Andy arrived about a minute and a half after he did. Must have been out there, waiting for him to get there, timing it perfectly. Ben guessed that it was supposed to be a dead giveaway to Matt and everybody at the house that Ben had given her a lift in his car most of the way and she’d pretended to walk from the Oyster Bay station. Donna was still making a performance about his face, trying to get ahold of his head to look at the stitches. All Matt’s wives had been tiny little ladies, probably chosen in the hopes that he’d have a normal-sized kid one day, so to get a good look Donna was either going to have to drag Ben’s head right down against her ballooning belly or pin it against the enormous kitchen island. So he resisted as much as he could. Matt was nearby in a struggling Hawaiian shirt, the only person who seemed like he fit properly in the room. He made the high ceilings and the triple fridge look appropriate.
“Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.” Donna was waving at Engo and Matt. “The guys’ll get them. Dirty motherfuckers, bashing up my Benji. Matt will take the guys down there this afternoon and find ’em. The local cops will know who the bastards are.”
“You kiddin’? Forget that. This afternoon I’m gonna be asleep.” Matt pointed at the leather lounge, which was the size of a limousine. “On that couch. In front of the baseball. You let yourself get jumped, Ben, that’s your problem. It’s not gonna ruin my day off.”
“He’ll get ’em, Benji, don’t worry.”
“I keep telling you, there’s no ‘getting’ to do.” Ben took Donna’s hand down from where it was stroking his hair. “I got them already.”
“Sure you did.” Engo joined in the hair-stroking. “Shhh.”
“Get off me, you prick.”
Then the front door opened and Andy walked in. She was wearing a black linen off-the-shoulder dress and sandals, and she’d swept her inky hair up so that it piled on top of her head like a bundle of glossy ribbons, showing the shaved under-bit. Donna squealed when she saw her. Matt and Engo exchanged a look, probably about the timing.
“Is this the new guy?” Donna waddled over with an arm around her pregnant belly like the baby might fall out of her skirts any second if she let go. She thrust her other arm out to hug Andy. “Oh my God! Hi! I’m Donna! I’m Matt’s wife!”
“Hey.” Andy gave her the awkward cautious hug people give pregnant women and showed a palm to the semicircle of men. “Hey. Where’s Jake?”
“Mowing the lawn.”
“What? You got Jakey out mowing our lawn?” Donna looked toward the double doors Andy had come through.
“I told him to do the neighbors’ first.”
“Matt!”
“He’s the fucking probie, Donna. That’s how it works. He wants to drink with my family in my house he earns it.” Matt hadn’t taken his eyes off Andy. “More importantly, why aren’t you looking at him?”
The question split the air. Everyone was still. Matt had one Finger of Death poked into Ben’s biceps, the other pointed straight out from his beer bottle at Andy’s face.
Andy looked from Matt to Ben.
“Why aren’t I looking at him?”
“He’s beat to shit.” Matt jabbed Ben with his finger again. “You spotted it when you walked in. No surprise on your face. None. You come in and you say nothing at all about it. And now you won’t look at him.”
“I’m looking at him right now.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Matt! Stop it! You’re being weird!” Donna said.
“Well, I mean, I just…” Andy feigned helplessness. Ben watched her mouth working, trying to form words. “I-I-I don’t know. I guess I was gonna ask what happened. Like, eventually.”
“After you found out where Jake was?” Matt said.
“Uh, yeah?”
“You wanted to know where Jake was more than you wanted to know why—”
“I mean—”
“You were there,” Matt said. “Weren’t you?”
“I was where?”
“On the scene. When it happened. That’s why you weren’t surprised.”
“No. No. No.”
“So you’re telling me you walk into a room and Ben’s standing there looking like he just got scraped out of the wheel well of a Mac truck and you don’t say ‘Ho! What the fuck happened to you’? You say ‘Where’s Jake’?” Matt’s neck and chest were the color of raw steak. He turned to Ben. “She was there. You two hooked up last night.”
“We didn’t—” Ben began.
“We just had a drink. One drink!” Andy put her hands up in surrender. “I mean, we-we-we had to talk about it. Right? We had to talk about the game plan. How we’re gonna work together and not, you know … You know. Be together.”
“It’s simple!” Matt barked. “You start by not being together!”
“Matt! Jesus!” Donna slapped his hand down from Ben’s biceps. “Calm down! Everybody’s trying to have a good time! You’re stressing me out!”
Engo had worked his way around the circle to Andy’s side. Ben hadn’t noticed, until the guy stroked his hand up the back of Andy’s arm in a way that gave her a full-body shudder.
“Is that how you got these bruises?” Engo murmured. “Did they hold you down?”
“No. I didn’t see him get jumped.” Andy moved away from Engo. “He went out to the alley to have a cigarette. I was inside. Can we move on?”
“Yes, we can.” Donna shot Matt a warning look that could have killed a horse. “What are you drinking, Andy? Wine? Scotch?”
Ben tried to get away from her. They fell into the usual Saturday-at-Matt’s thing: Engo and Matt arguing about the barbecue, Matt’s two teenage daughters from his second marriage taking selfies by the pool. Ben went over and had an awkward, one-sided chat with the girls for a little while because that’s what you did, knowing they’d fade out on him eventually and he’d be off the hook. Somewhere beyond the fences in the painfully sunny suburban wonderland of Long Island the sound of a Weedwacker told him Jakey was halfway through earning his first beer of the day.
Ben was sitting on an outdoor lounge chair messing around on his phone when he overheard Andy and Matt coming together in the sliding glass doorway to the kitchen. She’d escaped Donna’s clutches and was probably headed for him, but he didn’t look up. Kept his eyes on his phone and his ears pricked.
“Matt, listen.”
“What?”
Ben heard Andy give a stressed sigh. Her voice was low. “There really isn’t anything going on with Ben and me.”
“Oh, wonderful. Good to know. I’ll sleep easy.”
“I know you bent your own rules to bring me on, and I’m not going to take that for granted.”
“You’re sure as shit not gonna take it for granted.” Matt’s words were sharp but his tone had softened. Donna must have been watching. “Because it’s not granted. Not one bit. I get wind you’re up to anything that’s going to put my crew in danger, and I’ll fire your ass so fast your kids’ll have scorch marks. You’re the new guy. You get that? That makes you one shade above a probie to me.”
“Right. I got it.”
“Now get out of my face before I make you wash my car.”
She came and sat beside Ben on the adjacent lounge chair, turned toward him, wary eyes watching Matt and Donna through the big doors.
“Having fun?” Ben asked.
“Don’t move. I’m gonna slip two things into your hand,” Andy murmured. “Put them in your pocket.”
“What are they?”
Andy put her bag on the floor at her feet and reached in, fished around and came out with a big pair of sunglasses. On her way back up she tucked two tiny objects into Ben’s palm, which was curled on the edge of the chair.
“One’s a button camera, and one’s a GPS tracker,” Andy said. Her voice was light. She settled in the chair, an arm up behind her head, watching the girls by the pool. “The button camera you’re going to put on your shirt and wear into the room when Matt takes you to split your jewelry-store cut. I assume that’ll happen today.”
Ben had to force his mouth not to sneer. “I’m not wearing a fucking wire, Andy.”
“It’s not a wire.”
“If they find me with something like that, they’ll kill me,” Ben said. The tiny items in his clenched hand were heating up, becoming soaked in sweat, but he didn’t dare pocket them. “And then they’ll kill you. Because I’ll give you up in a goddamn heartbeat, just the way you did to me last night.”
“Wow, sounds messy.” Andy grinned at him, reached over and clinked his drink with hers. “I guess you better not get caught, huh.”
“What’s the tracker for?”
“I don’t know,” Andy said. “You might just find an opportunity that I haven’t uncovered yet. I’ve already tagged Matt and Donna’s cars on the way up the driveway. I got Engo’s car last week. Jake’s motorcycle is a bit trickier. He washes it by hand. Very thoroughly. I might have to secret one into the foam padding inside his helmet.”
They sat in silence. Somewhere, a leaf blower was powering down.
“If one of these guys killed Luna and Gabriel,” Andy said carefully, “they may visit the bodies. Or if they’re being held somewhere—”
Ben pocketed the items and held a hand up. They watched Engo hanging over the pool fence, talking to Matt’s daughters. The two girls were recoiled on their towels, their legs tucked under and their mouths downturned.
“Did you ever get the sense Luna knew what was going on with your crew?” Andy asked. “Finding out, getting nervous that she knew too much and the guys were going to come for her … It might have inspired her to go to Edgar and ask for a gun.”
Ben shrugged.
“How did she react when Titus Cliffen died?”
“What do you mean?”
Andy smiled at him. In his reflection in her sunglasses, Ben could see himself. The grief stubble was making a resurgence. He rubbed his face.
“You think Titus found out what we were doing.” Ben nodded, trying to keep his face light even as his head filled with darkness. “So we rubbed him out?”
“He was only on your crew for four months,” Andy said. “Then he falls through the floor of a burning bike store and is killed instantly. The accident-investigation team opens and shuts the case with zero complications in forty-eight hours. No one on your crew takes any grief time. No one goes to the funeral. I read the reports, Ben. Matt had decided to give you a little impromptu training session in active command on the street that night. He and Engo and Jake went in with Titus. Did Matt keep you out of the loop deliberately, because he considers you to be the bleeding heart of the crew? Or did you okay the hit, as long as you didn’t have to do the dirty work?”
“Matt lets me have street command sometimes if he’s bored or he just wants to go in. He’s been doing that for a year or so, okay? The guy has to retire one day, and Engo is too wild to take over Engine 99. You’d know that if you read all the reports, not just cherry-picked the ones that make us look like a pack of killers,” Ben said. The words felt like pieces of glass sliding up his throat. “What happened to Titus wasn’t a setup. They didn’t kill him.”
“So why not go to the funeral?”
“Nobody went to the funeral because the family wanted to do their own thing. And yeah, nobody took any time off, because Titus was a jerk.”
He looked Andy square in the sunglasses.
“He was a college-educated prick who wanted to lecture us all the time on politics. He only became a hose jockey to piss his rich daddy off,” Ben said. “Nobody was tight with the guy, not even Jakey. Titus was treading a fine line with Matt with all the political shit, so he was going to wash out of the crew in a couple more months anyway. The way Matt told it, Titus shouldn’t have been on that floor alone in the first place but he’d doubled back against Matt’s orders.”
“But you can see where I’m going with all this,” Andy said.
“Sure. But what I don’t see is how Luna could have found out what we’ve been doing, without me knowing she’d found out. She was never around the crew without me being there as well.”
“Did she come to these barbecues?”
“Yeah, her and Gabriel both,” Ben said. “Gabe loved the pool. Couldn’t swim. Didn’t stop him trying.”
“This is a big house. It’s in Oyster Bay, for God’s sake. On top of that, Matt’s got three ex-wives to pay alimony to.”
“So?”
“So did Luna ever ask you how the hell he affords it?”
“No,” Ben said. “She probably figured he got money from 9/11. Therapy money. Loss of wages from the time off. Whatever.”
“Was she right?”
“No. He never claimed anything. Never took any time off. I only know that because I overheard another chief getting into him about it one time, about how he should. Right before Matt threw the guy down a flight of stairs.”
Jakey appeared at the glass doors, sparkling with sweat and dusted with grass clippings. His knees were stained green. He sat beside Ben on the end of the lounge chair and huffed a sigh and clinked beer bottles with him.
“Between the glitter sweat and the ponytail, I can’t tell if you’re Edward Cullen or Lestat, Jakey,” Andy said.
“Pfft. Lestat. Give me some credit.” Jake caught Ben’s side-eye. “Vampire books. She likes them, too.”
Ben wondered if that was the first genuine thing he’d ever learned about Andy. He punched Jake right in the joint of his shoulder, a signal they’d established early after they’d met, Ben telling Jake he had done a good job on something. “You do the pool filter, Mr. Book Nerd?”
“Not yet. I’m hoping Matt forgets.”
“Gotta do the pool filter.”
“Poor ole Jakey,” Andy lamented. She rubbed his arm. “It won’t last forever.”
“It’s okay. He’s put me through worse.” Jake shrugged, then looked at Ben. “Did you have to mow Matt’s lawn too, when you were a noob?”
“No.” Ben smiled, remembering. “He was married to Christine when I was a probie. They had an apartment in Tribeca. I had to get there early and take Kaylee and Sharon out in the stroller for a couple of hours so they could get some alone time.” He pointed to the teenage girls. “I’m the only reason they have a third kid.”
“I’d rather take out babies than mow lawns,” Jake said.
“Yeah, it’s okay for a probie detail. You’re a chick magnet. Young guy in a park with two babies and no wedding ring? Come on.” Ben smiled again. “But then one of them has a blowout in her diaper and the other one throws up all over your lap and it’s not so great.”
They laughed together, the two criminals and the woman planning to put them both in jail. Ben felt sore and sick and a little like he was floating outside his own skin, the minicamera and tracking device in his pocket threatening to fall out on the floor and end his life. The stitches in his brow itched, probably drawn too tight. He’d done them himself after he got home from the bar, was out of practice with stuff like that.
Matt appeared at the doors. “Family meeting,” he said.
Ben hit the bathroom while Engo and Jake headed downstairs to the basement. He stood in the glow of the makeup lights, fished around in the cabinet as silently as he could to find something to cut the thread on the button of his breast pocket. His hands were shaking. Images flashing before his eyes, of Matt or Engo or Jake trying to hug him in the office and feeling the tiny box in his pocket, asking him what it was about. He supposed Matt would choke him out right then. No sense in letting him leave and get to his stash and head for the hills. They’d probably come downstairs as calmly as possible and tell Donna that he’d fainted and to go wait out front for an ambulance. While he was gone they’d lure Andy up to the office and put her lights out, too.
He cut the button off and pocketed it, slipped the fake button onto the shirt in its place and clipped it into the tiny box. The thing was no bigger than his thumbnail but it felt like it weighed a ton, seemed to him like it dragged the whole front of the shirt down.
Ben gripped the sink and tried not to throw up.