The bar was narrow, dark, spotted with colorful fairy lights strung beneath the countertop and the shelves behind. A little curiosity sparkled in him as to where the hell he was, why she’d brought him there, but his mind was so filled with other questions that a logjam had formed and none of them were coming out. She held his hand and led him in and slid into a little booth lined with sticky red vinyl, set him there and went to order the drinks. He watched her back and tried to imagine her on her knees scrubbing the toilets of some asshole bourbon maker while she tried to pin the guy for murder. He wondered if she’d been scared out there alone in the big house in the dark night, with the crickets, the farmhouses full of barrels and stills, the well-dressed killers. A fox sleeping among the hunting hounds. It made sense now how the hell she slept beside him so soundly that first night in his and Luna’s apartment in Dayton, because of course, her work had probably taken her to places where she could well wake to find a shotgun pointed at her face and a drunken good ole boy at the end of it. Or a drug lord. Or a terrorist. He supposed Andy had decided that Ben was a known quantity, once she’d dug around in his life long enough. But at what point had she decided that? What had she seen in his belongings, or in his eyes, that had convinced her?
And was there something on her skin or in her eyes that could make her known to him? Because that was all he had. Her body, sliding into the booth beside him, cuddling into his side. He didn’t even know her real name.
“What happened with Engo and his wife in Aruba?” she asked, taking his arm and draping it around herself like a shawl. The question came like a slap, so out of tune with what she was doing physically that he struggled to focus on it.
“Do we have to—” He shifted up.
“Yeah.” She held the arm in place. “Because we’re out in public. We play it as close to the truth as possible. I told you that.” She leaned up and kissed his mouth, and something in him stirred in its sleep. “So. Aruba.”
Ben gripped his whiskey. There was a fly drowning in it.
“Nobody knows, exactly. Engo hasn’t come right out and said.”
“But what do you know?”
“I know he went there on vacation the same week as his ex-wife.” He fished the fly out of his drink and gulped some to take the edge off. “She went missing two days after he flew in. You must know that, too. I mean, you would have seen the police reports.”
“I want to know what Engo’s said about it.”
“Look, Engo is a freak,” Ben said. “He would play it up like he killed her, just for the … the street cred. He wants everybody to think he’s a dangerous motherfucker. It’s like the thing with his missing fingers. He has all kinds of stories about how he lost those. But the guy used to be a builder before he joined the fire department. He probably just ran over them with a circular saw.”
“Have you and the guys asked him about it?”
“Sure.” Ben shrugged. “When we get drunk, every now and then. The song will come on. You know the one…” He struggled for the tune. Some heavy-metal shit was playing on the box at the back of the bar. “‘Aruba, Jamaica…’”
Andy nodded.
“He starts dancing, or gets all glassy-eyed, and one of us will say ‘Come on. Just tell us.’ He’s heavy on the suggestions. He was harassing her. Marlene, that is. Calling her day and night. Texting her hundreds of times. Leaving things on her porch. He told me one time he was turning up to her job at Macy’s and causing problems, and her boss chased him away. So he went to the guy’s house and did some things to scare him.”
“What things?”
“He had little kids. Engo just let the guy come home one day and see him in the driveway, talking to the kids. That was enough to get Marlene fired.”
Andy was watching him. His arm had slipped down to her ass and was just wedged there between her jeans and the vinyl while she leaned her elbow on the table. They could have been any other couple deep in conversation, maybe about their relationship, maybe about their futures. Not about some maybe-murderous loser, some poor man’s Jeffrey Dahmer. Ben had a bad taste in his mouth and the whiskey wasn’t clearing it.
“So she takes her savings and books a trip to Aruba with a couple of girlfriends, and he follows her,” Ben continues. “Stays in the same resort. She’s going out for early-morning swims, like, just after sunrise. One day she never comes back in.”
“You must have accused him,” Andy said. “In the beginning, after Luna went missing. Even if Engo has never come right out and said he murdered his ex-wife, he’s admitted to stalking a woman.”
“I got him drunk.” Ben nodded. “Blind drunk, several times. He never changed his story. Never said anything weird. And, I mean, I’d like to think that means he didn’t do it. But he never admitted to killing his wife, either, when I questioned him about that. And I’m talking on-the-floor drunk. He’d tell you anything.”
“Did you ever ask Jake?”
“Even if Jake was involved, he’d never tell me. Not even drunk.”
“Why not?”
“Because he knows I’d kill him.”
“What about Matt?”
“I’m not stupid,” Ben said. “You ask Matt the time of day and he’ll fire-breathe your face right off your skull.”
Ben closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. The music was pumping now. He could get right to the edge of a fantasy that he was with Luna, if he tried hard enough. It was a Saturday night, and Gabe was in at his abuela’s, and they were at some clean, cute place on the Jersey shore and not some shithole in East Orange of all the places in the world.
“Why are we here?” he asked finally.
And then the reason dropped down right in front of him, onto the other bench seat in the booth, lumping a well-thumbed glass of what smelled like bourbon on the table. Ben looked at Edgar Denero’s mean little eyes. Then he turned his gaze from Luna’s brother-in-law to Andy, and saw, just for a second, the real her. Before she put the mask on. Before she feigned surprise. She was watching Ben almost apologetically, because she knew—had to know—that what was about to happen would be very, very bad, and she’d been the one to set the whole thing up. She was squeezing his fingers with one hand and feeding him to a rabid dog with the other, just so she could watch how hard the thing bit.
All Ben could do about it all was smile.
Edgar put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, giving a lopsided grin that made Ben’s heart ache. That was Gabriel’s grin. Ben had never met Luna’s ex, but he’d seen pictures, and even as the guy had been wasting away from cancer he’d had that same cheeky slanted mouth. He guessed all the Denero men did.
“Well, look who it is!” Edgar reached across the table and slapped Ben’s shoulder. “How you doin’, Benny boy?”
Andy was deep in her bewildered and slightly unnerved new girlfriend façade, peeling away from Ben, her eyes big and cautious. “Hey. Who’s this?”
“Yeah, Ben, who is this?” Edgar gestured to himself. “How the fuck you gonna explain who I am to the new squeeze?”
“She’s not the new squeeze,” Ben said. It was all he could think to say. Because he was trying to get his head right, to figure out what his story would be, about his missing girlfriend and her kid and her angry brother-in-law. He was suddenly thrust onto a stage, and it was Andy who had thrust him there, and he was so angry about it he could barely speak at all. “She’s just a friend.”
“Oh! Right! Cool! Sure looked like you were getting friendly, from what I could see from over there.” Edgar pointed to the end of the bar, to a dark corner, where an empty stool stood next to a huge Hispanic guy in a plaid shirt. The big guy was watching Ben and Andy and Edgar’s table with interest. “Look at you, Ben, making new friends so fast after Luna and Gabriel disappeared. You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“‘Disappeared’?” Andy shifted away from him on the bench. Searched his eyes with hers, huge and bewildered. “Ben, what’s he talking about?”
Ben glanced toward the door. There was another guy there, clearly one of Edgar’s friends, leaning against the jamb with his arms crossed. Ben felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He knew he could take two guys without much of a problem. But three, no. And there might have been others, too. The bar was suddenly full of people, a wash of newcomers trying to find places in the other booths. He felt like they were all watching him. Judging his acting skills.
“Luna and Gabe aren’t out of town,” Ben said to Andy. “They’re missing.”
Andy’s eyes widened.
“He told you they were out of town? And you went for that?” Edgar threw back the last mouthful of his drink, looking over Andy’s body. “Real piece of work you got here, Ben. You two deserve each other.”
“Watch it,” Ben warned. He gripped the edge of the bench under the table, his knuckles straining and popping with effort. The fear and the fury were warring in his chest, tightening everything. All he was getting from Andy was the scared-girl act, but he looked at her anyway, tried to figure out if she’d planned a way out of this for him. With effort, he reached over and gripped her fingers, tried to get her to feel his desperation. She yanked her hand away.
“What you gonna do about it, white boy?”
“Nothing. We don’t need to get into this right now, Ed,” Ben said. “We can just leave.”
“Let me tell you about this guy.” Edgar pointed at Ben’s chest. “This guy: He comes around my shop the week after Luna and my nephew disappear, and he’s wanting to search my place. Talk to my guys. He wants to check out my CCTV. He wants me to go in and give a statement to police. And tonight, I look over and I see this?” He threw his hands at them. “You for real, bro?”
“I’m for real.” Ben nodded.
“Amazing. Amazing. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I understand. I saw your ass when you came in, honey.” Edgar looked at Andy. “Ass like that, I’d fuck you all over the house. Has he fucked you in my nephew’s bed yet?”
Ben tried to get up. Andy swept an arm across his chest, forced him down. The drinks rattled on the tabletop. People stared.
“Easy. Easy! Just keep it together.” Andy’s words were high and tight and her eyes were scared. “Let’s just go.”
“Where are they, Ben?” Edgar’s teeth were locked together. “Did you bury them?”
“Did you?” Ben asked. “You’re the one who’s always bragging about your fucking cartel connections. Did you finally break your cherry, Ed? Or did you puss out again?”
“What the hell are you even talking about?” Andy was gripping his arm, her nails sharp. “Can we just go? Please!”
“Let me tell you about this guy,” Ben said. “Ed had big cartel dreams. He always wanted to be a gangster. But they had no use for some cheese-dick mechanic from fucking Queens. So one time he’s fixing a car and he finds a human tooth under the grille. Sees there’s a hit-and-run in the newspaper. He goes groveling to the local scumbags with a tip about where they can get some easy extortion money. You had to beg for a spot, didn’t you, Ed? You have to suck any dicks to sweeten the deal?”
The guy by the bar and the one by the door were watching Ben, their eyes hungry. Fuck it. Ben might have been speaking his last words. He was going to make them good ones.
“The cartel gave him an invite.” Ben smiled at Ed. “But he wimped out when they asked him to kneecap some guy. Couldn’t pull the trigger. Pissed his pants instead.”
“We’re going.” Andy was dragging at him. “Come on.”
“That’s what I heard, anyway. You piss your pants, Ed?”
“I’m gonna make you piss your pants, you little bitch.” Ed was rigid as a rock. “Because I been thinking about you. All that huff and puff you came into the shop with? It blinded me. It blinded me to the fact that it might have been you, man. I remembered that Luna had called me, maybe two weeks before she went missing. Wanted to see if I could get her a gun for a friend.”
Ben felt Andy freeze beside him. All the sound in the bar drained away.
“Maybe the gun wasn’t for a friend,” Ed said. “Maybe it was for her.”
The guy from the door was there, reaching right over the top of Andy to grab hold of Ben’s shirt.
Ben let him drag him up, and Andy let herself be knocked to the floor, and then the two of them were being shoved out of the door of the bar and off the stage.