It was midnight before Andy got to her apartment. She was drunk. Not sloppy, but there was only so much tipping of her drinks into Matt’s garden, or down the sink, or into the pool that Andy could do before someone started to notice. Donna had decided Andy was her new best friend, and she wanted intense conversations all evening, eye-to-eye, the consumption of alcohol unavoidable. So Andy bumbled into the bare, dark space and went to the bathroom and stuck her fingers down her throat, threw up what was in her belly so she could try, at least, to work. The windows were small but curtainless, and the summer night sky over Hell’s Kitchen was dirty orange and cascading in. She put one light on in the bathroom but left the rest of the house bathed in tangerine.
She fitted her AirPods in and stood before the mirror, wiping her makeup off while she listened. The recording from the button cam on Ben’s shirt was playing for the second time. Some of it she had listened to on the train on the way home already.
ENGO: We don’t take commissioned jobs, man. That’s the whole point of what we do. Nobody knows our gigs, because we choose them ourselves.
MATT: This is a one-time-only thing. It’s big enough that we can make an exception.
BEN: Who’s the contact?
MATT: No one. He’s not someone in the life. He’s straight. Just a lawyer who’s flirting with breaking bad.
ENGO: No.
BEN: Absolutely not. I’m with Engo. It’s a “no” from me.
JAKE: I’ve got to say, I’m—
MATT: Shut that hole in your head, Jake. Nobody asked you.
BEN: We have a system. Why would we screw with it?
MATT: You’re right. You’re right. We have a system. We’ve always said: We all have to vote “yes” on a job for it to go ahead. Even this moron here. But you haven’t even heard the whole story yet. You assholes don’t get to enter a vote until you know what the job is.
ENGO: This lawyer. He’s talking about these wills. That’s all very hinky, man. If you forge a will, the family are gonna notice it. You’ve got to have multiple people witness for those things.
MATT: Okay so, look. Let me just explain it. Give me a fucking minute here.
BEN: Go.
MATT: It’s like this: The rich guy had multiple wills. He wrote them all out by hand. He would amend things, change things, get pissed at the kids and cut them out, then next week he’s putting them back in. You know how rich people are. So this lawyer’s working for him. He’s getting these wills every six months or so. The lawyer would approve the new one and file the old ones in his records.
BEN: Okay…?
MATT: So there are three versions of the will that interest us. The most recent three. In the first one, the oldest one, it says that the old man’s baseball card collection is supposed to be split equally between his children. Right? The collection was specifically named in the will. The will says the collection is in a safe, in the old guy’s office in his house on the Upper West Side.
ENGO: Mmm-hmm.
MATT: Then suddenly, the lawyer gets another version of the will from the guy. Because the old man got spooked, right? A couple of break-ins in the neighborhood. He decides it’s stupid to keep such a valuable collection in his own house. So he puts the cards in a safety-deposit box in a facility in Midtown. He puts a couple of other things in there, too. Jewelry and whatever. So he amends his will. The second will just says: “The contents of the safety-deposit box at blah blah location must be split equally between Little Johnny Fat Fuck Junior and all his brothers and sisters.” The baseball cards aren’t specifically mentioned in the second will.
JAKE: Heh! Little Johnny Fat Fuck.
ENGO: Shut up, Jake.
MATT: Then a third will comes. The last will. The current will. And … Wait for it! The will mentions both the contents of the safety-deposit box and the baseball card collection.
BEN: Okay but … does it say that the baseball cards are in the safety-deposit box?
MATT: No. It doesn’t.
ENGO: Ohhh.
MATT: Yeah. It just says “I leave them the contents of the safety-deposit box” and “I leave them the baseball card collection.”
ENGO: It’s like … an error.
MATT: Sort of. I mean, it’s true. He’s leaving them both of those things. But the way you read it, it doesn’t say that one is inside the other. That’s what got the lawyer to wondering about all this.
ENGO: Right. Because if you read the three wills in order, and you don’t know that the guy moved the baseball cards into the safety-deposit box, it reads like those cards are still at the house. Like they stayed at the house the whole time.
MATT: Yeah.
BEN: And nobody else knows about this? Nobody has spotted the error on the will? Not even the witnesses who signed it?
MATT: Apparently not.
BEN: They’re gonna figure it out. The kids.
MATT: How?
BEN: By going to the damn safety-deposit box after we’ve hit it and looking in and seeing no fucking baseball cards. That’s how. If the cards aren’t in the guy’s office at the house, and they aren’t in the safety-deposit box at the facility, and the safety-deposit box facility has just been robbed … It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.
MATT: We’re not gonna hit the facility. We’re going to get in and out without anybody knowing anything’s been touched.
ENGO: How?
MATT: Oh Jesus. With a fire, you stupid asshole!
BEN: I don’t like this.
JAKE: If we—
MATT: Jake, I’m going to kill you right here in this cellar in a minute. I will bury your body under the pool.
ENGO: It might be a go, Ben. The wills, the way they’re written. They disguise the fact that the baseball cards were ever in the safety-deposit box. If we can get in and out of the box without anyone knowing it’s been touched, the whole theft is disguised, man.
MATT: See?
BEN: How are you going to make it look like the box is untouched if there’s been a goddamn fire in the building?
MATT: We’ll get to that.
ENGO: Point is, that if the cards were never in the box, and the box was never robbed, the kids have no reason to look for them there when they discover that they’re missing. When the old man dies, they’re going to expect them to be in the safe in the house.
MATT: It’s good, right?
ENGO: This is the cleanest fucking job I ever heard of. There’s no crime scene. The safety-deposit box is going to be locked tight. Untouched. The kids are going to be sitting there trying to figure out how the cards got robbed out of the house. Or if the guy sold them or gave them away on the sly. Jesus. The house cleaner better start looking for her own lawyer.
BEN: This is not clean, Engo. Are you nuts? The lawyer knows about it. This guy is not in the life. How do we know he’s not a cop?
MATT: So we vet him.
ENGO: What about the cards? How do you move something like that?
MATT: We’ll work it out.
ENGO: When does this have to go down? I mean—
MATT: The old guy’s on death’s door right now.
BEN: Jesus Christ, it’s like I’m speaking in tongues. Why are we even— We don’t do commissioned jobs! We don’t do this kind of kiddie shit! And I mean, baseball cards? Fucking baseball cards? Are you serious? What are they even worth?
MATT: Eight point two million dollars.
Someone banged on Andy’s door. She pulled her AirPods out, put them on the bathroom sink, went out and stared at the door in the dark of the little hall. A dozen possibilities shuttered through her mind. Neighbors. Peddlers. Lost partygoers. She could hear the distant thumping of a get-together on one of the upper floors. When she considered that it might be Newler, that he might have followed her home, her stomach lurched. She went to the door and looked through the peephole, pulled the door open until it clunked against the chain thick with Landlord’s Special cream paint.
“Surprise,” Ben said. He was leaning on the doorframe. Eyes bloodshot, glazed. Andy unlatched the chain, realizing there was a gun in her hand only when the drunk firefighter pointed to it.
“Expecting someone else?”
“How did you find me?”
“Check your back pocket,” Ben said. He walked in, brushed past her. Andy slipped her hand into her jeans and pulled out a GPS tracker. “I stood in the street and watched the building and saw which light came on fastest after you arrived home.”
“Sneaky motherfucker,” Andy said. She guessed it sounded humorous, but it wasn’t. Newler’s presence, even the unrealized potential of it, still sizzled on all her exposed skin.
“Hell yes, I’m sneaky.” Ben was standing in the middle of the bare living room, taking it all in. The boxes stacked against the wall. The mattress on the floor with its pillow and sheet set, the rumpled duvet. “I did tag Matt’s stash bag. Then I changed my mind. I went down to the cellar and took the tag back out. Paired it with my phone. Put it in your pocket.”
They both stared at the lonely mattress in the middle of the floor. The empty rooms beyond.
“What’s in the boxes?”
“Thrift-store stuff.” Andy waved at the boxes absentmindedly. “First thing I do when I get into a role. Hit a bunch of thrift stores. Buy all the character’s personal belongings.”
“Look at you. You’ve even organized them.” Ben was looking at the tape on the tops, the marker labels she’d written on the sides. KITCHEN. BATHROOM. BEDROOM. CLOTHES. “Like you really did just fucking fly in from San Diego.”
Andy said nothing.
“Where are your actual things?”
“What actual things?”
Ben stared at her. “Your … your things. Your personal belongings.”
“There aren’t any.”
“But where’s home base?”
She gestured to the bed. “Here.”
Ben’s eyes were suddenly clear. “Why the hell do you do this to yourself?” he asked. “What happened to you, that you want to live like this?”
He looked sad. And the sadness cast a line down, threaded it through her sadness, the heavy, deeply sunken one, and tried to haul it upward out of the blackness into which she’d drowned it.
She snapped the thread.
“Ben, are you here for a reason?”
“Well, yeah. I’m here to tell you to get your ass into gear and find Luna and Gabriel,” he said. “Because I want my fucking family back.”
“You said this at the barbecue.”
“And I don’t want to do the job. I don’t want to rob a goddamn safety-deposit-box facility. I’m going to get myself or someone else shot or burned to death, and I’d much rather go to jail.”
“Baseball cards.” Andy nodded, grateful for the turn in conversation. “It’s smart. I did a little light Googling. For that amount of money, you could be looking at pre–World War I cards. No serial numbers. Easy to fence.”
“It’s not happening,” Ben said. “We’ll be in jail by the time the old man dies. Because you’re going to find Luna and Gabe and end all this.”
“I’m working on it.”
“No, you’re not!” Ben was suddenly looming over her, his back to the fire-stained night. A broad-shouldered, beer-scented silhouette. “You’re wasting your time trying to wheedle your way into the crew. It’s the robberies you’re interested in. You and your boss. Because millions of dollars’ worth of burglaries makes headlines. Dead Mexican mothers and their kids don’t.”
He sat on the edge of the mattress suddenly. Just plopped down. It was softer than he expected. He had to rock himself forward so he didn’t tumble over backward.
“Let me tell you a story.” Ben groaned as he righted himself and gripped his cracked ribs. “I had this cop up in Paterson. I was living there for a while with a foster family. Guy hauled me in from the street. I was … I don’t know, fifteen? He was trying to bust me on a bunch of damage some punks did to a car yard. Looked like a kid’s work. Windows broken. Cars dented. Spray paint.”
Andy sat beside him on the edge of the mattress. She put the gun down on the carpet.
“The guy says”—Ben jerked a thumb over his shoulder, imitating, remembering—“‘Oh, guess what? We actually got your mom in holding right now. Marissa Haig. That’s your mother, right? We just picked her up for soliciting. How funny—mother and child both in the same station at the same time. Weird. Anyway look, kid, we’ll do you a favor: We’ll help your mom out if you just admit to a couple of things here for us.’”
“Ben,” Andy said, “I think you should go home.”
“So I say,” he carried on, his words slurring, “‘Okay, I’ll admit I was in the area. I maybe saw something.’ And the guy’s like ‘Great. Great. We’ve taken your mother out of the drunk tank, she’s away from the crazies and she’s in her own private cell. Tell us more.’ The guy got me to admit it all. Step by step. While he gave my mother dinner, let her have her phone call, had her charges bumped down. But guess what?”
“She was never there,” Andy said.
“She was never there.”
“Ben,” Andy said, “I’m not stringing you along on my search for Luna and Gabriel so that I can tangle you up for the heists. I’m not an indolent, conniving beat cop trying to score easy-solve numbers by railroading a defenseless teenager.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m an experienced undercover specialist trying to find a missing mother and child. And I’m not going to bust you, or let anyone else bust you, until I’ve done that.”
Ben was looking right through her.
“I need to get as close as I can to Matt, Engo, and Jake,” she said. “I need them to trust me. I need them to accept me. This is what I do, Ben.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you do this?”
“You need to go home.” Andy stood. “You’re drunk, and I’m tired, and I’ve said all I’m going to say tonight.”
“Fine.” Ben got up, toppled, almost fell on the bed. Andy watched him as he struggled out of his boots. “It’s bedtime, then. Excellent.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to bed,” Ben said. “That’s right. That’s half the reason I came here. Because I know where you live now, Andy. So it’s payback time. This is what you get. You want to be my undercover girlfriend? You want to play charades? Well, now you’re the one who gets to have a naked stranger force their way into your goddamn bed. Let’s see how you like it.”
He tore his shirt off and his jeans and climbed onto the bed, dragged the blanket over himself while Andy just stood there, mortification pulsing through her. She waited, giving him time to drop the game and get up and leave. But the seconds passed, and she watched the lump at the top of the bed rising and falling as he breathed.
“Ben,” she said. “I get it.”
Nothing.
“You’ve made your point,” she tried.
He didn’t move.
“This isn’t funny!” Andy yelled. She kicked the mattress. “Get out of my goddamn bed!”
Ben didn’t stir. She was twitching with anger, watching the city lights, trying to think of her next move when she heard him begin to snore.
The second day after a proper beating was the worst. Andy knew that from experience. So she wasn’t surprised by all the groaning and wheezing when Ben started to wake, the hangover teaming up with the aftermath of the bashing to force him back down into the pillow a couple of times. Andy sat near him on the edge of the mattress in the morning light, drinking coffee, thinking about the nightmares that had plagued her in the dark hours.
She’d been back there. Twenty-two and untainted by what was about to happen, sitting behind the counter of her parents’ gas station in the desert south of Sheffield, Texas. Listening to Kanye West. She recalled now that her biggest worry in the world had been whether she was ever going to make it into a life and a city where she frequented places where gold diggers hunted rappers for their money. Where there were nightclubs and skyscrapers and subways, where she could have friends she hadn’t met on MySpace. She’d remembered the college chemistry textbook she’d had on the counter that night, and the magazine tucked inside it. Brad and Angelina and their domestic bliss in Kenya. Cover under cover, in case her father came in from the house attached to the back of the gas station and tried to check on her. So many of the details of that night had been stored away somewhere in perfect detail. Others were invented. In the dream, Andy saw the headlights of the first car coming down the road. In real life, she hadn’t seen the men who would destroy her until they were already out there by the gas pumps.
She’d snapped awake, drenched in sweat and struggling to breathe, at 3 A.M. Ben hadn’t stirred, but she braced herself now for him to say something about it.
The nightmares hadn’t come in years. Why were they back now?
Ben sat up, rubbed his eyes and reached over and took her coffee out of her hand like it was for him. Didn’t even question why it was half empty. She let him have it. She cut over him before he could ask her what she was afraid he would ask.
“Time to get up,” she said.
“Why?”
“I think I know where we can find Luna’s car.”