Andy thought now about the Newler she’d met that night behind the homeless shelter; the leaner, younger, more nervous version of the one she had to deal with now. She sat in the car down the street from the Best Western in Dayton and wondered about him and how he’d spent those three days posing as a volunteer care worker and surveilling her in her bunk. Watching her closely enough to know she still carried the .38, her ticket to prison, if she decided to go that way. Closely enough to know that it was suicide or jail or an out for her, and he had maybe the only out that she’d ever want to take.
Dahlia, who today was Andy, tapped the bottom of the steering wheel and wondered if Newler had been in love with her then already. Or if that came sometime later, when he was teaching her to walk like a lawyer from Michigan or talk like a ferry worker from San Francisco or suck down picklebacks like she’d been doing it since her teens in New Hampshire. While the two of them were posing as newlyweds in the Florida Keys, or real estate agents in Utah, or strangers on a train platform in Illinois. Had his love for her been obsessive then, when she was drawn and weak and curled in a ball with her backpack hooked onto her chest and her sleeping arms cradled around everything she had in the world? Or had it grown that way when he tried to make her settle down into a steady, stable, state-sanctioned life in New York? He’d tired of the freelance life, having fallen into the job himself as a bartender in his midtwenties, selling snippets of conversation between local drug dealers to the local cops for twenty bucks apiece. That had been his great love, the watching, the listening, the pretending, the quiet knowing. Now she was his great love, and he’d decided he wanted to go to Quantico and begin a new chapter, and oh, how convenient and wonderful it was: His little project Dahlia fit right into that vision.
He’d tried to marry her, tried to sell the idea of a child to her.
And she said no.
Andy watched the valets at the Best Western, shook her head, tried to veer wildly away from that doomed thought train before she got to Newler’s punishment for that no. When she saw Dammerly Tsaba emerge from the revolving doors at the front of the hotel she got out and straightened her wig and glasses and pantsuit in the reflection in her car window. Her brain wanted to settle into other dark thoughts, into the stomach-plunging humiliation of this morning on the floor of the burning school under Engo, into the day spent resting up, treating her aching shoulder and her blooded eyes at her apartment. But she corralled her thoughts back to the matter at hand as she walked across the street toward the hotel.
Up close, Dammerly was everything Andy expected him to be: a vacuum-seal-tight encasement of an upstanding citizen suctioned around the more degraded, more villainous man that rotted covertly inside. He was like the hotel itself with its brightly lit, spacious, and immaculate rooms online that were really dark, cigarette-stink-riddled boxes shot with a fish-eye. Dammerly’s prison tattoos were peeking from the neck of his blazer, and his nameplate was scratched and askew. The bottom half of his face broke into the smile he was paid to give as Andy approached under the gold entrance lights. But his flat gaze picked over the still-bloodshot whites of her eyes. The power stride had him unnerved from twenty feet out.
“Ma’am, welcome to—”
“Dammerly Tsaba. A word?”
Andy flicked her head toward the dark side of the driveway, away from the safety of the valet’s desk and the cameras. Tsaba knew what was up, clocked his colleague at the other end of the entryway and wandered into the dark with her, swinging a set of keys compulsively by his side.
“Ma’am, something wrong with your service? Are you a guest of the hotel?” Tsaba asked hopefully.
“Cut the crap, Dammerly,” Andy said. “I’m Tylee’s replacement.”
“Oh. Man.” Dammerly huffed a long sigh, let his head hang back against his collar. The recent parolee stared at the stars over New York just starting to peep through the purple cloak of evening. “I knew this was coming. She get fired or what?”
“She got cautioned.” Andy folded her arms with difficulty, her bruised subclavian tendons screaming at the maneuver. “The New York State Board of Parole couldn’t prove the two of you were fucking, but they sure knew something was going on when they tried to double-check Tylee’s last five sign-offs on your residence and discovered you moved out of the apartment two months ago. They don’t look too kindly on relationships between parole officers and their charges, Mr. Tsaba.”
Dammerly put his keys in one pocket of his blazer and pulled his phone from the other. “I gotta call her.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Andy pushed the phone down. “I didn’t come here tonight because I wanted to give you a heads-up before you end your shift, go home, and find she’s taken a shit on your side of the bed. I came here to get my cut.”
Dammerly’s head snapped up. He looked like he wanted to laugh but didn’t. “For real?”
“For real,” Andy said. “Hey, your girlfriend’s had a terrible day. She nearly lost her job because the board knew something was off between you two. But what you’ve got to lose, Dammerly, is far worse than that. So if you want to keep parking cheap cars and pocketing dollar bills from out-of-town businessmen, you better give me my end. Or maybe you want to go back to Queensboro Correctional with all your registered-sex-offender buddies and—”
“Will you keep your fucking voice down? Jesus!”
Andy shrugged, put her hands in the pockets. The suit was cheap, faded at the cuffs, bought off the thrift-store rack that afternoon. Andy had wondered if someone similar to the woman she was playing now had once owned it—someone just smart enough to get a salaried government job but too dumb and impatient to keep that job, work at it honestly for decades, slow-broil it into something that paid enough that she could buy herself new suits just before the old ones fell to rags. Someone like a parole officer who squeezed her charges for petty cash, a lowlife who enjoyed making other lowlifes squirm.
“How much do you want?”
“A thousand bucks will get you to the end of your parole period without any more red flags.”
“Oh, fuck me.”
“You’ve only got three months left and then I’m out of your life. That’s a bargain.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Maybe your girlfriend does.”
“She’s not my girlfriend, man.” Tsaba grimaced, made a tinny, hissing noise through his teeth. “We hooked up a few times and she’s been letting me crash on her couch so I could sublet my place and save money.”
“Look at me.” Andy pointed to her face.
He looked.
“Look at my teeth.” She grinned. “They look white?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“They are. And that’s because I don’t eat bullshit, Dammerly. I got nice white teeth because I don’t sit around all day eating bullshit.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Stop trying to feed it to me.”
“Okay. Jesus.” He glanced at her red eyes and Andy saw him consider a comment, then drop it. Smart.
“I’ll have the cash in my hand when I come back a week from tonight.” She tapped her palm with an index finger. “No excuses. You’re late or short and I’ll file a report saying I smelled alcohol on your breath during our friendly little chat tonight.”
He flinched as though slapped. “Man, who the hell are you?”
“I told you. I’m Tylee’s replacement,” Andy said. “You’ll get an email five minutes from now with all the change-of-case-management details. And while we’re talking computers, I’ll have your staff log-in for the hotel.”
“What?” The man took a step back.
“What?” Andy took a step back also, put her hands out, pantomiming his confusion. “You still don’t get it, do you? You’re under the thumb here, Dammerly. You and Tylee done fucked up. I’m your daddy now. Okay? So I’m not leaving here empty-handed. I want your log-in. Access to the hotel’s room and valet booking system.”
“What do you want that for?”
“Information, Dammerly.” Andy leaned in, smiled, like she was speaking to a child. “You think I got to where I am in the world without knowing what a piece of information is worth? I’m surprised you don’t know what it’s worth. Piece-of-shit career criminal like yourself. You got access to every check-in and check-out and room-service order and parking charge attached to this place going back years. Phone calls to and from rooms. Credit-card payments. Names on visitor lists. Bookings at the restaurant. What are you, an idiot?”
Dammerly twitched, looked browbeaten and three inches shorter than he should have been. “No. I’m not an idiot.”
“Jury’s out on that one, hon.” Andy got out her phone and opened up a page in the Notes app. “The log-in. Right now.”