t see. Me?” He points at his ghost-slit pupil, takes a hit, the junk flaring loud, his eyeballs trembling in zigzag lightning bolt seizures. “The amadlozi show me.” Amadlozi, a type of Zulu-ancestor worship. Ghosts and spirits and shit. “Show me truth.”

“Bullshit,” I say, because it is. Ghost hallucinations caused by burnt neurons. Can get the same effect huffing ethaline out of a paper bag. I rub my eyes, settle back in, snatch a sip of whiskey, my own choice for neural incineration. Gotta pass time somehow cause barring that lascivious little lovers’ junket, this stakeout, like every single stakeout I’ve ever sat for, proves an eye-screaming snoozer.

But when mid-afternoon rolls around, the weather picks up and the crow’s nest starts rolling back and forth like my grandma’s rocking chair. Boring, it’s not. I’m green in short shrift and trying not to spill my guts, but the seagulls wheeling and screeching overhead are the icing on the cake, running rusted forks up and down my spine. Can’t do anything for the rocking, but the flying vermin? I pump a couple broadheads up toward their gizzards and end my day rocking in sweet sanctimonious silence.

Brooklyn just shakes his head. “Bad karma, my man.”

“Fuck karma.” I smirk as one of the seagulls teeters and rolls in descending swirls, dropping screaming into the grey waves. It’s the small victories in life.

Come fall of night, lights begin to flare up rife across the bay. Rig-monkeys lug lanterns up hemp rope spider webs till they reach apexes. A bunch of tiny moons half waxing. Soon, the ships disappear in the darkness below, and only the stunted constellations and denuded forest of masts are visible. Amazing how the less you see of some things the better they become.

On schedule, I pop one of Chirag’s immunosuppressives into my gob, dry swallow it, grimace as it scrapes down my gullet. Not pleasant, but neither is having your body pull a Mir Jafar and slit its own throat. I turn and lean back against the parapet, hold the monoscope out to Brooklyn. The weather’s died down.

“The Butcher runs a tight ship,” Brooklyn comments as he takes the scope, raises it to an eye, adjusting the housing for focus. “She’s got her sweet girlfriend cooking the books for her. Then she’s got her knifeman. Mainlo. Number one in the whole of the Boneyard. A couple years running. A stone-cold cutter, righteous badass, knick your gizzard with a grin.” He lowers the scope, glances my way, smirking. “But you two already been introduced, huh?”

“We’re best friends.” I scowl. Point. “Eyes on the prize.”

Brooklyn shrugs, puts the scope back to his eye, does what I’m paying him to do. He’s got a sharp set of eyes, and he knows the Boneyard better than anyone. Anyone I’m willing to pay at this rate, anyways. “Check this sod out.” He hands me the scope.

A heavyset trudger inches up the gangplank to the Cartagena. I can see indecision in his every move. For an instant, he turns back, freezing in place, fists balling into clenches, then turns back to the ship. Mainlo’s there waiting on him before he sets foot on deck. A brief exchange and a pat down and the trudger heads in, the gremlin on his six.

“How many’s she cut a night?”

“How many would you?” He chuffs a laugh. “As many as she can handle. Nine or ten. Sometimes more.”

“Penny ante.”

“Maybe where you come from, Mister Moneybags,” Brooklyn shrugs, “but it ain’t nothing to sneeze at in the Boneyard. Wouldn’t mind sticking my thumb in that pie. A taste. You know how much a kidney fetches nowadays?” He whistles low. “And that’s just slinging giblets from the hip. Flying blind. Walk-ins, my man. Without even a near match.” He lowers the scope, gives me the serious eye.” He nods. “Fifty large.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I say.

“You ain’t shittin,” he goes on. “The Butcher deals in all sorts. Walk-ins. Near hits. But if by the grace o’ some Gods you manage a dead-eye donor match? Damn.” Slaps his thigh. “The golden goose, my man. Fifty times that. A hundred if she can line up the bloke proper. More than you or me or any of these croppers and sodbusters’ll see in this saga.”

“Maybe I should start looking for a match?”

Brooklyn glances at me askance, eyes squinting, trying to suss out if I’m serious. He must decide I’m not, and he’s right. I prefer to be on the receiving end of graft work. Never know when a spare kidney’ll come in handy. “The coppers keen about this joint?” I ask.

“Sure enough.” Brooklyn nods, eyes still down on the prize. “Name of Draegar. Bad hombre.”

“Badder than your Zulu Breakers?” I raise an eyebrow.

He scoffs, snake slits glaring. “Ain’t no one that bad.”

I scan the area; we’re on the far edge of the Boneyard, nothing between us and the horizon but cold and wet and lost dreams. “Tough lay for copping out here.”

“Sure enough, the noose seems loose as a Yankton party girl, but it ain’t.” He feigns looping an imaginary noose round his neck, tightens it and yanks it up suddenly, his tongue lolling. “Quick as a snare if you wrong some connected bloke or forget to pay your dues. And then you’re left dancing.”

“A yardarm jig?”

Brooklyn takes another hit of his ghost pipe, his face lighting up orange as he nods.

“That shit’ll kill you.”

Across the channel, a hyrax sentry pokes its vermin nose out of its burrow, an old toilet, feeling the wind.

“You see much worth living for round here?” Brooklyn asks.

“Look harder, kid.”

“How about them pills you popping?” He raises an eyebrow.

I shrug, turn away. “How long’s a donor stay after their operation?”

“How long you think she wants them to stay?”

“Breakfast. Tea. Four-course dinner?”

“You ain’t shittin.” He chuffs a laugh.

“But what if the Samaritan’s feeling a little woozy after his good work? She help them home?”

“Think that happened to your boy?”

“And what if it did?”

“Can’t say,” Brooklyn shakes his head, “but long walks and short piers is my way of thinking. Or maybe your boy donated a little more than he expected. If he was dumb enough to go without someone watching his six.”

“How many nights a week does this go on?”

“How many?” Brooklyn rears back like maybe I’m crazy. “How many times you like getting paid?”

“I am a creature of habit,” I admit.

“Well, there’s your answer.”

“Let me ask you something else.”

Brooklyn tilts his head. “It’s your dime, my man.”

“Nickel.”

“Get what you pay for.”

“A sad maxim of life,” I lament. “How’s a kid know so much about shit as dark as this?”

Brooklyn grins, his teeth and eyes white in the failed light. He tugs at the hem of his denim coat and pulls it up, showing me his bony right flank. A long ragged centipede of scar creeps along from the back of his ribcage down to his hip bone, right over his left kidney. “The Creator, my man, Unkulunkulu, he gives us two for a reason.”