Hells Kitchen

Y’oughta know better.”
    Ettie Washington, across the cell, listened with half her attention. She hurt more today than she had right after the fire. Her arm throbbed, sending waves of pain into her jaw. Her ankle too. And her headache was blinding. She’d tried again to get some painkillers and the guards had merely stared at her the way they sometimes stared at the mice scurrying around on the floors here.
    “But I know it work,” one skinny woman said. “One time mah man was cheatin’ and what it was—”
    “Listen to me. If you got the sight you don’t need them oils and candles and roots. If you ain’t got the sight then there’s nothing gonna do it. You come tomake a sacrifice at my honfour, you leave a few pennies for Damballah. That’s all you gotta do. But mosta the mambos and houngnans in New York’re just out fo’ money.” Her voice lifted, “What about you, Mrs. Washington? You believe in Damballah?”
    “In?—”
    “The serpent god? Santeria, hoodoo?”
    “Not really, no, I don’t,” Ettie said. She didn’t feel like explaining that Grandma Ledbetter, bless her heart, had squeezed every shred of religion out of Ettie by her fierce lectures that mixed Catholicism and fiery Baptist dogma. Which, come to think of it, didn’t seem to Ettie very different from the crazy stuff Hatake was talking about. Incense and holy water instead of High John Conqueror root.
    Hatake tugged at her naked, punctured earlobe and continued to expound on the silliness of man-fetching spells and law stay-away oil. What was in your heart was what was important, Hatake said. Ettie’s mind wandered and she thought again about John Pellam. Wondered when he’d come to visit her again. If he’d come. That man ought to be a hundred miles away by now. What the hell was he helping her for? She thought with horror how he’d almost been trapped by the fire. Thought about little Juan Torres too. She said a nonbeliever’s prayer for the boy.
    Then a noise from the front of the cell. The clank of metal on metal. Some of the women shouted hello to a new prisoner.
    “Yo, girl. Weren’t out but one day? You got yo’ ass busted that quick?”
    “Shit, Dannette, yo’ bad luck. I staying away from you, girl.”
    Ettie watched the young woman with the pocked face and the beautiful figure walk uncertainly into the large cell. She was one of the prostitutes who’d been released just yesterday. Back so soon? Ettie smiled at her but the woman didn’t respond.
    Dannette walked up to the circle of women sitting around Hatake Imaham, who nodded to the woman. “Hey, girl. Good to see you.”
    Which sounded a little odd. Sort of like Hatake had been expecting her.
    And the woman continued her lecture on hoodoo, talking now about Damballah, the highest in the voodoo order. Ettie knew this because her sister had dabbled in that craziness some years ago. Then the huge woman’s voice faded and the women began talking among themselves, very quietly. One or two of them glanced at Ettie but they didn’t include her in the conversation. That was all right. She was thankful for the quiet and for a few minutes’ peace. She had many things to think about and, as the good Lord, or Damballah, she laughed to herself, knew, there were few enough moments of peace in here.
    *   *   *
    One of those feelings. Somebody watching him.
    Pellam stood on the curb in front of Ettie’s building, wasting his time asking amnesia-struck construction workers if they’d been in the alley when the fire started or if they knew who had.
    He turned suddenly. Yep, there it was. About fifty feet away a glistening black stretch limo was parked in the construction site, under the large billboard on which an artist had rendered a dramatic painting of thefinished building. Pellam had seen a number of billboards like this one on the West Side; whoever painted them managed to make the high-rises look as appealing, and as completely phoney, as the drawings of women modeling lingerie in the Saks and Lord & Taylor newspaper ads.
    Pellam focused on the limo. The windows were tinted but he could see that someone in the backseat—a man, it seemed—was gazing at him.
    Pellam suddenly lifted the camera to his shoulder and aimed at the limo. There was a pause and then some motion in the backseat. The driver punched the accelerator and the long vehicle bounded out of the drive. It vanished in traffic toward the fish-gray strip of the Hudson River.
    He stepped off