Ben pulled up at the gates of Belafonte Towing, northeast of Summit, and barely had the engine off before he was striding toward her in a suit with an open collar. The breeze off the Passaic River was carrying a fishy sourness toward her mixed with engine oil from the yard. Andy was so mentally tangled in the ruse she’d had to play to get Dammerly Tsaba to cooperate with her, and the whole separate one she’d played on Nathaniel Belafonte to get unsupervised access to the tow yard, that she just watched Ben coming toward her and was unguarded against the thought that he looked good. There was a wrongness to the combination of the beautiful navy wool suit that Kenny had probably bought him against his will and the smudgy bruise under his eye and the cut in his forehead. It was the same dark partnership of opulence and violence that action-movie lovers thrived on. Andy examined the thought and resisted the urge to give herself a hard slap.
“Are you okay?” he asked again as they came together. “Jesus, look at your eyes.”
“I said I was fine. Where were you?”
“Meeting with Matt and the lawyer about the job.”
“You might have told me that.” She gave a regretful click of her tongue. “I would have given you the button cam.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t tell you.” Ben looked her over. Seemed to want to question the pantsuit but didn’t. “You’ll have enough on the crew from the meeting in Matt’s basement. And there’s no point in coming after the lawyer. He’ll be dead by Christmas. Can we just do this?”
Andy led him into the yard. Their shoes crunched on wet gravel. A row of semitrailers had been backed in against the trees lining the river, and beyond them sat a row of squat, sturdy tow trucks. Andy took out a set of keys and unlocked a cyclone fence into a second yard. These were the repossessed, reclaimed, and dumped cars the Belafontes were probably hoping to sell once their rightful ownerships had been established.
Luna Denero’s car was in the farthest corner of the lot. Ben spied it and ran there. Andy raced after him. “Ben! Ben. You can’t touch it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a crime scene.”
“Tell me you didn’t bring me here just to stare at it from the outside.” He stopped at the bumper of the car and wheeled on her.
“Cool it, cool it.” She put her hands up. Andy tugged a pair of disposable gloves from her back pocket. “I’m going to open it up. You just can’t get in, okay?”
He nodded, and she pulled the driver’s-side door open. Andy reached in and hit the roof light with her knuckle. Ben’s eyes roved around the car, and Andy observed him closely as she opened the passenger side and both back doors. Luna’s car was filled with the kinds of things a busy mother collected in her vehicle. Takeout wrappers, toys, children’s clothes, water bottles, carefully collected sticks and leaves. Ben walked around the outside of the car, leaned in, and squinted when she opened the glove compartment.
“Anything weird? Anything out of place?”
“No.” His mouth was twisted. “Not really.”
There was a little blue backpack wedged between Gabriel’s safety seat and the front passenger seat. Ben did two laps of the car, looking at it several times, before he stopped and pointed at the bag.
“Can you?” he asked.
Andy pulled out the bag, dusted cookie crumbs off its exterior, and unzipped it. Ben looked in as she shifted aside a handful of pencil drawings and a lunch box and showed him the bottom of the bag.
What he saw made him sit down right there on the gravel of the tow yard. He cradled his head in his hands.
“What?”
“The nail.”
Andy backed off and tilted the bag in the car’s dome light, looked in. At the very bottom, a dark, rough shape. She pulled it out. It was hard and heavy in her hands, square, the cold feel of it in her palm reminding her of the butt of a gun. Andy came toward Ben, but he turned his face away sharply. She waited. On the banks of the river, something moaned, a night bird in the trees.
“We saw a, uh, a video on YouTube.” Ben cleared his throat. “Magnet fishing. Gabe and me. You get a powerful magnet and you attach it to the end of a rope and just chuck it into the Hudson and see what you pull up. People film themselves doing it and they put it on the internet. The kid wanted to try it out, so I made it happen. I was, uh…” He rubbed his nose on the back of his hand. “I was half worried we were gonna come up with a gun or a syringe or something. I mean, it’s New York.”
Andy sat on the gravel in front of Ben. The gold light from behind him was making the rims of his ears glow red.
“We hauled in half a bucket of junk, and then there was that.” Ben pointed to the rusty nail in Andy’s hand, finally showed her his face. His eyes were wet. “It’s a railway nail. An old one. Gabe was just … He couldn’t handle it. He was so excited. He wanted us to pack everything up and go home to show Luna, right then and there. We’d only been out fishing half an hour.”
Andy examined the nail.
“He wouldn’t have left it behind,” Ben said. “Luna—she wouldn’t have let him leave it behind. That nail went everywhere with us. If we— If we drove twenty minutes to go pick up Luna from work, and Gabe realized he didn’t have the nail with us in the car, he’d make me drive back and get it. Like he would lose his freakin’ mind.”
Andy nodded. She put the nail back in the bag, zipped it up, wedged it in the spot in front of Gabe’s seat. By the time she had closed the car up completely, Ben was on his feet, standing in the aisle between the vehicles, staring unseeing at the bumper of a hotted-up black Escalade. They started walking together toward the street.
“What happens to the car now?”
“My boss will claim it. It’ll be forensically examined.”
“So it came here from the hotel? It had been inside the hydraulic parking space?”
Andy nodded. “It went there the first night. Was there for six days before the hotel had it towed. Luna put it in under her own name. Gave her driver’s license.”
Ben walked, his arms folded and his head down.
“I have a log-in to the hotel’s intranet belonging to one of the valets,” Andy said. “I’ve managed to gain some information that helps. But I was hoping for more. There’s no CCTV access, for example. But I can access the check-in and booking sheet from the week she went missing. Luna paid for parking at the Best Western that night, although there’s no room or restaurant booking under her name. I want to show you those lists and see if you recognize any names, in case she was meeting with someone you know.”
“Okay.” Ben stopped at the gates to the tow yard. “I’ll wait for you to lock up and we’ll convoy back to my place.”
Andy felt a flicker of something guilty and painful in her stomach, something she told herself was not desire. “Look, I’m tired. So are you. Let’s take this up in the morning.”
“Tell me the log-in details.” Ben pulled out his phone. “I might be able to work my way into the back end of the hotel’s systems with it. Get the CCTV. Maybe there are incident reports. Emails I could look at.”
“Right. I forgot you’re the tech-head,” Andy said. She remembered the bug Ben had most likely placed at the jewelry-store robbery. The one that had accessed, pillaged, and then knocked out the security systems. While she read out the details, she thought about the bug that had shut down the cameras in the apartment in Kips Bay. She held her phone next to his so he could copy the log-in details. “Where’d you learn all that stuff?”
“A teacher. Some high school somewhere. I can’t remember.” He waved a hand dismissively. “The guy tried to help me out. He knew I wasn’t going to hit a home run with the jocks so he put me in with the computer nerds.”
“You never wanted to go into that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s a normal-person job,” he said, his eyes on the screen. Andy felt a hard twinge in her chest at the knowledge that being placed in a stable, predictable IT job was as destined to work out for Ben Haig as it would be for her. That the thing that made him thrive in a high-stakes environment where he could be burned or crushed to death any day in a fire, or killed by his psychopathic boss, was the same thing that made her want to spend her days walking a high wire over being discovered and killed for infiltrating a possibly murderous crew of thieves. They weren’t normal people. What had happened to them had ruined them for desks and emails and team meetings.
“Don’t stay up all night doing that. You’re on duty tomorrow.”
“Fuck that. I’ll work the case tonight, you work it tomorrow during the day,” Ben said. “You’re off the crew now. You’ve got free time.”
“Ben, I’ll be getting myself back on the crew one way or another,” Andy insisted. “I meant what I said. I’m not just chasing a cold case here. I’m trying to bring down a crew of thieves. I need to be as close to the planning of the Borr Storage job as I can be.”
They stood facing each other, their hands in their pockets, the hard white moon making shadows of their bodies on the pavement.
“It’s not just about that, though, is it?” Ben said. “If we’re really honest with each other.”
Andy waited for it to come. Ben watched her eyes.
“You want to know if we murdered Officer Willstone.”
Andy drew a long breath before she answered, let it out slowly. “Now why would you say a thing like that?”
“Because it makes sense,” Ben said. “The longer and harder you go at this, Andy, the more I get to thinking there’s more in this for you than a few heists. You might have been able to sell it to me in the beginning that that’s why you’re here. Because you really care about Luna and Gabe, and the heist stuff is all bonus material. But, come on. Someone hired you. They paid good money for you. They’re not going to do that for burglaries, and a Mexican mother and her child.”
“What do you know about Willstone?”
“I saw that case. Of course I did. There was talk all around the station. Whoever did it used a Hurst tool.”
Andy felt her mouth run dry. “That detail wasn’t published in the papers.”
“You think cops and firefighters don’t talk? We had detectives crawling all over us. Every station did. They told us why. It’s because a set of Jaws was used.”
“Did you do it, Ben?” Andy asked. He shook his head, started to walk back toward the car. She got in front of him. “Look at me and answer the question. Did your crew do that robbery? Did you kill that officer because he walked up on you?”
Ben leaned into her. She could smell champagne on his breath. He jabbed her in the breast with his index finger. She looked down, realized he was poking the top button of her shirt.
“No camera. I’m surprised.”
“You have to understand something,” Andy said. “You made a bargain with the FBI: You’d give up your crew for the robberies if we find Luna and Gabriel. But you never said you’d confess to a murder.”
Ben said nothing.
“Exchanging ten years of jail time might have been worth it to you, in the beginning,” Andy continued. “You find them, dead or alive, and you pay the price you deemed fair. But if I find out that you and Engo and Jake and Matt murdered an off-duty police officer? You’ll be paying a lot more time than you’ve originally bargained for, Ben. You’ll be looking at life on the inside.”
He just watched her.
“Will it still be worth it?” Andy insisted. “Or are you going to bail out? Will you stick around long enough to know what happened to your family, and then run?”
“Are you holding back on finding them so you can take me for Willstone’s murder?” Ben cocked his head. “Is that what this is?”
“No. I wouldn’t hold back on finding a mom and her kid who might be in danger, Ben. And fuck you for suggesting that I would.”
“I can see it, though. You stick by me and the crew until we’ve done the Borr Storage job. You parlay that into a confession about Willstone. Put Jake, Engo, and Matt in different rooms, see which one cracks first. Suddenly you’ve got a string of high-stakes heists and a cop-murder confession in the bag. Fuck the woman and her child. They’re a garnish.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.” Andy gestured at the gates to the tow yard. “You can see where we are, right? I brought you here, to the car. I’m working the case, Ben.”
He stared up at the moon. It made his face look pale purple, the stitches in his brow like painter’s brushstrokes.
“We used to lie on the couch together and watch all those YouTube videos,” he said. “Me and Gabe. One after the other. The internet would lead us around. First it was magnet fishing. Then it was science experiments. Then it was facts about animals. I hardly watched them. I just used to love feeling him lying on my chest. I used to pretend I was a dad, you know? But one time, we watched this video about tarantulas. You know sometimes they team up with frogs?”
Andy frowned.
“It’s true.” Ben nodded, his eyes drifting down from the moon to her face. “In the Amazon. Frogs and tarantulas make a deal. The tarantula protects the tiny frog from predators, while the frog protects the tarantula’s eggs from whatever might want to eat them. The frog and the spider both live in the same burrow.”
“Ben—”
“What do you think happens to the frog, after the tarantula’s eggs hatch?” he asked. “After he’s stopped being useful and there are three dozen hungry mouths to feed?”
Andy didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. She watched him get into the car, start it up, and pull away. The strange flickerings of desire that she’d felt only moments before had mutated into revulsion.
There was no security system outside the apartment building in the Bronx, save for an elderly man with a walking stick and milky eyes who watched Andy all the way up the cracked path. The man didn’t speak as she shunted open the heavy glass doors, walked through the foyer toward the yard out back. The air inside the building was thick with the smell of cooking oil and the sounds of competing televisions. At the rear entrance, another old man sagged in a plastic chair, this one asleep, a paint can full of cigarette butts almost overflowing by his slippered feet.
Engo was standing on the fold-out steps of a sun-scorched trailer sitting in the middle of the yard, listening as a man and woman argued before him. He had the look of an overworked night judge hearing a car-repayment dispute. When he saw Andy coming, his eyes flashed. He pointed to the man and the woman in turn.
“All right, all right, all right,” Engo said. “You, buy a set of headphones and watch your porn with them on. You, tell your kids to grow up. Your boys are eight and ten now. If their minds are dirtied up by a little groaning coming through the air vents they better stay the hell off the streets.” He waved the warring neighbors away. “Now scram.”
Andy came to the edge of the light flooding through the trailer’s grimy push-out windows. She stood there with her hands in the pockets of her hoodie. Let Engo enjoy his moment looking down on her.
“Don’t I know you?” Engo said. “We used to work together, right?”
“Can I come in?”
“Oh, hell no.” Engo laughed. “You seen yourself in the mirror? You look like that demon child from The Omen. You might be here to stick a knife in me for getting you so good with that viper bite.”
“I just want to talk.” Andy put her hands out. “I need your help, okay?”
The potbellied overlord lingered on the steps and weighed his decision for a while, enjoying every last inch of the three-foot height difference as the seconds ticked by. Andy thought of the obtuse little mustached man who answered the big doors of Emerald City. Eventually Engo went inside, and she all but crawled in through the tiny door after him.
Inside, there were objects crammed into every space, the paraphernalia of a man who owned and operated and acted as super for a low-rent apartment building. A toilet cistern leaned against the lower cabinet doors of the kitchenette, and fly screens covered in an oily brown substance were stacked in one corner. An upturned milk crate served as a guest chair. Andy sat and Engo sank into a human-shaped groove in a filthy gray corduroy recliner.
“Before you say anything”—Engo swept the air with his hands—“it wasn’t my idea to have me put a hold on you today. That was all Matt. He came to me and asked me what I could do to incapacitate you without major physical injury so that we could run a little test on Ben. And sure, I mean, he was asking the right guy.” Engo laughed, popped his chest. “That subclavian pressure-point hold? That comes from the Japanese. The samurai came up with it. Not the assholes you see in the movies. The real ones. In my twenties I trained with a couple of them in Tohoku. Nice area. You know it?”
Andy opened her mouth to answer.
“The Japanese know a whole lot about pressure points,” Engo said before she could. “Not just pain ones. The pleasure ones, too. You got a point between your thumb and index finger there. I grab a hold of that wrong, and you won’t be lifting your arm for a whole month. There’s another inside your ear canal, though. I get that just right and the orgasm will make you rethink your entire life, honey.”
“Engo, I didn’t come here to—”
“I can’t give you your job back,” Engo cut her off. He showed her all eight fingers, leaned his head against the grease spot on the recliner’s headrest. “Sure, I told you when you first arrived that I’m the go-to man at the station. Matty wears the boss’s helmet, while I’m the true heart of the crew. The guy on the ground. And I stand by all that. But I don’t have any part in staff relations. That’s just a headache I don’t need.”
“But you have Matt’s ear, Engo,” Andy said. “You could at least tell him what I’ve said here tonight.”
“Look, you can say whatever you want”—Engo shrugged—“it was Benny Boy’s actions that signed your marching papers today, honey. One yelp from you and he was up those stairs like a rat out of a flooded basement. Pe-tow!” Engo shot an arm through the air, cackling. “And hey, I get it! If I had something like you on the line, I’d get on my horse to ride out and defend my princess, too.”
Andy sighed.
“Maybe ‘princess’ is wrong, though.” Engo’s eyes were penetrating hers. “You know, you can tell what a woman sounds like in the bedroom by how she screams when she’s in pain. I was dating this woman for a while. Cut it off because she had a baby and things got real stale. You know what? She sounded exactly the same in the maternity ward as she did in there.” He jerked his thumb toward what Andy assumed was the trailer’s bedroom. She didn’t look. Engo grinned.
“You must sing a beautiful song in between the sheets, am I right?”
Andy shifted her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. She had to unlock her jaw to speak. “Engo,” she said carefully, “I’m here as a fellow firefighter. I’m here as a colleague. I’ve got my hat in my hand. If you think that means you get to sit there and talk to me like I’m one of the crack whores who rents a room in your shithole apartment block, you’re dead wrong.”
Engo hung his head back and howled with laughter, actually clapped his hands.
“I want you to go to Matt and tell him, from me, that I want back onto the crew,” Andy said.
“Oh yeah?” Engo wiped a tear from his eye. “And why should he do that? Why should he take you back on?”
“Because I know,” Andy said.
Engo stopped laughing. His smile slowly faded. As the seconds ticked by, a reptilian blankness came into his shiny eyes. “You know what?”
“I know everything.”