“Why?”

  “Shut up.”

  They walk past yards with children’s toys, past driveways with several cars, till they finally reach a home with an old Ford in the driveway, a single, small garbage can, lace curtains, petunia beds.

  “This is it,” says Mimi. “Gotta be. Whoever lives here is old. Lonely. Female. You two get outta sight. Gimme that tape player.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m gonna lure the old lady outside, and sneak inside and steal some shit. I need money.” Mimi laughs. “Women are so stupid, they can’t resist a crying baby.”

  “But Mimi … !”

  “Can you just shut up for once? Just go hide behind that bush with Mason. Keep him quiet. Tell him it’s a spy game or something.”

  Alvin takes Mason’s hand and walks him to the bushes, where they crouch down and hide.

  Mimi puts the tape recorder inside the petunias, turns it on full volume, then runs to hide behind the old Ford, positioned so that she can sneak inside the house unseen once the lady is lured out.

  Mason’s wails fill the air and rise skyward. For a while all is quiet, even the birds stop chirping, as if to listen. Finally, there is movement at a window, a curtain pulled aside. An elderly woman comes out the door, looking for the crying baby. She follows the sound across her lawn. But there is no baby. Just the wails. She kneels down in the flower bed, forlorn. Mimi watches her from behind the car. She needs to run into the house. The woman’s back is turned. It’s the perfect moment. But something about the old lady, the soft curve of her elderly back, the way she clutches her shawl as if always cold even on such a hot day, her confusion that a baby cries and she can’t find it … Mimi is frozen.

  Finally the woman finds the tape player. Picks it up curiously. Holds it close, like a baby. Listens a while. Then shuts the tape off and tucks it gently back under the flowers, and walks slowly, sadly back to her house. Soon as she’s disappeared inside, Alvin sneaks out, retrieves his tape player and dashes out of sight.

  They continue the walk home.

  “I don’t get it,” says Alvin. “Why didn’t you do it? You had your chance.”

  “Shut up. She just seemed so sad.”

  “But … Mimi! You’re not supposed to do good things. You realize how this fucks up my paper? My whole theory hinges on …”

  Mimi glares at him. “You’ll just have to rewrite it then, won’t you?”

  Back home, Mimi sees that Mason’s shirt is covered in dirt. She pulls a clean one out of the laundry bin, and begins the struggle she’s seen her mother do so many times … . Pull off the dirty shirt, pull on the clean one. Twist the limbs into shirtsleeves. She struggles. Pauses. Looks at Mason.

  “You know what little guy? This ain’t easy.”

  The phone rings. Mimi carries Mason into the kitchen and answers.

  “Yeah.”

  “Mimi?”

  “Dad?”

  “How are you, honey?”

  “Dad … you like, haven’t called us in months.”

  “I know, I …”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Mimi …”

  “Too little too late, Daddy-o. Just tell me one thing. Why’d you take that one book.”

  “What book?”

  “The monster book. You know.”

  “What monster book?”

  “The one on the top shelf. The one we were never supposed to look at.”

  Mimi hears her father laugh.

  “What?”

  “Mimi, there is no monster book. That was just a story I’d tell you and Alvin, to scare you. I didn’t want you climbing that ladder in the library. It’s dangerous. I didn’t want you falling. I was so afraid you’d get hurt, I pretended there was something scary up there.”

  “No monster book?”

  “No, honey. Never. No monsters. I was just afraid you would fall.”

  “Oh.”

  Dead air on the line. A sense of breath.

  “So, Dad … how’s your checkout slut with all the zits?”

  “She got born again for your Daddy-o. The good Lord even cleared up her skin.”

  “Great. Congratulations. They give you like, a prize for that shit?”

  “How’s your smile?”

  “Still twisted.”

  “That’s my girl,” says Dad, lightly. Then adds, “So. When can I see you and Alvin?”

  More dead air. Less breath.

  “And Mason, Dad,” says Mimi. “Mason’s one of us now.”

  “Okay,” he sighs. “And Mason.”

  “And leave the slut at home.”

  “Deal.”

  “And Dad? Bring the monster book.”

  AND WHAT SHALL WE CALL YOU?

  by GARY PHILLIPS

  The Exeter was constructed in 1927 when this neighborhood was home to trolley car drivers and typing pool secretaries. Back when you’d find magnificent edifices in the Financial District with Ozark gray marble as part of their façades and generous use of walnut woodwork throughout.

  Reflecting that era of long-gone craft, the apartment building was soundly made of plaster and lathe walls, with oak and maple sawed and hammered and bolted down as weight-bearing beams. There was a kind of Irving Gill quality to the seven-story structure with its bank of archways on the first two floors and inset casement windows. Once Honduras mahogany had been used for the trim but that had been pried off decades ago for resale by one of the building’s many owners. This Roarke knew from official history culled from city records.

  From more recent accounts in such publications as the Coalition for Renters Rights newsletter confirmed that the true current owner, McLeash, was attempting to drive out the remaining Exeter tenants through active neglect and strategic intimidation. Even though this was still a rugged neighborhood, the urban pioneers were already tramping around the periphery in their Cordani boots and Gucci slip-ons sizing up the area for lofts and lattes.

  At the corner of the block, he noted a tall well-dressed woman walking two small dogs. The dogs seemed overly hyper.

  “Z’up,” one of the wide-set security guards said as Roarke exited his pickup and stepped toward the gated entrance. The shirt of the guard’s uniform was tail out over jeans, and the thread holding the logo patch of the service he worked for, Ajax, had partially unraveled. Ajax, Roarke had researched, was another of McLeash’s myriad holdings through dummy fronts.

  Roarke swallowed, moving aside his revulsion of the psychic rat claws that clambered over his arms and torso, the preternatural vermin rushing along his nerve lines seeking the soft meat of his eyes. It had been three days since he’d taken any Xanax or Zoloft, preferring to use the bio-feedback techniques Bouchard, the part-time guru and unlicensed body and fender man in Mar Vista, had taught him to control the bombardments to his neurotransmitters. While he could function on the drugs, there was a knife-sharpening of his reflexes provided by the unfiltered input that amped him like Barry Bonds on steroids. And he needed to be sharp and ready.

  He displayed his ID and said, “I’m here to do an inspection.”

  “You talk to the owner ’bout that?” the other guard responded. His shirt was tucked in and there was a pressed crease in his matching khakis.

  “This is not a matter of making an appointment,” Roarke answered in his mild voice, adjusting his old-fashioned black glasses. “I get in or I call the police, it’s that simple.” It was bullshit but he was hedging neither of them attended law school at night.

  “Can I see that again?” the first guard took Roarke’s Building and Safety identification and wrote down the particulars on a clipboard with lined paper. The clipboard had been leaning against a boom box on a upturned plastic milk crate. The duo had been playing a homemade rap number when Roarke arrived. When he spoke, the neatly dressed one turned the volume down. The sloppy guard handed the inspector his card holder and, looking at his companion, unlocked the entranceway.

  “All the tenants have keys to this gate?”

  The second blurted, “Sure they do.”

  Roarke reminded himself to verify this as he stepped into the gloomy hallway. Faded histories and ghostly yearnings whispered about him like a specter’s embrace. Under the stairwell there had been a knifing, the blood so old now it was just more dark stains on the worn floorboards.

  But not long ago, last week he guessed, there in the broken elevator car, there had been hot, grasping sex between two lovers. The teenaged boy effortlessly pushing the girl’s short dress over her full hips, she guiding his member past the panties purchased at Target as she roped one of her legs around his thin waist.

  Concentrating, he shunted aside the prurient spike and the other desperate revelations the walls told him. Roarke removed his fingers from the cracked, grimy plaster and asked, “Why aren’t these overhead lights on?”

  “Them tubes went out, the handyman’s going to fix that,” the first one chimed in, having picked up the cue from his partner.

  Roarke made notes on his aluminum boxed clipboard to maintain the illusion he was here to cite code violations and walked along. The two guards fell in behind him. “I know my way around,” he said, not looking back.

  “You can’t just come in here and disturb the tenants,” the neatly dressed guard admonished.

  “I suggest you call your boss and find out what it is I can and will be doing.”

  “That ain’t how it rolls,” the unkempt one said. “You don’t run us.”

  Roarke countered, “Then make the call.” He didn’t wait for a reply and started up the stairs. The second guard followed him as the first one got his cell phone out pressing numbers. Roarke didn’t for a moment believe he was phoning about procedures.

  “How many people you gonna talk to?” his handler asked.

  “How many cockroaches do you have?” Roarke asked as he pointed at several scampering along the baseboard, their antennae quivering in anticipation of finding greasy crumbs.

  The guard hovered over his shoulder as Roarke knocked on a door. Paint that didn’t match the original color had been freshly rolled on its surface to blot out graffiti.

  “Sí,” a tentative woman’s voice said from the other side.

  In Spanish, Roarke told the tenant who he was.

  “Use English,” the guard groused.

  The door opened a hair. In Spanish, again, he told the brown eye looking out who he was and showed her his credentials. The woman asked in Spanish if the guard had to be inside and Roarke told her he wouldn’t let him in.

  “What are you two jabbering about?” the guard demanded. “I have to know. You have to speak American.”

  The door was opened wider and Roarke turned to face the larger man. “She didn’t invite you inside.”

  He snorted derisively. “You ain’t stopping me.”

  “You’ve already done time for possession, Tony. What’s your probation officer going to say when I call him up and tell him you trespassed?”

  “How’d you know—” the surprised guard began, but didn’t finish.

  Digging into your opponent’s holdings unearthed a lot of errant information. Roarke stepped backward and shut the door on the guard. A blow of nausea punched him hard but he ground his teeth and hoped the discomfort didn’t contort his face. McLeash had been in this room. Not recently, but at some point in the last five years as that seemed to be how far back his ability had been able to track. Roarke had come to the Exeter after hunting through other buildings seeking an extra sense trace of the reclusive billionaire and was finally successful.

  Elmira Bustamonte worked the swing shift as a seamstress earning a piece rate. She led him quickly around the two-and-a-half rooms she was soaked $860 a month for plus utilities. This is a town where 61 percent of the residents were renters, paying an average of $1,750 a month. There were the rat droppings she constantly cleaned up in the kitchenette, and the busted hot water faucet in the closet-sized bathroom—though this was minor since the hot water had been on and off for months. There were the rust splotches spread across the ceiling like ink blots, the forever running toilet, and even part of the floor had been cut away supposedly to repair a pipe—that had been half a year ago.

  Bustamonte, being single and not having some beater sucking up extra funds to keep it running, was able to stretch her paltry wages after paying rent and buying food, to get a few rat traps and roach motels. All part of the endless tenant tango she engaged in to maintain a semblance of a home. Brave woman in a city of cobras, Roarke reflected, as they talked back in the front room. This was where he’d gotten the flash that McLeash had stood where he now stood. There wasn’t much else except, and he wasn’t sure about this as he sometimes misinterpreted his reads, but he had the impression that McLeash had a deeper connection to the Exeter than just being its owner. But what?

  “Will anything happen to improve this place?” she asked him in English.

  “There was another inspector who came here,” he declared.

  “Yes,” she admitted haltingly. “Must have been, I guess, the beginning of the hot summer we just had.”

  “You remember his name?”

  “No, but he was, you know, gordo,” she held her hands out in front of her stomach.

  “Loud man was he? Like to hear himself talk? Chewing on a cigar butt?”

  “Yes.” Her brow deepened. “He’s a friend of yours?”

  “I work with him, but he’s not my friend.”

  “Good,” she smiled. It was a nice smile.

  “Was there somebody else with him?”

  “No, he was by himself.” She stopped, studied him, then continued. “He came here to try and have sex with one of us, you know, the women renters, to trade that for him doing his job.” She crossed her arms. “I, of course, told him to go to hell.”

  He tipped his cap. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Bustamonte.” Leaving, he gave her his card and told her to call him if the security guards bothered her.

  “The one that thinks he’s going to be the next Ice Cube asked me for dates a few times. But when I kept saying no, he said I was a, you know, a flor de mal to his friend.”

  He wasn’t sure nor cared which one wanted to be a rapper but he couldn’t block the regret he felt if she was a bad flower, slang for a lesbian.

  “I’m not,” she said to what must have been a giveaway on his face.

  “It’s none of my business,” Roarke said.

  “Okay.” She didn’t break eye contact.

  He lowered his head, his cheeks warm, and gave her a slight wave. “Well, thank you for your time.” Smooth, Roarke. You’re a real Tony Stark.

  “De nada.”

  In the hallway, like a sudden blast of putrid wind, the mental surge of the rats darting about in the walls affected him violently. Those scavengers were attuned to their kind, their two-legged cousins, the fear feeders. Turning, he wasn’t surprised by the three bruisers lounging at the other end.

  “You lost, homey?” This one wore a cutoff Raiders football jersey and baggy shorts. With his close-shaved head, fake diamond-bejeweled cross on a heavy chain around his thick tatted neck and prison iron arms, he was the typical thug Roarke expected to encounter once the guard had made his call.

  “Thank you for asking, but I’m fine,” the building inspector replied blandly.

  “Yeah?” Raiders man chirped, advancing. “Well you look a little nervous to me, ese. Looks like you could use some help getting your ass out of here.”

  “‘Cause you don’t belong here bothering people,” the second tough added. She was a good-sized woman, over six feet, spiky pinkish hair streaked with orange, fatigue pants riding below her thong, strained athletic-T, street buffed with piercings from her eyebrows on down.

  “I’m doing my job.”

  “So are we, lovely,” the third hired goon intoned. He was waspish in contrast to the muscularity of the other two. His white-blond hair drooped over one brilliant blue eye, and he was attired in an Edwardian-style suit and ruffled shirt. He even extracted a mauve handkerchief from one of those frilly cuffs that he dabbed under his nose to complete the look.

  “Come on, let’s go.” Raiders man clamped a rough hand on Roarke’s thinner arm and yanked.

  Without pause, Roarke unlimbered the Taser M26 pistol from his clipboard box. He juiced 50,000 volts into his unwanted chaperone after shooting him in the leg with the tethered fishhook barb. The bruiser jiggled like a skeleton cut out in a gale, his muscles turning to mush.

  “Motherfuckah,” the thug swore, drooling and falling to the floor in convulsions.

  The big woman rushed him and Roarke threw a handful of carpet tacks he’d also brought along into her face.

  “Bitch ass punk,” she bellowed, throwing up her forearm instinctively to block the onslaught. Several tacks lodged near her eyes. “They fuckin’ burn.” She raked her face to remove them.

  Roarke stepped forward and kicked her in the stomach with his steeltoed boot as she tore away the tacks whose tips he’d coated with lye. Then he hammered the corner of his aluminum clipboard box onto her head to produce a satisfying wet smack that had her back-pedaling.

  The dandy leaped over Raiders man who was on all fours, breathing hard and struggling to rise. The Edwardian was aiming an ivory-handled five-shot .45 derringer that would turn Roarke’s skull into pulp.

  The bespectacled county employee cold-cocked the fop with the foot-long Stanley stainless steel claw pry bar he kept in a custom carry under his jean jacket. The blow opened a gash on the retro-dressed hoodlum’s temple, and he leaked crimson where he lay stunned on the floor.

  “What kind of civil servant asshole are you?” The pierced woman wiped blood from her mouth. She stood to one side of the hallway, eyes wide on Roarke.

  “Tell McLeash his platinum-plated thumb will be forcibly removed from the scale, and a proper balance achieved.”

  “The fuck you talking about?” the muscular woman exclaimed.

  “Affordable housing is for honest, hardworking people, not vampiric plutocrats.”