Queen of the concrete

"They killed him, Mari. They killed Darnell." The phone nearly slipped from her hand. Marisol Reyes had been folding laundry when Nico called. Clean sheets. Grand Mama Rose's lavender detergent filling the bedroom with something so ordinary it hurt later to think about. A Tuesday night in Englewood. Same as every Tuesday night for the last twenty-four years. The television was on in the next room, some late-night host laughing at something, and outside a dog was barking two houses down, and the world was exactly as it always was. Then those six words arrived and the world stopped being what it always was. "Where." Not a question. A demand. "Behind St. Augustine's. Mari, there's so much blood. You need to —" She was already moving. She grabbed her keys off the hook by the door. She didn't take a coat. She didn't tell Grand Mama Rose where she was going. She just moved down the stairs and out into the cold November night and got in her car and pulled out of the lot so fast the tires squealed. She drove three red lights without stopping. She didn't feel it. Didn't feel the cold either. Her hands were steady on the wheel in the way that hands get steady when the brain has departed to somewhere past feeling, past thought, past everything, into pure animal motion. The city moved past her windows in orange and black. She made every turn without thinking. Her body knew the way to St. Augustine's the way her body knew how to breathe. The alley behind the church smelled like garbage and copper. Police tape was already going up on one end, a uniform she didn't recognize unreeling it with the mechanical boredom of someone doing a routine task. Two other officers stood at the far corner talking between themselves. Not looking her way. The blue-and-red lights painted everything in pulses. Nico was crouched near the dumpster. His shoulders were shaking. His hands were pressed to his mouth like he was physically holding something inside himself that needed to stay in. Then she saw Darnell. He was on his back. One arm stretched out to the side like he had been reaching for something in the last moment, like even at the end there was something he was trying to get to. His face was turned slightly upward. His eyes were open and they were wrong in a way that Mari had never seen before but recognized immediately, flat and fixed and absolutely, permanently vacant in a way that living eyes never are, not even sleeping eyes, not even resting eyes. The person who had lived behind them was simply gone. Three bullet holes. Chest. Neck. Forehead. Clean shots. Professional. Someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had done it before. Mari walked to him. She didn't run. Her legs wouldn't let her run. They carried her forward at the pace of someone walking through water, every step requiring more effort than the last. She knelt on the wet concrete beside him and put her hand flat on his chest over the wounds and felt nothing. No heartbeat. No rise and fall of breathing. No warmth. The chest she had leaned against as a child, the chest she had punched in jest a hundred times growing up, was completely still. Just meat and bone in a jacket she had given him for his birthday two years ago. "Darnell." She whispered it first. Then louder. "Darnell." Nothing answered her. Nico's hand landed on her shoulder and she shrugged it off. Hard. He stumbled back two steps and made a sound but she didn't look at him. "Don't." Her voice came out barely above breath. "Don't touch me right now." She stayed there for a long time. Long enough that the concrete soaked cold through her jeans. Long enough that the blood on the ground seeped into the fabric at her knees. Long enough that one of the officers finally walked over and told her in a careful voice that she needed to step back from the body, ma'am, this was a crime scene. She looked at him. Not aggressively. Not pleadingly. Just looked at him with the full weight of what was happening in her face and he took a half step back and looked away and did not repeat himself. Nico was beside her eventually. He was crying openly, not bothering to hide it, tears streaming and breath ragged. He had known Darnell since they were eight years old. His grief was real and enormous and she could not feel it right now. She could not feel anything right now. She was entirely numb from the throat down. "Who called it in?" she asked. Her voice was flat. Practical. Something to do. "Lady from the apartment building. Said she heard the shots around nine- thirty." Nico wiped his face with the back of his hand. "Mari, I'm so sorry. I'm so —" "Did you see anyone? Coming or going?" "No. I got here after. He called me at nine. Said he was handling something and he'd hit me back. Then I couldn't reach him and I walked over and found —" Nico stopped. Swallowed. "I found him." She nodded. Stood up. Her knees were wet with her brother's blood and she looked down at them for a moment and then looked away. On the drive home she felt nothing. Not grief. Not rage. Not the hot acid of shock working its way through the system. Just silence. Wide and deep and total silence, the kind that has mass, the kind you can feel pressing on all sides. She drove carefully. Signaled every turn. Stopped at every light. Arrived home at 10:45 PM and parked in the lot behind the salon and sat in the car for four minutes before she could make herself go inside. Grand Mama Rose was waiting at the door. She had been watching through the curtains because she always watched through the curtains when either of them was out late. She was seventy-one years old and five feet two and the hardest person Mari had ever known, and the moment she saw Mari's face, before she even saw the blood on the knees, she made a sound that Mari had never in her entire life heard come out of another human being. Low and wordless and from somewhere so deep it had no name. "He's gone, Grand Mama." Mari stepped inside. She removed her shoes. She set them by the door with complete, terrible composure, as if doing things normally could hold reality in its correct shape. "He's gone. Go to bed. I'll handle it." Rose grabbed her arm. Hard. Harder than an old woman should have been able to grip. Her eyes were wet and furious and terrified all at once, a combination of emotions that Mari didn't have a word for. "You listen to me. Whatever you are thinking right now. Whatever is going on inside that head of yours. You stop it. You hear me? You stop it right now." Mari looked at her grandmother. Really looked. She memorized the lines of her face the way you memorize something when you understand, even in the middle of everything else, that the world is less safe than it was an hour ago and the people you love most are the most exposed in it. "Go to bed, Grand Mama," she said softly. "I'll make calls. I'll take care of everything. Please go to bed." Rose did not go to bed. But she released Mari's arm and she went to the kitchen and she sat down at the table and she began to pray in a low voice, her rosary moving through her fingers, and Mari went upstairs and showered the blood off her knees and changed her clothes and came back down and sat at the kitchen table across from her grandmother and they stayed there together in the quiet of the house while the city hummed outside the window and Darnell grew cold in the county morgue. At 4:03 AM Rose finally fell asleep in her chair. Mari covered her with the blanket from the couch and turned off the overhead light and sat back down at the table in the dark with her phone in front of her. At 4:07 AM the phone buzzed. Unknown number. A text message. Just four words, no punctuation, no greeting. She read it once. Looked up. Looked back down. Read it again. Her jaw locked so hard she felt it in her back teeth. The text read: Check his left shoe.