75. HEY, BUDDY

O shosi, scout and hunter, had entered Tito in mid-backtuck. He heard the gray car strike the lamppost as his black Adidas found the sidewalk, confusing cause and effect. The orisha propelled him immediately forward, then, like a child walking a doll, making a puppet of its limbs. Oshosi was huge in his head, an expanding bubble forcing him against the gray interior of his skull. He wanted to scream, but Oshosi clamped fingers of cold damp wood around his throat. “Buddy,” he heard someone say. “Hey, buddy, you okay?” Oshosi walked him past the voice, his heart hammering within his rope-wrapped rib cage like a mad bird.

A bearlike, bearded man, in heavy dark clothing, having seen the crash, was climbing into the cab of an enormous pickup. Tito struck the flat black fiberglass cover of the pickup’s bed with the palm of his hand. It boomed hollowly.

“What the fuck you doing?” the man shouted back at him, craning angrily back out of the open door.

“You’re here for me,” said Oshosi, and Tito saw the man’s eyes widen above his black beard. “Open this.”

The man ran back, his face strangely white, tearing at the fastening of the cover. It popped up, and Tito hauled himself in, dropping the hard hat as he collapsed on a large sheet of spotless brown cardboard. He heard a siren.

Something struck his hand. Yellow plastic, with a yellow cord attached. An identification badge. The fiberglass cover came booming down, and Oshosi was gone. Tito groaned, fighting the urge to vomit.

He heard the truck’s door slam, its engine roar, and then they were accelerating.

The man who had followed him, in Union Square. One of the two behind him, there. That man was here, and had just tried to kill him.

His ribs ached, within the cruelly wound rope. He worked the phone from his jeans pocket and opened it, glad of the screen’s light. He speed-dialed the first of the two numbers.

“Yes?” The old man.

“One of the men who were behind me, in Union Square.”

“Here?”

“He tried to hit me, with his car, in front of the hotel. He struck a pole. Police are coming.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you?”

“In your friend’s truck.”

“Are you injured?”

“I don’t think so.”

The signal fizzed, faded. Was gone.

Tito used the glow of the phone to look around the truck’s bed, which proved empty, aside from the hard hat and the yellow-framed identification tag. Ramone Alcin. The photograph looked like anyone. He slipped the cord over his head, closed the phone, and rolled onto his back.

He lay there, slowing his breathing, then checked his body, methodically stretching, for sprains or other damage. How could the man from Union Square have followed him here? Terrible eyes, through the windshield of the gray car. He had seen his death coming, in another’s eyes, for the first time. His father’s death, at the hands of a madman, the old man had said.

The truck stopped, waiting at a light, then turned left.

Tito set the phone to vibrate. Put it back in the side pocket of his jeans.

The truck slowed, pulled over. He heard voices.

Then they drove on, over rattling metal grates.

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