Doubletake

Black for me, bronze for Niko, and it may as well have been case-hardened steel. We wouldn’t be Vayash; neither of us would want a ring attached to that name. He might mean this as my “Leandros” ring of manhood. Niko putting the lie to the black-market monsters who accused me of being much more of a nightmare than they were. Niko denying Grimm’s games and plans and lures.

My genes didn’t matter one way or the other in what Nik knew and had always known. I wasn’t a monster.

I was a man.

He must’ve bought it from Mr. Chen before we left. It fit my middle finger, which would be at the forefront of any punch I threw. It not only said I was a man, but it was…I grinned.

Practical.

20

Three hours later we were going into a bakery on Melbourne Avenue. Robin hadn’t called back yet and that was beginning to worry me. Niko had called Promise to check on his condo and we were waiting to hear back from her. It wasn’t like Goodfellow. Okay, honestly, it was like him with everyone else, but not with us and not now.

The bakery wasn’t much to look at. Plain. Blue and pink cupcakes had been painted on the smallish window by hand, and not a good one. The paint was peeling now, giving them a slowly advancing case of sugar leprosy. But as with most dives, that’s where the food was the best. When I opened the door, the smell was unbelievable. Bread, pies, fudge, and ten kinds of cake. The place was called Rapture’s Buns. The paint on that was flaking too, but it wasn’t making the business suffer. The place was full of people lined up at a glass case, squabbling over who was first in line and snatching free samples off the top of the counter.

Repeat customers like me didn’t have to go through that. Rapture bumped them to the front, actually the back technically, as soon as you walked in. She saw me as she was putting a cake in a box and handed it over to one of the guys who worked for her. They were all guys. All tough, some with prison tats, but all good-looking. Rapture liked her baking harem.

She beckoned impatiently toward the door in the back. “Bebé, where have you and your hermano, el buenorro, been? My best customers and you desert me. Where is the lealtad these days? Ay, the world, she is falling apart when my children starve because your wallet is too tight to buy some of my sweets.” She didn’t have kids, but it was a good line when bargaining.

Rapture had been thrown into hooking when she was sixteen, two years after coming over from Puerto Rico. Her favorite line had been, “My name be Rapture, honey. I’m so good, sugar pie, I’ll make you see God.” I think she came up with the line first and then picked her street name. I had no idea how big she’d been then, but she was large enough now to bring her chosen name to the whole world or at least an entire continent. I had a feeling she’d been close to the same big and beautiful three hundred and fifty some-odd pounds she was now as when she’d shot her pimp’s cousin at the same time she sat on her pimp’s head and suffocated him. She said they called him Tiny Tino for a reason. It was a good story and I believed it.

After two years of hooking she’d decided it was time for a career change. She loved telling her success story. It gave hope to other whores with stupid pimps, she said. Tino had a cousin who sold weapons, and he made money Tino couldn’t dream of. And he didn’t have to give blow jobs in alleys. She watched and learned and made that profit when she brought the Rapture to Tino and shot the cousin with one of his own guns. Of course, then it was her gun and that was a quicker profit than a BJ any day. Now Rapture was thirty-five and not the only gunrunner in the city, but one of the top ones. And she gave you a free cupcake with every purchase. How the hell can you beat that?

We’d left Kalakos driving the car around a few blocks until we were finished. With what I was buying, those random checks on public transportation these days would give a transit cop a heart attack and have us running before the government buried us so far under that the word “lawyer” was a myth.

She closed the door behind us and stripped off her baker’s jacket and hairnet. The last thing she’d want was the health department coming around and finding even the rats carried Uzis. She fluffed her curly black hair and pulled down a sequined tube top that Niko, Kalakos, and I all three could’ve stood in. “I had the boob job. What do you think? I have money. Why should I not give the angels a look at what they’re missing?”

They were perky, and as she was half an alphabet past a D cup, that made me both doubt gravity existed and think she had one damn talented doctor…who used concrete instead of silicone. “They’re…damn. I’ll bet men fight to the death for you when you walk down the street.” Hey, I didn’t want to get shot by my supplier. If they made her happy, good for her. For someone who sold guns and had put a few people six feet under, she wasn’t bad.

She hugged me thoroughly until my bones creaked and I was inhaling sequins. I heard the click in Niko’s throat he made when he was desperately trying not to laugh. His laughter was rare and I’d have wanted to hear it if it weren’t at my expense and would get him shot as well. Rapture let go of me, pulled up the glittering top again, and then waved her arms. “So? What is it you need? Wait. My book.” Opening the book, she flipped pages and ran a finger down.

“Ah, here. Cachorro Gruñón.” She didn’t know any of her customers’ real names in case the police ever tracked her down. She gave us code names, and I got Grouchy Puppy, as I’d started buying from her when we’d first moved to New York. I’d been seventeen. Apparently that had gotten me “Puppy.” “Grouchy” I’d earned on my own. She always tried to get me to smile. At that point I was being chased by the entire Auphe race. I didn’t have a lot to smile about.

“Yes, tsk, you take vacation? You should be low on everything. Explosive rounds. Jaivin made a good batch last night. Your usual forty?”

“Nah. Thirty should do it. They’re not quite getting it done on my current job. What I really need is about twenty grenades,” I’d want some spares around if we survived Janus. “C4 with military detonators, all you have. A grenade launcher. A little more distance than my pitching arm would be a good thing.”

Her round face beamed. “With this, I might get the butt lift too. Very popular in Brazil.” She wrote a couple of check marks in her book and then, unusually, scribbled what looked like three words. “I am sorry, Cachorro. I sold my last grenade launcher last week. Am waiting on new batch to fall off truck. But lucky, lucky you, bebé, I have something that would have you spit on that. I have a thing of such beauty. For almost a year, it sits sad and unwanted on the shelf. I should know you would be the one to buy it. To appreciate the virilidad magnifico.”

I knew a few Spanish words, but that wasn’t one of them. I glanced at Nik. “Virility,” he supplied dryly. That sounded right. If it swung a bigger metaphorical dick than a grenade launcher, bring it on.

She opened yet another door at the back of the room and shouted, “Marco, bring us the Javelin.”

That word I knew, and not in the Olympic throwing-competition category. “You have an antitank rocket?” I asked, incredulous at that as I was at the fact that her tube top was staying up.

“An antitank system.” She planted a kiss on my cheek. I could feel the thick coating of bright red lipstick. I carefully waited to wipe it off until she was focused on Niko. Do not offend the woman with the antitank system. “Your puppy brother. He has vision and like all good men knows the perfect tool for the job.”

Niko said, “You mean as a terrorist would?”

She waved her hands vigorously. “I sell to no terrorist and your brother has good heart. He doesn’t want to think so. He hides it. But one day, you will see, your brother is a hero. One day he might save the world. My abuela had the sight. Me some too. You will see.”

Before I could tell her she’d better get some glasses for that sight, as she was way off about world saving and hearts, she was shouting again. “Marco, you lazy, worthless bastard. I have the order of the week. Are you back there with the porno magazines pulling on your polla again? I told you next time I would cut it off and bake it in a turkey-apple cobbler.” That was the Thanksgiving special. “This is work time, not pervertido time.”

Marco was up for the list in less than five seconds and his belt was buckled in the wrong hole, pants bagging