She felt, rather than saw, the reaction. Her words sent a bolt of electricity right though Benjamin Haig, seizing the air in his chest. Raw seconds passed, in which she read the paper and he tried to come to terms with what was happening. When she looked up again, he’d collected himself a little. But the fork was being white-knuckled in his fist and all the muscles in his neck were wire-tight.
“Detective Johnson sent you?” he asked his eggs.
“No,” Andy said. “He got your letter and passed it on to his superiors. I was called in about five days ago.”
“Oh good.” Ben’s wild eyes flicked to her. “So fifty goddamn people know about this already.”
“No, you just—”
“I’m out.” He shoved his eggs away and stood. He was bigger than she’d anticipated. Broad-shouldered and roped with muscle. “I don’t need this.”
“Yeah, you do.” She turned back to her paper. He’d stopped by her chair, and she could smell him. He hadn’t showered after the fabric-store fire from the night before. He reeked of chemicals and body odor and grief. “If you want to find Luna and Gabriel, you need this, Ben.”
He thought about it. Then walked back to his stool, slipped onto it, slow and numb. People had noticed the tension between them. Of course they had, it was bouncing off the countertop like welding sparks. But they went back to their own business soon enough. Andy sipped her coffee. It was good.
“Detective Johnson knew this was too big for him,” Andy said carefully. “He went directly to his superior, who kicked it over to the FBI. An agent there, Tony Newler, reviewed the situation and made a decision to call in a specialist. I’m that specialist.”
“If the crew find out I’ve flipped”—Ben eased the words out—“I’ll be dead. You get that? They will kill me. It’ll happen on the job, or I’ll just disappear. I’ll end up in a hole up north somewhere. No one will ever find my body.”
“Do you think that’s what’s happened to Luna and her child?” Andy kept her tone neutral. She flipped the newspaper to read the bottom half of the cover. The front page was about the fabric-store fire. “Do you believe your crew put them in a hole somewhere?”
“I don’t know! That’s the whole point.”
They sat in silence for a while. Jimmy’s people yelled out order numbers and scraped the griddle. Andy took her phone out, eventually, and zeroed in on the photograph she had taken of Ben’s letter.
“‘I am worried that my girlfriend might have discovered something about what the crew and I have been doing,’” she read. Ben kept his head low. “‘Either the last job we pulled, or one of the ones we did in the past. I am worried she and her son might have been killed to silence them.’”
“You don’t have to read me the letter,” Ben said. “I wrote it. I know what it says.”
“‘My efforts to find Luna and Gabriel have come to nothing, and the police officers handling her case are not taking it seriously. I am—’”
“‘I am willing to cooperate to help police solve a number of high-level criminal cases if police will help me investigate my fellow crew members.’” Ben worked his jaw. “Yes I know. I wrote it. I read it a thousand times before I handed it in.”
“Those cases,” Andy said. “They’re burglaries.”
“Why would I say that to you now?” Ben leaned back on his stool, exhausted. “You haven’t given me anything.”
“Reading between the lines, it looks like you’re talking about burglaries,” Andy said. “You talk about ‘valuables.’ You call them ‘jobs.’”
“I don’t know why we’re doing this here.” He looked around.
“We could do it in an interrogation room, if you like.” She smiled, flipping to the sports.
She felt his eyes on her.
“So what are you, then? An agent?”
“I’m a specialist.”
“I wanted Johnson. I picked him on purpose,” Ben said. “He’s not connected to anybody in Midtown. And he solved that … that murder last year. The waitress. Everybody said she’d just gone back home to Mexico. I read about it in the paper.”
“I told you. Detective Johnson isn’t trained for this.”
“For what?” Ben was leaning in. The smell again. “What kind of specialist are you? I don’t even know your name.”
“You can call me…” She gave it a few seconds of consideration. Never more than that. “Andy.”
“What are you, FBI or something?”
“I need to get this straight, Mr. Haig,” Andy said carefully. “You believe one or all of your crew—Matthew Roderick, Englemann Fiss, and Jacob Valentine—may be responsible for their murders. That Luna found out about what you’d been doing and the crew got worried she was going to go to the police. They decided to silence her. The kid was collateral.”
She turned to him. His head was down now, grimy fingers raked up into his dark hair, his elbows splayed over the eggs. She knew that putting the situation so plainly was making him question the whole thing. But she wanted him to question it. Really examine what he was doing. Because she needed him fully on board, not with one foot still on the pier.
“Matt wouldn’t kill a kid,” Ben murmured, almost to himself. Andy could barely hear him. “He’s got six of his own. One on the way. He talks a lot of shit but he wouldn’t … But Engo. Engo, maybe. If Matt ordered it, then…”
“You don’t believe it was something else,” Andy pressed. “You fully believe it was one or all of them?”
Ben thought. For a full minute, he was completely still, staring at his plate.
Then he nodded.
“I’m going to just go ahead and assume you’re talking about high-stakes robberies in this letter.” Andy put her phone down. “But you haven’t been specific enough about which cases you’ll cooperate on. And is it just burglaries that we’re talking about? I notice that you don’t mention Titus Cliffen when you talk about your past crimes. Was he not part of your crew?”
Ben didn’t speak.
“Titus was killed in a workplace accident,” Andy went on. “Did he find out about the crew, too? Was he murdered? Is that why you’re so convinced Matt, Engo, and Jake might have had a hand in what happened to Luna and Gabe?”
Ben just shook his head. Exhausted, angry.
Andy sipped her coffee, ran some things through in her mind. Approaching Ben in the café had been the final big-ticket item on her list. She had decided to take the job. But that just meant starting a whole new list. Phase Two. The Entry. She opened the newspaper and turned it to the back and folded it again so the apartment listings were on top. The last sip of coffee wasn’t as good as the first. Dish-soap residue in the bottom of the cup. She stood, and Ben sensed her movement.
His head snapped up. “Wait.”
“You’ve got some things to do.” Andy held his eyes with hers. Because it was all business now. Not a curiosity. And she needed him to feel it. “You need to get this under control.”
“What?”
“This.” She gestured at his face, his body. The complete package. From the perspective of the gawky diners, she probably looked like an ex telling a guy to clean up his life. Maybe she’d give him a second chance if he did. “The shaky hands. The twitchy eyes. You need to get your head together, Ben. Shave off the grief beard and pick yourself up. Because when I come back into your life, you’re going to need to be a man who’s finished grieving. A guy coming to terms with the idea that his girlfriend just took the kid and ran off home to Mexico.”
“I don’t understand.” Ben shook his head. “Where are you— When are you coming back?”
“It’s better if you don’t know,” she said. “Or you’ll be expecting me.”
She dropped some bills on the counter. He had the look of a dog being abandoned on a roadside.
“And take a shower, for God’s sake.”
2022
The callout was for a kid, so that had gotten everybody hustling. Always did. A guy could be three minutes from the end of his shift, his replacement already in-house an hour earlier, shooting the shit with the day crew in the hall between squad rooms, his mind already in his bed at home. Then a child-in-peril callout comes in, and he’s hard-nosed and hungry like it’s his first minute on the job. Ben remembered they were about midshift when they got the alert from Dispatch. Sundown. A kid was stuck outside the 7-Eleven on Eighth and Thirty-Ninth. Jakey was so geed up he was grinding his teeth in the back of the engine. Even Engo looked awake.
The excitement shorted out pretty quick. It was clear from a block away that the kid wasn’t in any real danger. A crowd hadn’t formed on the sidewalk, and traffic was still moving. Matt parked the engine, got a measure of the situation, then went inside the store to buy a Coke. Ben got a glimpse of the mother. Curvaceous, beautiful, Latina. So he pushed ahead of Engo before the guy could say something awful in greeting. The woman was standing over the kid, her face taut and veined with stress.
“Fire department,” Ben said. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Aw, Jesus.” The mother straightened and gestured to the kid, let her hands slap loudly on her painted-on jeans. “This kid. This kid! I’m gonna have a goddamn heart attack out here. I stopped to check my phone for five seconds—five seconds! And look at this. Just look! Jesus Christ!”
Ben assessed the predicament. The boy of maybe three years old was bent at the waist. His head of close-cropped black hair was thrust through a U-lock, that U-lock connecting a rusted bike body to a rack. The rack was bolted to the sidewalk. There were thousands of bike carcasses like this one chained to racks all over the city, even more in the Hudson, rented or bought cheap by tourists and then abandoned after they flew out. It had been picked over for everything that could be repurposed or hocked by the homeless. Now only the trapezium-shaped midsection of the bike remained, its heavy-duty U-shaped lock hanging around the neck of its tiny human attachment. The kid was drenched from the neck up in vegetable oil, and there was a half-empty bottle standing nearby, an attempt by someone to grease him up and slip him loose. The kid was growl-crying. Big snot bubbles. If everybody hadn’t been so upset, it might have been funny, the tiny pudgy man sentenced to time in the medieval stocks.
“He stuck his head through there while you weren’t looking?” Ben surmised.
“It just—it just—it happened so fast.”
“It’s okay.” Ben felt bad for the lady. “It’s an easy fix.”
“Why do they have this sitting here?” The mother slapped both hands to the sides of her head now, raked her curls back from the sweat on her face. “Who leaves half a goddamn bike chained up like this? Why the huge lock if you’re not gonna come back for the bike?”
“Ma’am—”
“Why doesn’t the city come and cut this thing off?”
“Quit your complainin’,” Engo snorted. “This is on you, not the city. You should have kept an eye on your kid, lady. You’re in New York, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Engo.”
“What?” Engo gave the woman a look-over. “Okay—so today the kid got his head stuck in a bike rack. Lucky you, missy. You don’t change your ways, and tomorrow they’ll be scraping him off the underside of a taxicab. Or pullin’ his corpse out of a manhole.”
“I was watching him!” the lady barked. “I-I-I had to take a call from my boss!”
“So your job is more important than your kid now?”
“Engo! Fuck, man!”
“What can I say? I just—I see this all the time.” He took off his helmet, gave the sigh of the disenchanted. “Modern mothers addicted to their phones. It’s sad, is what it is. There’s a whole generation bein’ raised without—”
“Man, what the fuck are you sayin’ to me right now?” The lady came at Engo. Ben just managed to get an arm around her in time. “Who even is this guy? You’re gonna come here and-and-and judge my parenting? I called you for help! Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Stop, stop, stop, stop.” Ben took the mother by the shoulders as gently as he could. “Jakey, cut the kid free, will ya? Engo, fuck off.”
He took the lady to the mouth of an alley where she could still see her kid. Jakey had been soothing the child and seemed to just about have him smiling already. He went to the engine to get a Hurst tool and Engo stepped in to take over clown duty and ruined all Jakey’s good work. Ben’s main concern was the woman. She dumped her huge handbag at her feet and kicked it hard.
“Listen.” Ben put his gloved hands up in surrender. “Listen to me. This kind of stuff happens. All right? Okay? This is nothing. The kid is fine. You want to hear about bad mothers? You wouldn’t believe the—”
The lady burst into tears.
Then she fell into his arms.
As a firefighter, Ben had been hugged by strangers a million times. He understood it. Emotions were high wherever he went, and the uniform—the heavy jackets and the helmets and the huge heatproof boots—tickled that corner of the brain reserved for football mascots and superheroes. But when Luna Denero hugged Ben that day, a padlock fell off an old, rusty iron door somewhere inside him. It was a door he’d been pulling on and struggling with, breaking and bending keys in, for much of his adult life. Suddenly every inch of his skin was on fire. Humiliation and exhilaration and desire and horror. He did something that surprised himself then. Instead of stiffening and waiting for it to be over like he usually did, he seized the moment and wrapped his arms around her and rocked her a little, feeling like the luckiest son of a bitch in New York.
He held her for maybe twenty seconds, and in that time, five guys in the steady flow of foot traffic glanced over at the firefighter hugging the Latina beauty with the huge brown eyes and cheeks for weeks and gave him a glare that sent pain waves right down to his balls. Then she broke it off, thumbed her mascara back into place, and was just as dry and hard and put-together as she had been when she’d tried to scratch Engo’s eyeballs out a minute earlier.
Jakey was cutting the U-lock off the screaming kid with the hydraulic Hurst tool. Engo was trying to scare off the crowd, who had started gawking and filming now that there were flashing lights and uniforms to look at. Matt was standing at the open door of the engine, an elbow on the high seat, guzzling the Coke and watching the fray.
“Where’s my handbag?” Luna asked.
Ben looked down at the ground, at the spot at the mouth of the alley not three feet from them where the woman had drop-kicked the bag.
It was gone.
He’d found the bag.
It had taken him most of the night, and he’d walked all over the city. Afterward, he’d felt pretty clever about it. If his parents hadn’t been no-good junkies and his mind hadn’t been poisoned against the police from before he was even out of the womb, he would have made a passable cop. Ben had returned to the 7-Eleven after his shift, got a printout of the skinny figure in the ball cap captured by the store’s CCTV scooping up the handbag from the alleyway and walking away without even slowing his pace. He’d stared hard at the image: the young man bent double, reaching for the bag, twelve people in the frame and none of them seeing the grab. Ben figured the guy was a seasoned thief. He’d shown the picture around all the local scumbags, paid out a couple of hundred bucks in bribes. The CD peddlers near Central Park couldn’t help him, and neither could the elders of the homeless communities in the Financial District. He struck out with the men and women in red uniforms standing in Times Square, the ones hawking tickets to hop-on, hop-off bus rides for tourists. He quizzed the sellers of knockoff handbags spread out on sheets on the sidewalk, the guys with sunglasses stands, the ice cream and kebab truck drivers. He focused on the shoplifters taking breaks outside the stores on Fifth Avenue for a while, kids sweating in their big jackets and baggy jeans. For a sizable bribe, these skinny youths had helped him dig up some TikTok footage of the crew cutting the boy’s head free of the U-lock, and he’d gotten a better image of the thief from that.
About 2 a.m. he had a name. At 3 a.m. he had an address. At 4 a.m. he’d knocked on the asshole’s door and dragged him out into the stuffy hallway of his walk-up in the projects in a yet-ungentrified corner of Brooklyn. Ben had thrown the guy clean through the drywall beside his apartment door and back into his own living room. At 5:30 a.m. Ben was dumpster-diving for the handbag in trash cans outside a diner back at Times Square.
Luna was trying to hustle the kid out the door of her apartment in Dayton and get him off to daycare when Ben came walking down the hall at about 7:30 a.m., the bag strap clutched in his fist and a big dorky grin on his face.