Mookie hoofs it. Heads toward Mott and Elizabeth, where Elizabeth ends at Bayard – that last block, deep in the heart of Chinatown, that’s where some of the monsters are. Monsters who play nice – or, nicer, at least – with the people above ground. You got Lei-Lei, the half-and-half mer-girl who runs a killer dim sum joint from her tank of ocean water in the back room. Across the street on the Elizabeth side is an antiquities shop run by another halfsie – actually a pair of them: conjoined twins, Jim and Judy, both white and blonde as the sand on a Florida beach. You look at them with a Blind eye, you don’t see them conjoined – you just see a brother and sister who always stand shoulder-to-shoulder. You go in Blazing and you see the way the flesh reaches out like gooey bread-dough, her ropy flesh intertwining with his, both of them looking like each is melting into the other.

They sell tschotschkes to the tourists – lucky kitty clocks and Buddha statues and the like – but to those in the know, they sell artifacts found down in the deep. Strange rocks. Gobbo weapons. Above-world items dragged into the depths and infused with the magic of the Underworld, sucking it up like a kid with a straw.

It’s not them that Mookie wants to talk to. Not tonight.

He wants to talk to Mr Smiley.

Smiley’s a Snakeface. Runs a “teahouse and cocktail bar” at the corner. Also runs a whole stable of prostitutes. And buckets of drugs. And guns.

And, most important of all, information.

On the way, Mookie grabs his cell. Thinks to dial Jess, his ex. Nora’s mother. It’s too late – er, early? – to call. Right? He’s suddenly not sure. Nora’s in danger. He knows that much. And if Jess knows anything…

Then again, Mookie’s the last person Jess wants to be talking to. Particularly at asshole-o’clock in the morning. That’s all it is. It’s late. Right?

He quickly pockets the phone.

Mookie spies the alley between the Xinhua fish market and the Golden Sun dry cleaners, ducks into the shadow between the two buildings. Back here, it smells like old fish and cleaning solution – soap and seafood in troubling combination. Mookie pushes past it, past a couple rust-eaten dumpsters, feet splashing in old puddles–

A figure steps out in front of him. Twenty feet away. Rises up from behind a small mound of black trash bags. Rats scatter.

It takes a second for Mookie’s eyes to adjust – but he sees the skinny, lanky frame and what at first looks like a square head. But the head isn’t square: it’s just the brown paper bag over the head. A bag painted with a Jack-o-Lantern mask, the orange pumpkin with the triangle eyes cut out, the jagged mouth, too.

Jack-o-Lantern mask.

That means it’s one of the Lantern Jacks.

They’re one of the city’s old-school gangs. New York isn’t like other cities. The big gangs – M13, Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, Triads – aren’t here. The Organization rose up in the 1970s, made friends with the gangs that existed at that time: the Black Aces, the Black Sleeves, the Battery Park Bruisers, the Railroaders, the Majestic Immortals, the Sinner Kids, and of course the Get-Em-Girls and the Lantern Jacks. The bigger gangs never got to make a foothold because the smaller ones made a deal with the Organization – a deal that let them survive here long as they kept to the truce. Each has territory. Each does their thing.