Midnight Taxi Tango Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  HALF-RESURRECTION BLUES

  “Simply put, Daniel José Older has one of the most refreshing voices in genre fiction today.”

  —Saladin Ahmed, author of Throne of the Crescent Moon

  “A damn good read . . . a hard-core, hard-driving fantasy. . . . Daniel José Older takes aim at a whole bunch of familiar targets and hits them hard in new and interesting ways.”

  —Simon R. Green, New York Times bestselling author of

  Tales from the Nightside

  “Smart and gripping, funny and insightful. It kicks in the door, waving the literary .44. Be warned: this man is not playing.”

  —Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver

  “Vividly imagined and rendered . . . this is a fantastic beginning to what will surely be a fantastic series.”

  —Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award–winning author of

  Men We Reaped

  “Older has crafted a compelling new world. . . . Half-Resurrection Blues is not just a daring new mode of ghost-detective story; it’s also a courageous effort to celebrate the diverse voices that surround us.”

  —Deji Bryce Olukotun, author of Nigerians in Space

  “Noir for the Now: equal parts bracing, poignant, compassionate, and eerie. A swinging blues indeed.”

  —Nalo Hopkinson, Andre Norton Award–winning author of

  Sister Mine

  “Fresh and richly envisioned, a gritty and genuine urban setting.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Delightful and witty . . . a fun, smart bit of paranormal noir.”

  —Booklist

  PRAISE FOR

  DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER AND SHADOWSHAPER

  “The strength of Older’s tale is in his meticulous attention to the details. . . . A world that will stay with readers long after the last page.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “One of my favorite new voices.”

  —Anika Noni Rose, star of The Princess and the Frog

  and Dreamgirls

  “Magnificent.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Dazzlingly inventive . . . funny, frightening, and always surprising.”

  —Sarah McCarry, author of All Our Pretty Songs

  Also by Daniel José Older from Roc Books

  HALF-RESURRECTION BLUES

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  First Printing, January 2016

  Copyright © Daniel José Older, 2016

  Modified portions of this book originally appeared on Tor.com as short stories “Anyway: Angie,” “Kia and Gio,” and “Ginga,” copyright © Daniel José Older, 2014, 2015

  “Sus ojos se cerron” copyright © SADAIC, 1935

  “Las cuarenta” copyright © SADAIC, 1937

  “Las puñalada” copyright © SADAIC, 1951

  “A la luz del candil” copyright © SADAIC, 1927

  Map by Cortney Skinner

  Frontispiece illustration by John Jennings

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Roc and the Roc colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about Penguin Random House, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-16681-3

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Daniel José Older Books

  Also by Daniel José Older

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Brooklyn Map

  Epigraph

  CYCLE ONE: RED SQUARE GINGA

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CYCLE TWO: BURN THE WHOLE SHIT DOWN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CYCLE THREE: INTO THE UNDERGROUND

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CYCLE FOUR: THE MAD ARCHITECT’S LIGHTHOUSE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Nastassian, my love

  Convertir el ultraje de los años

  en una música . . .

  Convert the outrage of the years

  into a music . . .

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “Arte Poética”

  CYCLE ONE

  RED SQUARE GINGA

  Con el pucho de la vida apretado entre los labios,

  la mirada turbia y fría, un poco lerdo el andar,

  dobló la esquina del barrio y, curda ya de recuerdos,

  como volcando un veneno esto se le oyó cantar:

  Vieja calle de mi barrio donde he dado el primer paso,

  vuelvo a vos, gastado el mazo en inútil barajar,

  con una llaga en el pecho, con mi sueño hecho pedazos,

  que se rompió en un abrazo que me diera la verdad.

  With the cigarette stub of life pressed between his lips,

  his gaze turbulent and cold, his stride a little off-kilter,

  he turned a corner of the barrio, drunk on memories,

  and like an eruption of venom, his song rang out:

  Old streets of my neighborhood, where I took my first steps,

  I return to you, my whole deck wasted with a single useless shuffle,

  my chest on fire, dreams torn to pieces,

  broken by an embrace that gave me only the truth.

  “Las cuarenta”

  tango, 1937

  Francisco Gorrindo

  CHAPTER ONE

>   Carlos

  What song is that, man?”

  I don’t move. The rumble of this ambulance’s diesel engine fills the air again; the park comes into focus around us, streetlamps fighting off the gloom. If I hold still, if Victor shuts the fuck up, if nothing happens for another few seconds, then maybe I can sink back in, grasp hold of that fragile thread of a melody, the line of her face fading into the darkness.

  “Carlos?”

  I rub my eyes and reach for the coffee cup on the dashboard. The thread is gone; Sasha is gone. Gone for good. “It’s nothing, man. Just some song I heard.” The coffee is lukewarm but strong as hell. Reality settles in fully around me. “Can’t seem to shake it, is all. You get a job?”

  Victor shakes his head. “Nah, man, go back to sleep.” The ambulance radio crackles to life, a routine announcement that seat belts save lives, and then all we hear is the diesel putt-putt-putt and occasional snores from the passenger compartment, where Victor’s partner, Del, is laid out.

  “Look,” I say, “if some shit don’t go down by four, I’m out.”

  Victor nods. “I’m telling you, it’s been every night, C. Without fail.”

  “Maybe accidents do take vacations after all.”

  “Carlos, I’ve been doing this job for twelve years and I ain’t never seen a pattern like this. You know I don’t even go in for all that woo-woo shit either. I don’t get involved in your whatever spirit-hunting weirdo life. No offense.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “And I ain’t never come to you ’bout some shit in all the time I known you.” He pulls out a cigarette and starts smoking it out the window.

  Around us, Von King Park glowers with late-night shadows and a few scattered lights. The metal bars of a playground swing glint out of the gloom, a silhouetted pyramid against the cloudy sky. Darkened brownstones peer from behind the trees on either side.

  Maybe there is something lurking out there. I get the faintest tinge of it—a rude kind of itch—but my cluttered-up memories make it hard to think clearly.

  Anyway, if I say anything right now, Victor will interpret it as encouragement to speak more, so I light a Malagueña and glower along with the park.

  Victor lets out a menthol-laced cloud and shakes his head. “Last night, a hipster on a bike got completely destroyed by a passing garbage truck. I mean, we were picking up pieces of him blocks away. The night before it was a prisoner that broke out the precinct over there, made it halfway across the street before the desk officer popped him, and then he got sideswiped by a motorcycle. The dude got dragged like four blocks, and when we got to him, his back was hamburger, Carlos. Hamburger.”

  I just grunt.

  “Wednesday it was the suicide. That was on the far corner of the park over there. Jumped from the roof of that brownstone and lived, man. We had to decompress him though, full-on tension pneumo, tubed that ass and hauled him to Bellevue. Died in surgery.”

  “Damn.” I have no idea what Victor’s going on about, but all medical jargon aside, he’s right. Three apparently unrelated gory deaths in a four-block radius is the kinda thing that puts me to work. He rattles off a few more while I smoke and ponder patterns and, inevitably, the past . . .

  “Carlos?”

  “Yeah, man?”

  “You’re humming again.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like, while I’m talking.” Victor narrows his eyes at me as I sit up and rub my face.

  “Shit, man. Sorry.”

  “It’s cool. I know you’re not used to the nightlife. Anyway, they started calling the place Red Square on the strength of all this. And I’m just saying, seems like the kinda thing . . . you might know something about.”

  Vic’s never known how to talk about me being half dead. It’s not his fault—I’ve never come out and said it to him. But a gray pallor covers me like a layer of dust, and my skin is cold to the touch; my heart rate never surpasses a melancholy stroll. Plus I deal with ghosts. In fact, I’m employed by them: the New York Council of the Dead, a sprawling, incomprehensible bureaucracy, sends me to clean up any messy irregularity in the rigid, porous borderlines between life and death. I mean, since I’m a walking messy irregularity myself, I guess it makes sense the Council’d use me as their cleanup man, but truth is, it gets lonely.

  Especially recently.

  A whiny bachata song explodes out of Victor’s belt. He curses, his belly shoved against the steering wheel as he squirms into what must be some kind of yoga pose to dig out his phone.

  “Ay, shut the fuck up with that yadda-yadda horseshit,” Del hollers from the back. Del is like eight feet tall with locks down to his ass. He’s from Grenada, but he got hit by a school bus in the nineties and has been speaking with a thick Russian accent ever since. When he gets really worked up, his brain clicks fully over into Russian—some shit the neuroscientists of the world are still going nuts trying to figure out.

  Mostly people try to be really nice to him.

  “Sorry, man!” Victor yells, cradling the flip phone against his face. “Hello? . . . Uh, yeah, hang on.” He hands me the phone. “It’s for you, man. Some chick.”

  Sasha.

  The thought wreaks havoc on my slow-ass heart for a half second, and then I mentally clobber it into submission. Of course it’s not Sasha. There’s eighty million reasons for it not to be Sasha, least of which being how the fuck would she have Victor’s number and know I was with him? And why would she care? She walked out on me with no forwarding address, barely recovered from a nasty demon possession and pregnant with my child. And now all I have is a Sasha-shaped hole in my chest and a song I can’t stop humming.

  I mean, I did kill her brother. I was in no place to try to get her to stay. And still . . .

  “Carlos?”

  I have to stop disappearing from the world like this. I ignore Vic’s raised eyebrow, take the phone, and say hello into it.

  “Tell your buddy if he refers to me as ‘some chick’ ever again, he’ll be driving his own ass to the ER so they can extract his nutsack from his mouth.”

  “Hi, Kia.” Kia is sixteen and will probably rule the world one day. For now, though, she runs my friend Baba Eddie’s botánica. Started on the register, selling amor sin fin and espanta demonio herbal mixtures, statues of saints, and beaded necklaces. Then she took over the books, which were a disaster, and, without bothering to ask Baba Eddie, she set up an online store and proceeded to build what appears to be a small spiritual-goods empire—one she rules with an iron fist—and all as an after-school job.

  “You called?”

  “Isn’t it a school night? What are you doing up at four a.m.?”

  “Returning your phone call.”

  “That was like eight hours ago!”

  “Alright, man. I’ll talk to you later then.”

  “Wait—you know anything about the park over on Marcy?”

  “Know anything about it? I know a buncha motherfuckas been gettin’ got there recently. Usedta be my stomping grounds for a while, then I moved on. Is that where you are right now, C? You might wanna not be there.”

  “I’m alright. Anything else?”

  “My girl Karina babysits a whole boatload of little white kids at that park. You want me to ask her about it?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I’ma see her at capoeira tomorrow. Maybe I’ll swing through with her after.”

  The radio crackles, and Victor picks up the mic. “Five-seven X-ray, send it over.”

  “Be careful out there,” Kia says.

  Victor puts on his seat belt and cranes his head toward the back. “Del, we got a job.”

  “Morgala vikalyu, padla!”

  • • •

  “It’s been like three weeks now,” a little Humpty-Dumpty-looking middle-aged man in a bathrobe tells us. “I been coughing
and hacking, but this is different.”

  Del towers over the guy, arms akimbo, perpetual frown deeper than usual. “You’ve been coughing for three weeks, yes?” He says it like he’s about to launch into an eighty-thousand-page dissertation about peasants and vodka. “And now you decide for to call nine-one-one, why?”

  “Well, tonight I coughed up something different. You want to see?”

  “I really do not want to see this thing,” Del says, but the little oval-shaped dude is already rummaging around a pile of used tissues and medicine vials on his coffee table.

  Victor copies down the guy’s basic information at the kitchen table. I’m sitting across from him trying not to gape. “Is this normal?” I whisper. “People call you for this shit?”

  He peers over his dollar-store reading glasses at me for a hard second, then gets back to writing.

  “Here it is!” the guy exclaims cheerfully. Then he erupts into a hacking fit. He passes a plastic Tupperware container to Del, who gingerly takes it in a gloved hand and peers in. He scowls and tips it toward us just enough for me to see a tennis-ball-sized clump of tangly brown hair.

  “The fuck?” I say before I can stop myself.

  The patient shrugs. “I know, right?”

  Victor shrugs too, and then both radios in the room burst into excited, static-laced growls.

  “Unit with a message, please repeat your assigned number and location. Unit with a message, please re—” Another desperate scramble of static and yelling cuts off the dispatcher. Victor and Del both furrow their brows and turn up their radios at the same time.

  I hear the words “forthwith” and “imminent arrest” and then more static comes in. The dispatcher releases an angry tone over the airwaves and yells at the units to stop stepping over one another.

  I stand up. “What is it?”

  Victor shakes his head. “Sounds like they’re calling for backup.”

  “Marcy and Greene! Marcy and Greene!” the radio screams. “Forthwith! We have an imminent cardiac arrest. I need medics. I need backup. We about to roll.”

  Victor and I lock eyes. “The park,” I say.

  He nods. “Go. We gotta wrap this up.”