The hazy summer sun found her walking the streets, sleepless. Two in the morning was too late to go knocking on familiar doors, too much of a burden to put on anybody, so she had spent the night wandering to stay awake and watching a nonstop mental replay of the shooting.
Arthur was worried that someone would come for him. Or for the phone, or whatever was on the phone. The man at the door, the cadaver in black who she mentally dubbed “the missionary,” had known Arthur. But Arthur didn’t know him. What did he call Arthur? “Four-Nineteen”? And what had happened in Philadelphia? He’d mentioned over dinner that he’d just come back from a business trip, but he didn’t say where. Arthur never liked talking about his job and she didn’t press.
And then the missionary had calmly stood over Arthur’s dead body, opened up a doctor’s bag, taken out a Polaroid, and started photographing his bookshelves. She couldn’t begin to explain that.
Seelie’s left hand rummaged in her jeans pocket. Her fingertips found a tiny bend of hard metal, dull with age and wear. She fished it out. The little race car, a token from a Monopoly set, caught the sunlight’s gleam in its tarnish.
She’d had nightmares when she was small. Screaming, cold-sweat terrors, night after night. She was also the kind of precocious kid who haunted libraries, living in the adult stacks and devouring every book that caught her eye. The Art of Lucid Dreaming offered her a solution if she was willing to work at it, a method to take control of her dreams, to banish the monsters that tormented her, to build a sanctuary in the land of sleep.
For that she needed a token, a physical object to remind her of when she was dreaming, to break a nightmare’s spell. It could have been anything; she wasn’t even sure, now, why she picked the race car. But she’d carried it in her pocket for half a decade, long enough that it was part of her, and she’d checked it diligently since fleeing Arthur’s apartment—hoping that this was just a nightmare and soon it’d be over and everything would be fine.
No such luck. She was wide awake.
She weighed her options. Going to the police wasn’t one of them. What was more believable: that a phantom assassin had come to Arthur’s door and murdered him in the middle of the night? Or that they got drunk on red wine, had a lovers’ spat, and she shot him herself? She knew what she would think if she were a cop. Even if they believed her, there was her legal status to think about.
Seventeen-year-old runaways didn’t get released on their own recognizance. They got held by child protective services and handed over to their grateful parents.
She would eat a bullet before she ever let that happen again.
As long as she stayed away from Arthur’s condo, or any of the places he used to take her, she’d be free and clear. She was anonymous now, faceless in a growing crowd on the summer streets, one of eight million. That didn’t buy her answers, but it did buy her some breathing room. Besides, she had a prior appointment to keep.
The Q-line train smelled like dirty socks, a mildew odor that percolated in the trapped heat. A bead of sweat trickled down Seelie’s spine, leaving a damp streak along the soft cotton of her T-shirt as she clung to a steel bar and rode with the curves of the track. It dropped her off in Alphabet City.
Back before her time, this stretch of town had been a war zone. Progress and gentrification gently pushed the war back, replacing crack dens with jazz clubs and coffee shops and organic grocery stores. The street still looked a little sketchy down by Avenue D, and she kept her head on a well-trained swivel as she walked in the shadows of the projects. Nobody hassled her today. She turned left past the Royals Chicken, air thick with the aroma of frying fat and grease, and climbed a short flight of steps. Soon she was standing at the end of a sweltering hallway, walls caked in peeling eggshell white, knocking on Ducky’s apartment door.
Amber opened up. She was Ducky’s girlfriend, or common-law wife, or ex, depending on who asked and what day it was. She’d gotten her everything pierced; rings lined her bottom lip, more along her septum, and she swung enough heavy metal in her ears to weigh down an elephant. She looked at Seelie with bloodshot eyes, then glanced past her shoulder.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Seelie said.
“Just you?”
“It’s always just me.”
She checked again, just to be sure, then waved Seelie inside.
Ducky’s kitchenette had been built sometime in the forties. His furniture was from a seventies garage sale. Their quasi-roommate Dee sprawled on a deflated orange and brown flower-print couch, arms spread like she was ready for a cross, eyes rolled to heaven. Seelie wasn’t actually sure if she went by “Dee” or just the initial D. Dee was always too faded to talk to, and Seelie didn’t care enough to find out. The television was on, some preacher claiming he could heal the sick and work miracles, and the screen offered up a big golden 1-800 number to buy your very own divinely blessed prayer water.
“Didn’t that guy get busted by a reporter or something?” Seelie said.
Amber was flipping bolts and pulling a security chain tight. She looked back over her shoulder and squinted at the grainy, bulky TV set.
“Huh. Yeah. Guess God forgave him.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Ducky! You got company!”
Ducky emerged from the bedroom in frayed jeans and a studded belt, looking like a rocker past his prime. Tribal tattoos curved along his bare chest, rising in black waves over the bumps of his rib cage. He rubbed his eyes, one foot still in dreamland, and gave a half-hearted wave.
“Seelie, hey.” He looked to Amber. “Do I smell breakfast?”
“Nope,” Amber said.
“Could I smell breakfast? C’mon, babe, I’m dying here.”
“I didn’t tell you to stay up until four in the morning, playing video games and getting blazed.” Amber sighed and relented. “I’ll see what we’ve got. Think we’ve got some eggs that aren’t growing fuzz yet. Seelie? You want?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“You here for the usual?” Ducky asked her.
“The tried and true.”
He puttered back into the bedroom. She saw his shadow crouched on a span of dirty carpet, fiddling with the dial of a combination lock. She kept her distance, equal parts respect and caution; never a good idea to play with a drug dealer’s sense of security, and she knew Ducky stashed a loaded shotgun under his bed.
“You know anything about phones?” she asked, calling across the threshold.
“Like what?”
“Like how to get them unlocked when they don’t belong to you.”
“Nah,” Ducky said. “Might have a guy for that, though. Hold up a sec.”
She stopped breaking his concentration and idly watched the preacher on TV. He was trying to convince an old woman to climb out of her wheelchair and walk. Seelie gave her fifty-fifty odds.
“Hey,” Dee said. Seelie glanced at her. Dee was still sprawled on the sofa, pupils dilated, riding a wave of chemical bliss.
“Yeah?”
“They cut it off yet?”
Seelie’s eyebrows lifted. “Excuse me?”
Dee’s dangling hand pointed a limp index finger. She flopped it around like a dying fish.
“You know,” she said. “It.”