The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [23]
“I am,” I said. “Long story. What happened here?”
“Well,” he said, his feet starting to dance in excitement again. “Me and Slap and Sick Louie, here”—I nodded to the other boys as Nosy indicated them, and they returned the greeting—“we was just walking the waterfront, you know, seein’ if maybe there was any unclaimed baggage lyin’ around the pier—”
I chuckled once. “‘Unclaimed baggage? Jeez, Nosy, that’s rich.”
“Well, you gotta call it somethin if the bulls grab you, right? So, anyway, we’s workin’ our way down to the pier, and we seen this red package just floatin’ out there. Figured it might be somethin’ tasty, so we dove on in, as we’s in shorts, anyway. Got it up here okay—but I guess you can figure what it was like when we opened it.” He whistled and laughed. “Brother. Sick Louie musta puked eight times—only got half a stomach, anyway—”
“Hey, hey,” Sick Louie protested, “I told ya a million times, Nosy, it’s my intestines, I was born widdout a buncha my intestines, dat’s what does it!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Nosy said. “So we went for a cop, figurin’ maybe there’s a reward involved. Shoulda known better. Now they won’t let us go—figure maybe we had something to do with it! I ask you, what would we be doin’ sawin’ people up? And how, for Chrissakes? I got one kid’s an idiot”—he flicked a thumb at the boy called Slap, who, when I took a closer look, didn’t seem to be catching much of what was going on around him—“and another kid with half a stomach—”
“I told you, Nosy!” Sick Louie protested again. “It’s my—
“Yeah, yeah, your intestines!” Nosy shot back. “Now shut up, willya, please?” He turned back to me with a grin. “Fuckin’ morons. So—whattaya got goin’, Stevepipe, what brings ya here?”
“Ah,” I said, looking back at the crowd around the piece of a body and seeing that they were starting to break up. “Came to fetch a couple of pals.” Cyrus and the detective sergeants had started to move my way. “And I gotta go. But I’m coming down to Frankie’s this week. You gonna be around?”
“If these cops ever let us go,” Nosy answered with another cheerful grin. “Imagine tryin’ to hold us for a thing like this,” he went on as I moved away. “It ain’t logical! But nobody ever said cops was logical, eh, Stevepipe?”
I grinned back at him, touched the brim of the top hat, and then rejoined Cyrus and the Isaacsons, hurrying with them back to the hansom.
The cabbie had passed out again, though when Cyrus climbed back in he woke up with a start and whimpered a little, like maybe he was hoping the whole ride down had been a bad dream. “Oh, no … no, not again! Look, you two, I’m going to the cops if—”
Marcus, who had perched his feet on the little iron step on one side of the cab as his brother did the same on the other, flashed a badge. “We are the cops, sir,” he said in a firm tone as he slung a satchelful of instruments over his shoulder and then laid a solid grip on the side of the passenger compartment. “Just sit back and be quiet, this won’t take long.”
“No, it won’t,” moaned the old man, resigned to his predicament. “Not if the ride down was any measure …”
I got into the driver’s seat and cracked the reins, and we crashed back onto the cobblestones of Clarkson Street, leaving behind the strange scene on the waterfront and figuring—wrongly, it turned out—that we’d seen and heard the last of it.
My mind was still full of thoughts of both that bloody sight and my disheartening encounter with Kat and her mark as we dashed back east But when we reached Hudson Street again and turned north, my attention was finally distracted by a familiar and—given the situation and my brooding—welcome sound: the Isaacson brothers, taking off after each other as soon as there were no other cops around to hear.
“Just couldn’t resist, could you?” I heard Marcus say over the din of the mare’s horseshoes on the stones.
“Resist what?” Lucius answered in a kind of squeak, already on the defensive as he clung for life to the side of the cab.