*****
Filly's idea of a “walk” was actually another cab ride, which he informed me I was going to be paying for. When we reached our destination, clear up on the upper east side, in the low 100s, I took no small pleasure in showing him my barren wallet, and that I didn't have enough to cover the fare. Filly threw a couple bucks at the driver in disgust and we climbed out of the hack in front of a broke-down tenement on 3rd Avenue.
Filly glanced casually up and down the street, probably looking out for black-and-whites, then moseyed casually up to the stoop, past the capheads and the farmers who wandered these streets like something out of Night of the Living Dead. One of these guys was sitting on the stoop that Filly was making for, and he sprang up at our approach. I hesitated, but a second glance made it pretty clear he wasn't some kind of bouncer or anything. He probably couldn't have fought off a feisty three year-old, he was so thin. There was a blue tinge of moss growing in the corners of his eyes, and when he started talking, I could see there was something fuzzy on his teeth too, something a little more aggressive than plaque. The hygiene was the first thing to go with these guys.
“Some good shit here, cuz,” the caphead said. “You wanna see?” Without waiting for us to reply, he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to show a gray-brown mushroom cap growing out of his forearm, and several circular sores, each the size of a nickel, where other fleshies had recently grown and been cut out. 'Fleshies' were crazy-makers and fetish-baiters. They were supposed to give you one of the most intense highs you could find... but I couldn't say for sure, because they were one of the few vices I'd never partaken of. This was mostly because I'd yet to meet a fleshie farmer who wasn't completely rock-bottom disgusting. You had to be pretty close to the floor when you decided to start farming – it was nearly impossible to stop the shit from growing once it started. Of course, most farmers never stopped, they just kept growing until they starved or ate the wrong cap or got a bad infection in one of those sores.
“Get the fuck away from us,” Filly growled, and the caphead did as he was told, averting his eyes as we mounted the steps.
“What's going on here, Filly?” I asked as we reached the door. We were obviously far away from my theory that Candy Warner was working a street corner somewhere.
His eyes narrowed. “Man, why you doing this? It makes me look bad, and paints a big fat target on both of us.”
“I'm just trying to do my job.”
Filly's eyes widened in understanding. “Aw hell, Cheek. You took something, didn't you?”
“I didn't take a damn thing!”
“Then why don't you remember that we already came here three days ago?”
“Three days...” I shook my head. “Why would we've come here? I just met Candy's mom yesterday.”
“No, you didn't.” He put a hand on my shoulder. I tried to shrug it off, but he kept it there. “Three days ago, you were showing Candy's picture to Mondo's girls. Then you came to me, just like today, and I showed you what's in this building. Then I told Mondo what was up, so he'd know to keep his mouth shut, and he didn't want nothing more to do with it. That's why he clobbered you this morning, bro. He thinks you're trying to get him involved in some shit he don't want to be involved in.”
I was shaking my head for the last half of his story. “No, that's bullshit. Why don't I remember any of that?”
“Question of the day,” Filly said. He glanced back toward the door, then looked at me. His eyes had softened. “Look, let's go get a drink. I'll tell you all about it, but you don't need to see what's in there, okay? Ain't nobody needs to see it.”
“Is Candy Warner in there?”
Filly sighed. “Yeah, she is.”
“Then I need to see it.”
“You are killing me, Cheek.” He looked away. “Okay, fine. One more time. But if you pull this shit on me again, I'll shoot you. Swear to God.”
He knocked on the door. There was silence, then motion from inside. The door opened a crack, stopping at the chain, and a large, ogre-ish face I didn't recognize looked out.
“What you want, Filly?” the ogre asked.
“Let me in,” Filly demanded.
The ogre looked at me. “What's he doing here again?” My heart nearly stopped in my chest. So it wasn't just Filly messing with my head.
“He's with me, Deanderus. Open the fucking door.”
Deanderus frowned. “I'll have to let Bode know.”
“You do that,” Filly said. The door closed and Filly shot me a hateful look while the chain was being drawn back. The door opened and the ogre stepped aside so that we could enter.
Filly led the way and I followed, keeping an eye on Deanderus as I passed. He was almost as big as Mondo, though from all appearances, only about half as smart. He shut the door behind us and the hall went dark. There was no electricity in here of course... or at least that's what I thought. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see a faint milky glow from underneath a couple of the doors down the hall.
Filly waved me down the hall, and we edged past peeling sheets of wallpaper and kicked needles and pill bottles aside as we went. The place was filthy, but I'd seen worse, and it was obvious that somebody was at least making an effort to keep a path through the building clear and the wild 'shrooms under control. I heard a moan from one of the rooms we passed and paused. The latch had long ago been busted off the door, so I reached for it.
Filly's hand was on my arm. “Not yet,” he said. “We're almost there.”
He led me two doors farther down the hall and stopped. We were at the base of a flight of stairs, leading higher into the building. A thug sat on the stairs, almost as big as the guy at the door, and he had a shotgun laid across his lap. He didn't bother to get up when he saw us, just raised a hand in acknowledgment of Filly.
Filly put his hand on the doorknob and stopped. He turned to me, and his voice was low, too low for the goon on the stairs to hear.
“You need to keep your head, now,” he said. “You ain't gonna like this, man. I know that better than you do. But if you cause a ruckus, James there is likely to drag you out back and use his shotgun on you. You understand?”
I nodded. The wound on my forehead was throbbing. Suddenly I didn't want him to open that door. I wanted to run back to my office and call Mrs. Warner and tell her that I couldn't find her daughter and I had no intention of even trying to find her. And then I wanted to get good and drunk.
Filly pushed the door open.
The one-room apartment on the other side was lit by a single fluorescent lamp. There was a door, and a tiny bathroom that would have fit twice over into a broom closet, and the only furniture in the place was the small table where the lamp sat and a mattress. The place was relatively clean, considering, but the smell was atrocious. Like piss and shit and dead rat, all at once. Lying on the mattress was Candy Warner, dressed only in a spaghetti-strapped top and a pair of stained panties. Judging by the swell of her belly above those panties, she was about six months pregnant.
“Jesus,” I breathed. “What the hell kind of science experiment bullshit is this?”
Candy tossed and moaned at the sound of my voice, but her eyes were closed and she didn't turn toward us. She was obviously out of it, probably drugged.
“Candy,” I said, loud enough for her to hear. “Candy, you gotta get up now. Your momma's looking for you.” I moved toward her, but Filly's hand was on my arm again.
“Did you not hear me, motherfucker?” he hissed, a panicky edge in his voice. “James will shoot you! He will shoot you as soon as look at you!”
I pulled my arm free. “What, you can't tell him no? You're the big man around here, right?”
“I'm just an investor,” Filly said, leaning over to shut the door behind him. “I got pull, but that's all. And it ain't enough to save your stupid ass if those men out there decide you're a security risk!”
I dry-washed my face with one hand. I wanted to grab the girl and walk out of there, but I didn't have the fi
repower to do it. “What's wrong with her?”
“She's drugged,” Filly said. “She needs to be, for the pain.”
I looked at the lamp. “What the hell's going on here, Filly? Why does it smell so bad?”
“Somebody – I don't know who, like I said, I'm just an investor – somebody came up with a new kind of 'shroom, right? A fleshie that's not like anything you've ever seen before. The high is stronger and longer lasting than anything else out there, and it makes you stronger too. Like, physically. Maybe even smarter.”
“Bullshit.”
Filly shrugged. “Think what you like. Lots of people think different. Any case, this fleshie can only grow under a very specific set of circumstances.”
He fell silent, and I looked again at Candy, at her closed eyes and her swollen belly. Without realizing it, one of my hands crept up to cover my mouth.
“Jesus Christ, Filly!”
“The spores are put in the womb early on, first month of the pregnancy, and they kill the fetus quick. It's no worse than getting these ladies an abortion, Cheek.”
“Except you leave it in there,” I said. I thought of the portabella I'd had earlier that day and tasted vomit in the back of my throat. The smell!
“Something about the fungus keeps the mother's body from rejecting the fetus once it's dead. So it's left to grow in there. It's dark and it's wet, right? And that's what mushrooms need.
“And then at about seven or eight months, she gives birth to a six or seven pound fleshie. Six or seven pounds, Cheek! Even if those were normal fleshies, you got any idea how much money that would bring in?”
“Somebody eats them?”
“A lot of somebodies, bro. Wouldn't be a profitable venture otherwise.”
I grabbed him by the lapels, drove him back against the wall, not caring if James heard or if anybody heard.
“You kill babies and sell them to people so they can get high? What kind of fucking monster are you?”
Filly was holding my wrists and grimacing, but wasn't fighting back. “Tell you the same thing I told you three days ago, Cheek. Grow up.”
“I'll kill you,” I hissed. “I'll kill you and I'll burn this place to the fucking ground!”
“Yeah? And who's gonna take care of these girls when you do that? You? With us, nine in ten of them survive. Without us, dumped in some free clinic somewhere, how many of them you think gonna make it? They all here by choice, Cheek. They all being paid.”
“Any of them gonna be able to make a real baby again after this? Huh? I know how fleshies work, Filly. I know how hard it is to get rid of them.”
Filly shrugged, but he also dropped his gaze. “They being paid,” he said again.
Suddenly I was exhausted. I let him go, and he just sort of cleared his throat. “You wanna give me a slap, bro? Go for it. You did it before and I ain't gonna stop you now. But if you try to take that girl out of here, I ain't gonna be any help to you.
“This new fleshie is spreading like crazy. Labs going up all across the boroughs, man. You burn this one down, another one will go up next door tomorrow. All you'll be doing is putting these girls here at risk, and those babies will still be dead.”
“And I'll be keeping you from getting paid. Keep you from buying anymore shiny new jukeboxes.”
“There's that too,” Filly said with a shrug. “But that's the only thing you'll be getting out of it, and if I think you'll actually do it, I'll have James or Deanderus kill you and dump your body in the alley. Serious as a heart attack.”
I looked at him, and I knew he wasn't bluffing. I thought of the skinny kid I used to play stickball with when we were growing up in Clinton Hill, the one who kept his eye on the ball and found the sweet spot every time, because he wasn't strong or fast enough to compete otherwise. His eye was on the motherfucking ball this time, for sure. He'd beat me.
I took one more look at Candy, writhing on the mattress with her big, infected belly and the horrible smell that could only be coming from one place.
“I'm sorry, baby,” I said, and then I pushed past Filly and out into the hallway.