Game knows game, he thought.
His phone buzzed from a front pocket. It was a text from Flowers, asking where he was. Something about another Gypsy Town party and how Pete hadn’t showed either and how they’d said they were going to be there and how the Volunteers were supposed to stick together, even back here.
Jean-Jacques put his phone back into his pocket without replying. Flowers meant well. But.
The stoplight had remained stale yellow. The basketballers across the street called out to one another in thick shouts and grunts, the ball an anvil of lead in the still. A third player had joined the teens, blocking their shots and taunting at their objections, looming over them like a shadow giant. Straightaway, Jean-Jacques knew who it was. There was only one Justice.
Jean-Jacques had served with Pete Swenson for four years, yet the man’s physical presence had never normalized. Tall as an orange tree with outsize shoulders and legs long as roots, Pete wore khaki cargo pants and a short-sleeve rugby shirt. Every time he posted up one of the teens or bent over to reach for the ball, it appeared like he might fold in on himself, until he burst back up with raw muscular force. Other than a five-o’clock shadow, he still looked the part of a special operator—a low fade haircut and sideburns that barely met regs, wraparound ballistic shades propped up on his head. An old Ranger cadence entered Jean-Jacques’s mind: “I ain’t the killer, I’m the killer man’s son. So I’ll do the killing—until the killer man comes.”
“There he is.” Pete punched the basketball into the air with a fist and walked over to the chain-link fence. “Get what you needed?”
Jean-Jacques answered with his own question. “How’d you get out here?”
Pete half-smiled, half-grimaced. His dark eye blended with the night, but the other one, coral green and throbbing, pierced through it. If my family thinks I’ll radiate them, Jean-Jacques thought, they should meet this freak.
“Car service,” he said. Dabs of sweat had gathered on his forehead and under his ears and armpits. “Yellow cabs won’t come out this way, you know that?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Jean-Jacques shook his head and walked toward the car, still holding tight the box he’d secured from his cousin. Car service to Little Haiti? After hundreds of missions together and thousands of orders, he liked seeing Pete out of his element.
“Dash.” Pete called after him. “What’s a guy have to do around here to get a brew?”
Jean-Jacques shook his head again but turned around.
“How thirsty are you?”
“Very,” Pete said.
“Okay,” Jean-Jacques said. “You’ve been warned.”
Jean-Jacques got into the car and started the engine. As he reached over to open the passenger door for Pete, one of the kids playing basketball called after them.
“Superhero,” he said. Pete looked over. “Why you leave Abu Abdallah breathing?”
Pete leaned over the door frame of the car and stroked his chin. He loved answering this question for citizens more than any other. Jean-Jacques understood why. It hadn’t only been a good mission. It’d been a clean one.
“Didn’t have a gun in his hands,” Pete said. “Just a bag of his own piss.”
* * *
They drove through Little Haiti. The passenger seat belt was broken and Pete couldn’t figure it out. He knotted the strap around the buckle until it held and pumped his fist in triumph. Then he asked what it was like being home.
They were passing a bus depot Jean-Jacques remembered as a construction pit.
“Got nicer.”
“That’s good, right?” Pete looked out the window, nodding to himself. “Home should get nicer.”
“Sure.” Jean-Jacques again tongued the back of his teeth. He’d liked that pit. It’d been normal. It’d been consistent. It’d been a pit. “If you say so.”
Pete nodded again.
Jean-Jacques took them to the Basic Lounge. It was nearby enough, and he felt like fucking with Pete. The lounge had been founded with the first exodus of Haitians, the ones who’d fled the second dictator. The ones who’d arrived when Empire City still had its old name, before it became an American city-state over taxes. Jean-Jacques hadn’t spent much time there growing up, but he had made a few of its famous karaoke nights. At one, he’d received the first blow job of his life in the bathroom from an angry Cuban wife who’d caught her husband cheating. At another, he’d given the only blow job of his life to an investment banker for three hundred dollars.
The money had gone to the hospital during his mother’s initial chemo treatments. He’d told her he’d earned the money carrying groceries for white people.
Jean-Jacques didn’t tell any of that to Pete, instead choosing to wait and see how long it took the other man to realize where they were. The lounge, a quarter-full and languid on a late Sunday night, smelled of air freshener and old leather. Black-and-white photographs of poets and dancers from the Harlem Renaissance and curtains of red satin hung from the walls. Soft funk played through unseen speakers. Jean-Jacques and Pete found a booth in the corner and a middle-aged waitress with pink dreadlocks and eyelash extensions asked what their poison was.
“Two beers and two well whiskeys,” Pete said.
“I don’t want whiskey,” Jean-Jacques said. “Just a beer.”
“Wasn’t ordering for you. Super liver.” Pete turned to grin at the waitress but she was already headed toward the bar for their drinks.
“You know,” Pete continued, “I expected a bit more—well, not acknowledgment, exactly. But notice?”
“Cali’s cued to celebrity,” Jean-Jacques said. They’d spent a lot of late nights at Hollywood clubs basking in that recognition. “It’s different here.” He paused until the waitress dropped off the beers and shots and left. “Even for us.”
Pete laughed, then downed his first whiskey like it was tap water. Jean-Jacques’s stomach ached just watching it. “Maybe that’ll change when the movie comes out.”
Jean-Jacques sipped from the neck of his beer and narrowed his eyes. “Why’d you come here, man?” he asked. “I told you. I was handling family.”
“Got antsy. All the bohos were watching some peacemonger fantasy about Vietnam and a dead Kennedy.” Indoors, it was his black eye that emerged, smoldering like hot coal. The cythrax had left Pete with the most extreme case of heterochromia any doctor had ever seen. Not that he minded. It was always the second thing strangers commented on, after his height. Young women, in particular.
Pete continued. “Gypsy Town’s got some perks, but it’s not authentic. It’s not the real city.” He shrugged. “Also, got some intel for you.”
Jean-Jacques rubbed at his bald head. They’d survived the same experimental bomb, but instead of irises that exuded primal sex magic, he’d been left naked as an earthworm. No eyebrows, no nothing. He ignored the question coming up from his chest about “the real city” and instead took the bait he was supposed to, from the squad leader he’d followed into battle too many times to remember. “Intel?”
Pete leaned his long frame forward and pushed his elbows out, slipping into his command voice, terse and jumpy. It was a flaw, a goofy one. Jean-Jacques appreciated it. Kept Justice as one of them. He’d spoken with a War Department contact. Jean-Jacques’s request for a platoon in the International Legion would be denied. They wanted to keep the Volunteers united. At least for another tour. It would be important to the war effort, them fighting terror together when the movie was released. For recruitment, in particular. Which had been flagging.