The Blue Blazes Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nora didn’t do him any favors. “I just mean, until I see it, I don’t buy it.”
    “But if Death’s Head were real, it could cure him.”
    Mookie shrugs. “If it does what Oakes said it could do, yeah.”
    “So you’ll find it.”
    “Kid–”
    “You’d be helping me. And him. And the whole Organization. Can you imagine it? Curing his cancer?” Casimir runs his hands through his copper hair. “I’m not ready. I need more time.”
    “Why me? Why not go to Werth?”
    “James Werth is a half-and-half. A hybrid.”
    So, he knows what that is . Mookie wonders if the kid’s ever Blazed, torn the scales off of his eyes to see what’s really out there. “So? You some kind of racist?”
    “No. I mean – I don’t know. You’re human. And you come highly recommended.”
    “From who?”
    The kid blanches. “From, I dunno. People.”
    “Jesus. Fine. I’ll look.”
    Casimir offers a hand to shake. “Thank you, Mookie.”
    Mookie takes the hand. Shakes it. Tries not to roll the kid’s knuckles. If the measure of a handshake really matters, then Mookie wonders what it means that it feels like he’s shaking a dead carp instead of the kid’s hand. Maybe the kid really isn’t ready.
    Which is bad news for everybody.
     
    Mookie heads for the door. He ate. His stomach feels fit to burst. In a good way. He likes that feeling beyond satiety – the fullness of the flesh, the sense of being somehow completed by a good meal.
    Werth hobbles over to him. “You leaving?”
    “I figure.” He doesn’t say anything about what Casimir wanted. Werth would call it crazy. It is crazy. “I got things to check on while I’m in the city.”
    “You should move back. Get an apartment in the village. Or Brooklyn at least.”
    “I got my bar.”
    “It’s not a bar. It’s a house with a bar in it.”
    He shrugs. “Got a freezer for meat. Got shelves for liquor.” But he notices that Werth has mentally checked out. His tongue is fidgeting with his loose gray tooth and he’s staring off toward the door.
    “Who’s that?” Werth asks, lifting his whiskery chin.
    The man that enters the small banquet room isn’t one Mookie recognizes. Definitely not a thug. Nobody from a gang. He’s too well-dressed. Like he’s in a Cuban café – tan fedora, red embroidered guayabera shirt, a gold watch, and shoes so shiny other shoes might use them as mirrors.
    Mookie doesn’t know what makes one guy good looking and another guy ugly, but he knows that if he’s at the ass-end of the spectrum, this guy’s at the other. He looks like someone out of a movie. Dark-drawn lines around the eyes, a glimmer in his gaze.
    Following behind is a thin slip of a man, skin so pale it might as well be gray, sliding along with all the posture of a broken coat-rack. A black V-neck T-shirt hangs loose over his sickly frame – his match-stick arms are inked with symbols and sigils, ones Mookie’s seen but can’t place, ones that tell him right away what he’s looking at even without blazing.
    “Ten to one that guy in the black shirt is a Snakeface,” Mookie says.
    “Shit, yeah. Look at the arms.”
    The man in the suit and his wormy attaché head toward the Boss’s table in the back of the room, the pair gliding through the crowd, earning stares. They don’t belong.
    Mookie feels himself tense up. This could be it. This could be a hit. Maybe one of the gangs is sending someone. Or maybe this is from another city: the Sicilians, the Irish, or any number of Mexican, Aryan, or Dominican gangs. Or maybe it’s someone from the Deep Downstairs – some pissed off half-and-half wants to take over.
    Mookie reaches into his pocket and starts to move toward the new guests. His big hand fumbles for his little tin of Cerulean – he’s ready to powder up, rip open his third eye and become aware . But then he sees Haversham stand and cross the room. Haversham and the man in the suit shake hands.
    “Mr Candlefly?” Haversham says.
    Mookie lets the tin