City of Night

just as cold on the idea.
    Cindi had blindsided him with this weird voodoo talk, which he had never heard from her before. She knocked him off balance.
    Suddenly he didn’t know if he could rely on her anymore. They were a team. They needed to move as one, in sync, with full trust.
    When their speed fell as they approached the sedan, Benny said, “Don’t stop.”
    “Leave the male to me,” she said. “He won’t see me as a threat. I’ll break him down so hard and fast, he won’t know what happened.”
    “No, keep moving, just drive, drive ,” Benny urged.
    “What do you mean?”
    “What did I say? If you ever want to make a baby with me, you better drive! ”
    They had glided almost to a halt beside the sedan.
    The detectives were staring at them. Benny smiled and waved, which seemed the thing to do until he’d done it, and then it seemed only to call attention to himself, so he quickly looked away from them, which he realized might have made them suspicious.
    Before coming to a full stop, Cindi accelerated, and they drove farther into the park, along the service road.
    Glancing at the dwindling sedan in the rearview mirror, then at Benny, Cindi said, “What was that about?”
    “That was about Ibo,” he said.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “You don’t understand? You don’t understand? I don’t understand. Je suis rouge , evil gods, blood sacrifices, voodoo? ”
    “You’ve never heard of voodoo? It was a big deal in New Orleans in the eighteen hundreds. It’s still around, and in fact—”
    “Did you learn nothing in the tank?” he asked. “ There is no world but this one . That is essential to our creed. We are strictly rationalists, materialists. We are forbidden superstition.”
    “I know that. You think I don’t know that? Superstition is a key flaw of the Old Race. Their minds are weak, full of foolishness and fear and nonsense.”
    Benny quoted what she’d said as they had approached the sedan: “ ‘Praise Ibo, all glory to Ibo.’ Doesn’t sound like a materialist to me. Not to me, it doesn’t.”
    “Will you relax?” Cindi said. “If you were one of the Old Race, you’d be popping a blood vessel.”
    “Is that where you go sometimes when you go out?” he asked. “To a voodoo cathedral?”
    “There aren’t such things as voodoo cathedrals. That’s ignorant. If it’s Haitian-style, they call the temple a houmfort .”
    “So you go to a houmfort ,” he said grimly.
    “No, because there’s not much Haitian-style voodoo around here.”
    Out of sight of the sedan now, she pulled off the service road and parked on the grass. She left the engine running, and the air-conditioning.
    She said, “Zozo Deslisle sells gris-gris out of her little house in Treme, and does spells and conjures. She’s an Ibo-cult bocor with mucho mojo, yassuh.”
    “Almost none of that made any sense,” Benny said. “Cindi, do you realize what trouble you’re in, what trouble we’re in? If any of our people find out you’ve gone religious, you’ll be terminated, probably me, too. We’ve got it pretty sweet—permission to kill, with more and more jobs all the time. We’re the envy of our kind, and you’re going to ruin everything with your crazy superstition.”
    “I’m not superstitious.”
    “You’re not, huh?”
    “No, I’m not. Voodoo isn’t superstition.”
    “It’s a religion.”
    “It’s science,” she said. “It’s true. It works.”
    Benny groaned.
    “Because of voodoo,” she said, “I’m eventually going to have a child. It’s only a matter of time.”
    “They could be unconscious in the back right now,” Benny said. “We could be on the way to that old factory.”
    She zipped open her purse and produced a small white cotton bag with a red drawstring closure. “It contains Adam and Eve roots. Two of them, sewn together.”
    He said nothing.
    Also from her purse, Cindi extracted a small jar. “Judas’s Mixture, which is buds from the Garden of Gilead, powdered silver gilt, the blood of a rabbit, essence of Van Van, powdered—”
    “And what do you do with that?”
    “Blend a half teaspoon in a glass of warm milk and drink it every morning while standing in a sprinkle of salt.”
    “That sounds very scientific.”
    She didn’t miss his sarcasm. “As if you would know all about science. You’re not an Alpha. You’re not a Beta. You’re a Gamma just like me.”
    “That’s right,” Benny said. “A Gamma. Not an ignorant Epsilon. And not a