A moment. His face is a strong tree in a stiff breeze. It barely moves. But I feel something pass, an animus. Bigger than Alvin but a part of him. It threatens me, yes, but it is a knife at the throat of someone else.
“Where is she?”
I don’t remember standing. I don’t remember the movement of my hands, hovering over his neck. I am trying to breathe in a downpour.
Alvin fetches against the rain-lashed window. “You touch me, I touch you.”
“Tell me about Pea. What do you want with her?”
Or maybe what I felt was Pea in trouble, thinking her way to me?
Alvin jerks his head—emphatic and yet ambiguous. He ducks under my arm and scrambles for the door.
“If you’re worried about her, ask Bobby Junior. I saw them in town this afternoon, drinking at the inn.”
We stare at each other. I am thinking of certain looks, the heat of which I avoided. I am thinking of the way that I kissed her before I pulled back, each time. I am remembering the smell of blood and the smell of saliva. The sweet peas in the garden, and the watermelon.
Alvin takes one step into the rain. “If you don’t help me,” he says, “you’re killing me.”
Without a touch. And the one thing I will never do is kill again.
3
Pea never guessed.
I wondered why I didn’t feel more guilty about all the lies I had to tell, but I supposed I was busy enough trying to save her from my colleagues without bothering with the finer moral quandaries. She knew that I didn’t approve of her execution of justice. She knew that I could feel her enemies when we touched. She knew, even if I didn’t, that I had drowned in her; drowned as quickly as that boy I had let fall into the river when we were twelve.
Pea didn’t know all of me. I certainly didn’t know all of her. Knowledge, it turned out, was a red herring.
Drifting in twilight sleep all night while we pressed every possible inch of skin to the other’s body, then we shifted to touch more, breathing and sweating and fucking and sleeping and waking up to find her so unexpectedly still there—that was the thing.
Leaving her, “I have work, I’ll be back in the evening, at 8 p.m. sharp, no I don’t care if you won’t be back then, I’ll wait, sweet Pea, I’ll wait—”
I did wait, and I did go to work, after a fashion.
It occasionally felt wrong, how often I would watch her when she didn’t know I was looking. But it also thrilled me, it made me love her more and in ways I would never be able to tell her—to see the woman whose smile to discover me beside her in the morning was as sweet as jaggery, calmly discussing knife thrusts and mob justice with Red Man or Russian Vic. That those expressions could colonize and transform the same beautiful features made her seem supernatural to me, a Kali in truth.
And when we lay together at night, that secret knowledge of her gave me a power I could only express in how much I left unsaid. The other ways I found to say it. We read each other in light reflected from unshed tears—and yes, I saw more than she did, but I didn’t see enough.
I never went to headquarters. The uniformed cops were almost entirely white, and they didn’t take kindly to colored rookies like me walking their halls. Though I of all people could tell if eyes had followed me there, the policy was for undercover cops to make reports in a diner two blocks away: Sal’s Sunshine, integrated—at least to friends of cops—and home to the greasiest burgers and soggiest french fries south of Houston.
I always got the egg cream, and Finn always made a point to say it was his five-year-old’s favorite too.
“Dev, you all right? You look sick, wrung out. You know most of that bootleg liquor they sling at the Pelican ain’t safe. Might be drinking arsenic for all you know. Gotta take it easy, kid.”
“Haven’t been there as much recently,” I said, taking a spoon of the sweet foam head and sucking until the only taste left on my tongue was chocolate and the metal tang of aluminum alloy.
Finn, older than me, but young enough to still feel the hunger for that break-or-die snap of a big case, gave me a long look over his cherry cola. He’d dumped a solid slug of whiskey in it from his hip flask, as always. Plenty of cops had kept drinking straight through Prohibition, though few with quite so much brio as Finn, who used to bring whiskey in canteens to interrogations and offer sips to the detainees. He had an ex-wife who hated him with a passion that jolted me every time I touched him in passing. I never asked him about it. We all had our dirty seams. Places an enterprising rookie cop could stick the crowbar and apply pressure. But I hadn’t seen any need for it.
“So you really have shacked up with that old lady? The hatchet girl? What do they call her?”
“Phyllis LeBlanc,” I said. I took a sip of the egg cream and a little dribbled down my chin. I put it down, very carefully.
“Victor’s angel,” Finn said, and banged the heel of his palm on the table. “Well, isn’t that just peachy. Look at you, with some pretty white girl who could just as easily cut your balls off as kiss you.”
She isn’t white, I thought, but I did not say it, because you didn’t tell your assassin lover’s biggest secret to your cop boss.
“She doesn’t
