I look back at Skippy’s leaking shirt, then at the blinding jacket.
“True,” I mutter. “Let’s wrap him before he stains the seat.”
That is how I find myself, two minutes later, wrestling a dead man’s swelling arm into a sleeve while Alejandro tries to zip the front. The jacket bunches. Skippy’s neck gives a soft crunch when his head flops forward. I hiss under my breath and shove Alejandro’s hand aside.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
“You’re making it worse.”
“You’remaking it worse.”
Skippy slides sideways.
We both grab him before he face-plants into the parking lot.
It turns into whisper-yelling that absolutely no one wins.
By the time we drag him to the elevator, I’m sweating and one bad moment away from homicide number two.
The elevator shudders as it climbs, old cables groaning like they resent our existence. Alejandro props Skippy upright, holding him by the jacket collar like he’s escorting a very drunk friend home. I stand beside them, arms crossed, panting hard and profoundly irritated with everything, especially Alejandro’s breathing.
He glances at me, earnest and exhausted.
“Let’s not fight in front of the kid, okay?”
The “kid” tilts sideways, head thumping against the elevator wall in some macabre show of solidarity.
I stare at both of them in silence. The smell of death, old elevator grease, and my own patience burning out fills the tiny metal box.
The doors ding open, and I step out withoutlooking back.
“If you don’t shut up,” I say, perfectly calm, “I’m going to punch you in the nuts.”
Behind me, Alejandro mutters, “I love it when your mama is feisty,” while dragging Skippy out of the elevator like this is all somehow normal.
The hallway hits us like a punch of noise and heat the second we step out. A baby screams somewhere behind a thin apartment door. Two people are tearing each other apart in Spanish behind another, the argument so fast I only catch the rhythm, not the words. An old woman with white hair sits in a hallway chair shucking peas into a metal bowl like she’s monitoring the whole building.
I nod at her. She nods back.
Alejandro gives her a too-charming “hola,” because he can’t help himself even while hauling a leaking corpse.
“So,” he says, breathing hard, “who is this very trustworthy guy you’re dragging us to?”
I savor the irritation simmering off him. “A friend.”
“That’s descriptive. Thisfriendhave a name? Or are we playing twenty questions in a hallway full of witnesses?”
We reach the end of the hall where a single door sits under a flickering light, cigarette smoke leaking from other apartments creates an odd haze near the ceiling.
I stop. “Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”
Alejandro opens his mouth, probably to bitch at me again, but the door cracks open first. A short Mexican woman in her mid-thirties eyes us with suspicion.
Before she can speak, I slip into Spanish. “¿Está Grim?”?*
Her whole demeanorshifts when she recognizes me. She smiles, shuts the door, and I hear the rattle of multiple chains being undone. All of them. It sounds like Fort Knox.
Alejandro sucks in a breath beside me. “Grim?” Shock, awe, a hint of terror. “As in… the Grim Reaper?”
