“They agreed,” you say, before Victor can spit something out past his rage.
“And I changed my mind, angel. I don’t appreciate rogue knives. Never know who they might cut?”
“Someone is going to notice they’re gone. They’re respected businessmen up in Harlem, how do you expect—”
And Victor, he just waves his hand. Lucky for you, his rage has passed.
“They’re just a pair of niggers in nice suits. Police wouldn’t do a thing even if I asked them to. Now somebody get me a goddamn bourbon. You do it, angel, you know just how I like it.”
And you do.
The hands that hold our gift chip ice as good as they throw knives.
The rot settles in, then, settles in for good, but power is a fine perfume.
You won’t smell it for years.
“She’s waking up. Can you hear me, darling?”
I heard the dentist first. I wished I couldn’t. I took a breath and then attempted, with some small success, to push the air through rough vocal chords.
“Good girl, Phyllis. Open your eyes, that’s it.”
Victor was here, too. He was no harpist in heaven, and I discovered an ache, in and among the others that had gathered in celebration of my unexpected return, because he had bothered to come and that meant he still intended me to be of use to him.
I squinted up at the two hovering faces—one dark-haired, one crowned with tarnished silver—and thought of many questions, none of which I could, or would, ask.
The dentist rubbed my fingers between his hands, warm and treacherously comforting. “Darling, they say you’ll be all right.”
“Whoopee.”
Victor frowned. “The woman who shot you…”
I stared at him.
“Recognize her?” he tried again. “Your job, angel. That mark you didn’t want to kill nearly killed you. And got away. Think you ought to…”
I couldn’t help it: “Kill her?” I raised an eyebrow, since I couldn’t even manage to tilt my head.
He shrugged. “When you’re healed up. Red Man will look for her till then. My angel needs…”
“A trip to the country?”
Victor grinned like that was a good joke. “Revenge, dollface.”
“Crickets, Victor. Clean air. A whole lot of nothing to do, that sounds good right about now. Shit, I hurt.”
The dentist squeezed my hand. “Should I call the nurse? You can have more morphine.”
“Outside, Marty. Your gal and I have something to discuss.”
The dentist’s head left my field of vision and a door closed softly. I grimaced, and Victor caught it. “Bit of a limp fish, that man of yours.”
“Not in bed.”
That made him laugh. I’d been good at that in the old days, when he and I had spent years building the legend of Victor’s angel of justice. I’d reveled in the messy grit of it; I had killed with the passion of the newly converted, and the vision of a Harlem girl unexpectedly divested of obscurity.
“Get healthy, Phyllis. Get strong. But then you’re going to kill that woman, ’cause no one’s going to talk about Victor’s angel the way they’re talking now. You’re my girl.”
“Your knife,” I said.
His smile was crooked, fond. “With the killing edge.”
“What if your knife got lost, Victor?”
He rested a veined hand on my collarbone, where the bandages began, and traced its length. “I’d look for it. This doesn’t have to be complicated. We’ve done pretty well by each other, over the years.”
My hands jumped.
“There’s a copper out there who wants to see you.”
I squinted at him. “What’s the matter, they stopped taking your money?”
“When someone gets gunned down on Bleecker, forms gotta get filed. You don’t know anything, right? Didn’t even see the dame?”
“Where’s Dev? Or Tamara? They saw her.”
Victor gave me a long look. “Not an integrated hospital, Phyllis. Have to save the family visits for when you get out of here.”
I wondered what he meant by that, just like he wanted me to. A hundred blunt needles, iron-hot and intermittently electrified, bored into my right side. Disordered with pain, I nearly called his bluff—so my great-grandmother was a slave and my grandaddy was a sharecropper and sure as shit I grew up in Harlem, Victor, I’ve always been your Negro angel—but that wasn’t how we played the game. Flat on my back in a hospital bed wasn’t the time to change the rules. And I remembered—or someone had reminded me—of a dinner, an ambush, and the forgotten Negro blood that had baptized the Pelican.
Someone knocked and opened the door. The cop—young, and not one I recognized, which meant he might be one of Commissioner Valentine’s rotating army of squeaky-clean recruits—nodded at Victor and pulled up a chair.
“Just a few minutes, ma’am,” he said. “You can wait outside if you like, Mr. Dernov.”
Victor smiled. The cop pretended not to notice. “Got places to be, anyhow. Rest up, Phyllis. I’m sure this fine officer of the law will keep his questions to the point.”
The cop frowned after him. I decided he was either clean or on the take and unhappy about it. Either way, dangerous. I affected unthreatening weakness, which wasn’t difficult.
“Your full name is Phyllis LeBlanc, correct?” he said.
I nodded. A little joke, that name. Phyllis Green only existed north of 110th Street. I wondered when Gloria would start to worry about me. Knowing Gloria, it would probably be two weeks before she even bothered to knock on my door, and thank goodness.
“And you were shot in the chest at approximately 10:46 p.m. yesterday night outside of the Pelican nightclub on Bleecker Street?”
“Looks like it.”
He leaned so far forward I couldn’t see past his furrowed eyebrows, which met in the middle. “Did you see who shot you, Miss LeBlanc?”
“I was too busy almost dying.”
“You’re awfully glib about something this serious.”
“Oh, I’m serious as a bullet. The trouble is, one went through me. Yesterday. So if you don’t mind getting to the point?”
The kid blushed purple and quickly pulled a photograph from a folder. I had schooled my expression into exhausted ignorance, and so just managed to maintain the pose at the sight, though my pulse jumped hard and I felt faint
