It wasn’t long before Birdie found the other items on the list.

  VI.

  Birdie had already hit several stops along the number 75, but thus far come up empty.

  The crosstown, which ran from the Plaza up along Ramsdale Hill, then wandered down through the River Market before descending into the uproarious West Bottoms typically grabbed up the folks who were either too drunk or too broke to make it home otherwise. White folks dubbed it “The Gambler’s Taxi,” but the coloreds who worked the twenty-four-hour bars and restaurants along the line called it “The Underground Railroad” on account of the fact that it ran all night.

  Birdie yanked the signal cord, got off and walked the short distance to the top of Ramsdale Hill where she slid into a doorless phone booth that squatted beneath a neon sign that read: FREDONIA AUTO MECHANICALS.

  The night air crawled in off the river.

  Birdie could feel the stink of rotting wood and rusted steel hanging heavy against her skin like a sheet of worn gauze that blurred the world around her into soft focus. Birdie’s eyes followed the slope of the hillside down towards a dented breadbox masquerading as a small series of shotgun apartments, one of which belonged to Hamilton Tate, the doorman from her building.

  This was her last stop.

  From Birdie’s vantage point, it was easy enough for her to see Tate’s Buick Regal parked on the gravel beside the building. She reached into the left pocket of her raincoat and fingered the disintegrator pistol, and felt it hum beneath her fingertips like a jar full of angry yellow jackets.

  In her right pocket, Birdie felt that other thing that she’d discovered in the Alienist’s lair: a vial of icy green liquid that, even now, hours after she’d stolen it, remained cold to the touch.

  Birdie tightened her grip on that Pyrex vial, then settled her weight against the glass as she undid the cork and hinge. She watched carefully, half expecting a mist of emerald green vapor to escape into the air the way it did in children’s cartoons, but there was nothing; just the smell of fresh-cut grass, salt and ashes. Birdie screwed her eyes shut and swallowed just as she’d seen McClellan do on her first trip into the abyss.

  The Extract went down smooth enough.

  Slowly, Birdie opened her eyes and watched as the world caught fire. She felt dizzy; felt the ground go liquid beneath her feet. She moved to steady herself and heard a loud crash, realizing that she’d just punched a hole through the booth’s glass.

  Birdie checked her hand and forearm for cuts, but there weren’t any. Nary a scratch, scrape or slice of any kind. Instead, her skin appeared to glow, the soft pastels of her everyday life lost beneath a tumultuous sea of vibrant neon green.

  Birdie looked closer at the palm of her hand and saw stars. Sparks of electricity that moved through her body, dancing the jitterbug as they passed from cell to cell, changing her. Birdie rubbed her hands together as if to warm them, and giggled as current leapt from one fingertip to the next, accompanied by the sharp smell of ozone. She craned her neck and looked up.

  Birdie knew that the stars were the same ones she had always known, the same gleaming jewels that she had lain under as a little girl. And yet, for the first time in her life, those lights seemed to be infused with an intelligence all their own, a spirit focused solely upon her.

  Birdie grinned, then ran her tongue over her teeth.

  There were no words.

  The cleaning woman took a black cotton handkerchief out of her pocket and tied it over her nose and mouth. With her long black coat, stage robber’s mask, and the gun in her pocket, the housekeeper thought she might look a bit like some desperado from the Old West.

  Birdie tensed the muscles in her legs, then leapt into the air, straight through the roof of the phone booth like a V-2 rocket, watched as the earth fell away beneath her the way it might in some grasshopper’s dream, there one moment and gone the next.

  Seconds later, Birdie landed with a crunching thud.

  She had come down directly beside that black Buick, missing the right front fender by less than a quarter-inch. Legs crouched as she hit the ground, Birdie reached out to steady herself, inadvertently denting the Buick’s fender with the fingertips of her outstretched hand.

  Rising from the ground to her full height, Birdie wondered if this was how he felt. The Alienist: his veins so full of unearthly fire as if he had become a new thing entirely, a creature wholly apart from the everyday world.

  Nearby, a pack of dogs whimpered and howled.

  Birdie felt drunk as she shambled towards the back door of the building, struggling to come to terms with the changes moving through her body. The cleaning woman reached out and jiggled the knob, but it was locked. She squeezed the doorknob and felt it come off in her hands, not that that made the door any easier to open. Annoyed, Birdie gave the door a little kick and it shattered like porcelain under the weight of an anvil.

  Within, Birdie found a dimly lit shotgun hallway, at the far end of which hung a lazy, half-dead light bulb that illuminated the space in a sickly offwhite glow the color of spoiled margarine. To either side of the dingy corridor, that nasty yellow warmth revealed about a dozen wood-shuttered doors. The wood shutters were a cheap form of air conditioning in summer and let the warm air move from one apartment to the next while keeping the bugs out and maintaining some degree of privacy for those inside. Birdie could hear dozens of voices coming from behind those doors, any one of which might have been Hamilton’s. Even getting this far hadn’t been easy. The fact was: it would have been difficult under even the best of circumstances. But, as it stood, Birdie had not been entirely without resources. She had a devil on her shoulder: one determined to point her in the right direction.

  But which? she wondered.

  She couldn’t very well just go kicking down every damned door, could she? She knew if someone had ever come busting in on her daddy’s house, her old man would’ve grabbed up his shotgun lickety-split.

  Bang! No questions asked.

  It wouldn’t do.

  Slowly, delicately, Birdie made her way down the hall; putting an ear to first one door and then the next, hoping to hear a familiar voice behind one of them. Instead, moving from door to door, all she heard most often were bursts of laughter and snippets from the same two or three radio programs playing over and over.

  Frustrated, Birdie approached a shuttered door that, unlike the others, hadn’t been secured from the inside with an eyehook. Birdie reached out to steady that door and keep it from banging against the moldings but, still somewhat unfamiliar with the physics of her altered body, she missed the handle and accidentally let her fingers graze the interior door.

  And there, inside her mind, Birdie could see it all, the images flickering past like a silent movie projected on some great, bright movie screen. There was Hamilton Tate, pacing back and forth with a half-empty beer bottle in hand. Behind him, a second figure—a white man—lumbered past, restlessly shadowing Tate’s movements, urging him to calm down. At the back of the room, a familiar figure hunched awkwardly in a broken down rocking chair: the same Frankenstein’s monster she’d met in the bar.

  Ruby’s bodyguard: Mr. Darrell James.

  Birdie jerked her hand away from the door, then gritted her teeth beneath her makeshift mask. Running on something deeper than instinct now, she kicked hard and watched as the door splintered to woodchips.

  “Evening, boys,” Birdie said, not caring one iota what her voice might sound like behind that scrap of black cloth. “Anybody want to tell me what the hell y’all done gone and gotten yourselves messed up in here?”

  Not surprisingly, the moment was rather awkward.

  Hamilton Tate had just managed to raise a bottle of beer to his lips when the door vanished. A split second later and that malt liquor had spilled all over the front of his shirt, staining his tan wool pants a deep shade of brown. The white man, the one in the pork pie hat, was unfamiliar to the cleaning woman and had his back turned at the moment Birdie kicked in the door—and as for that big black Frankenstein’s monster?

  He was still right where Birdie had sensed he would be, sitting in that broken down chair on the far side of the room, pants legs flooding way up around his calves while a pair of mismatched socks drooped ’round his ankles.

  The monster had a big, fat revolver pointed straight at Birdie’s head.

  A dead awkward moment.

  No one had time to say shit as the first shot rang out, Frankenstein having pulled the trigger without the slightest hesitation.

  Birdie couldn’t see the bullet—not exactly. But her extended sense of self covered the distance between her and the gun in a number of ways that made sight nearly redundant. She felt heat from the minuscule explosion as the hammer slammed against the firing pin … sensed the minute changes in air pressure as the spiraling slug left the chamber, closing the distance between them at roughly nine hundred feet per second.

  Plenty of time, it seemed, to fling herself out of the bullet’s path and deeper into the room where she collided with the nameless white man, tossing him into Tate with the force of a catapult.

  As Birdie caught her balance, the two men thudded hard into a nearby wall. As the second shot rang out from Frankenstein’s pistol, Birdie’s senses continued to perform, instinctively tracing the next bullet’s trajectory as it lodged in a cabinet several feet behind her.

  Finally the sound of gunshots caught up with her perceptions. The time between gunshots had been seconds. A few moments more and another gun entered the developing equation of violence.

  The white stranger had a Colt .45 with a stock grip. He turned to fire his first shot in tandem with Frankenstein’s third volley, the two bullets due to intersect less than an inch from the cleaning woman’s buzzing, thrumming heart.

  Hamilton Tate screamed like a chorus girl, as he tried to hide his head beneath a pile of musty old newspapers. Birdie, meanwhile, hit the ground, rolled and came up close to that Frankenstein’s monster, using the opportunity to slap the big bastard dead in the face with a three-fingered snap.

  Just like the gravel outside, the thug’s jaw went soft beneath her fingers, the bone suddenly rendered the consistency of wet paper. Birdie watched as he slumped, unconscious, against the nearest wall, an imprint from the impact vaguely outlined in the plaster.

  Bang.

  Her focus had been tuned exclusively to Darrell James. A third shot from the white man’s .45 caught her by surprise. Birdie turned towards the sound of the shot, but she was too late. The slug grazed the meat of her left shoulder.

  It felt … good.

  The tearing of the flesh—that violent sting—stirred something that had been lingering just under her skin since that emerald fluid touched her lips. Without a thought, Birdie grabbed the mica-colored pistol from her pocket, the nested barrel extending effortlessly into place.

  Birdie depressed the trigger and smiled as a bolt of orange lightning arced from the tip of the muzzle to its target. Birdie felt the roar of the insect choir, a thousand million tiny voices vibrating up the length of her arm and into her brain.

  For a split second, Birdie could swear she’d seen the stranger’s skeleton, a vague charcoal outline, and little else. Then he vanished, rendered invisible in the most permanent manner imaginable, leaving behind little more than a steaming, shadowy stain on the carpet.

  Motherfucker didn’t even have time to scream.

  Hamilton Tate—on the other hand—seemed to have had that bit covered.

  Birdie stood up and walked over to the cowering brother. She grabbed the man by the thick roll of meat on the back of his neck and lifted. Raggedy Ann dolls were heavier. Dust mops and newborn babies carried more weight.

  Birdie slammed Hamilton hard against the wall, then spoke. “You better tell me sumthin’ fast, mister. You wanna be smoke or what?”

  “Naw,” replied the doorman. He eyed that stain on the floor. He let his bowels go without the slightest hesitation, the stink of piss, shit and malt liquor threatening to overwhelm her amplified senses.

  Birdie let the man slip from her hands and onto the carpet. “Then you’re gonna answer a question for me, lickety-split,” she continued. “I want to know what happened to Ruby Brown and exactly what you had to do with it.” Birdie imagined the voice coming out of her throat couldn’t have sounded much like her at all, backed with the fury of some unseen insect choir.

  In fact, her voice didn’t sound human at all.

  Tate’s apartment was a very small place, and far from tidy, more like a coffin than a decent place for any living soul to hang his hat. Even here, Birdie felt the urge to rearrange, to clean and straighten.

  She had to laugh.

  There was an unconscious thug on the floor and a blackened stain in the carpet where that white fellow had been, a blot that all the Pine Sol in the world wouldn’t remove. Birdie stood there, filling up every inch of that cramped space with her senses, taking in the sound of troubled neighbors echoing through the walls. And there was Hamilton Tate, a cowering mess, hunkered down on the floor of that dimly lit one-room apartment. The little man was broken, boxed in by a lot more than just the four walls that surrounded him.

  Birdie crouched down low to face the doorman, her heightened sense of smell reminding her it wouldn’t pay to get too close. She opened her mouth to speak and heard the hue and cry of the cicadas more clearly than before.

  “You want to tell me what it is you’ve gone and got yourself mixed up in, Hamilton? Were you there when it happened? Were you the one who hurt her, huh?”

  Hamilton Tate had just enough sense left to shake his head, indicating the negative. “Naw. Naw. That wasn’t me,” he confirmed. “Shit. I ain’t had nuthin’ to do with killing nobody.”

  Birdie gestured between the eerie stain on the carpet and the unconscious thug in the corner, both of which suggested otherwise. “If you didn’t have nuthin’ to do with it, shorty, explain what that big zipper-headed nigger in the corner is doing here.”

  “What? Aw, that fool? He’s my second cousin on my momma’s side. That niggah been in and out of prison so many times they oughta give him a damn key. He knew I’d been working down on the Plaza as a doorman for a while. I told him I’d seen Firecracker down at the Dunwich with his girl a few times and he didn’t seem too impressed at first.”

  Birdie nodded, signaling the little man to go on.

  “Then he came back over here a few weeks ago with a carton of cigarettes ‘n’ talking ‘bout some white men from uptown who were offering good money to know a few things ’bout Mr. Chalmers. He wanted to know what he had to do to get up close to him. Said he would pay out of pocket for me to keep an eye out from time to time. That’s pretty much what I did. I don’t know about you, but down here the times is hard. Shit. Where’s the harm in a nigger making a little scratch?”

  Where’s the harm?

  Birdie’s eyes narrowed as she thought about her friend Ruby Brown, alone in that cold penthouse apartment and she knew that as answers went, what Hamilton had told her wasn’t good enough by half. The cleaning lady bit her bottom lip and reconciled herself to the inevitable.

  Like it or not, she’d have to wake the giant and make him spill.

  VII.

  The mortuary’s chapel was about as quiet as could be expected, given the circumstances.

  In the last twenty-four hours, Birdie McIntyre had been busy making plans to clean up the mess that she, somehow, quite impossibly, felt responsible for.

  But she couldn’t do it alone—not completely.

  “She’s ready if you want to take a look at her, Miss Birdie.”

  The cleaning woman turned to face the two men who stood in the doorway of the chapel.

  The less familiar of the pair was Firecracker. He held his hat in hands, the weight of his loss hanging around his neck like a tow chain. The other was Firecracker’s cousin, Little Pete, the mortician and leader of Birdie’s Sunday church choir.

  The mistress of a Negro gangster found murdered in a penthouse apartment. There was no way the cops in Misery would have gone near such a thing. They were useless and the situation had been too volatile. So, Birdie had taken a chance … that her friend Ruby had been right about the devilish lover … that she really had owned a little piece of him after all.

  Firecracker stepped forward, smelling less like smoke than she expected.

  “You should come and see her now, Birdie. She looks—” He halted for a moment, then shook his head, regaining his composure. “My baby looks good.”

  Firecracker reached a hand out for the cleaning woman and she reached out in kind, as the heartbroken pyromaniac led her through a series of thick, gray drapes into the viewing room. Firecracker himself hadn’t been home since yesterday. Instead, he’d been forced to hide out here in the church certain that whoever it was that had killed Ruby would likely be gunning for him, as well. With so very many enemies, though, the problem was figuring exactly who it was that was after him, and what it was that they wanted.

  When Birdie approached the mobster about solving the crime, he had laughed at her, which made perfect sense. But now that she had delivered, the gangster had newfound respect for her and that respect had given him license to feel … vulnerable.

  Fragile.

  The sun would be coming up soon. A dull ache on her left shoulder signaled that the Extract’s effectiveness was coming to an end. In the next few hours she’d once again be as she was … but not yet.

  As Birdie approached the casket, she felt Firecracker’s fingers slip away, leaving her to cover the remaining distance alone. As Birdie touched the edges of the coffin, her extended perceptions did her no favors.

  Birdie leaned forward and kissed the corpse on the forehead, whispering, “I don’t care what you say, there ain’t gonna be no devils where you’re at, baby doll. That much I know.”

  There were more words; private words and tears. A great many tears.

  Afterward, Birdie turned on her heels and left the viewing room, determined to finish what she had begun. The mortuary’s garage had been a late edition to the plans, constructed primarily out of poured concrete and cinder block, which came in handy if one was of a mind to start a small fire.