They stood in the back room of the pet store and stared up at the ceiling fan, Engo and Ben shoulder-to-shoulder, Jake kicking things around in the next room, chasing embers and being nosy. The python wasn’t one Ben had ever seen before. It was pastel yellow and cream colored, as thick as his forearm in parts, coiled around the stem of the fan like a scaled insulation system. The men had been watching it for five minutes, off and on, while the breeze off the Hudson cleared the room of smoke. The creatures, almost all of whom had survived being suffocated in their tanks, lolled and crawled around on plasticky, half-hearted jungle or desert landscapes. There was a lot of luck in the room for the creepy, crawly things behind the glass here who might easily have been snuffed out by the fire started by an electric bike in the back room of the shop. Ben had seen e-bike fires kill whole families while they slept.
“How did it get up there?” Ben asked, looking at the snake. There was nothing he would deem “climbable” on the ceiling or upper parts of the walls anywhere near the fan.
“They can climb sheer walls, pythons.”
“No they can’t.”
“It’s not real, then.”
“You can see it’s real.” Ben gestured to the snake. Jake came in, dusting soot off his gloves. “Why would a place that sells real reptiles have a fake snake wrapped around the ceiling fan in the back room?”
“Family meeting.” Matt came through the doorway, not looking at any of it—the snakes, the lizards, a tarantula bigger than Ben’s hand walking sadly around in the sand. Because what the hell are reptiles and spiders when you’ve seen what Matt’s seen? “We’re a man down now, and that’s a problem.”
“Why?”
“Because Command is making noises about a guy they’ve got over with the Forty-Niners. Some annoying pissant that they want me to bring into line.” Matt finally glanced up at the snake, seemed not to take it in. “I don’t want some new asshole trying to prove himself on the team the same night we take Borr Storage.”
Ben hadn’t seen or spoken to Andy in two days. He’d texted her, called her, and she hadn’t answered, and he hadn’t known if that was part of the Almighty Unwritten Script he was supposed to be following. Like if she really was his girlfriend she’d have a thousand reasons to be pissed about what happened at the burning school—that he’d come for her, that he hadn’t kicked Engo’s teeth in there and then, that he got her dumped from the crew. She was now giving him the silent treatment and expecting flowers. But Ben didn’t know if it wasn’t the script at all but something real, like Newler had reassigned her or she’d reassigned herself, and he was about to pull off the Borr Storage job after all whether he liked it or not. If that was the case, he was on his own now trying to find his family before he was arrested, and all he had was the CCTV footage he’d been able to scrape up off the Best Western’s ridiculously insufficient security system. Someone walking with Luna through the hotel’s lobby. He had that, and he had the constant random stomach-plunging feeling the footage was causing him, and nothing else. He wanted to call Andy and scream down the phone, that while the footage told him basically nothing, it told him everything. There were two people walking. Two sets of legs cut off at the knee. One was distinctly Luna’s, and one was an adult set with jeans and sneakers.
Whoever was walking with Luna, he or she was hidden from view.
But Ben had the legs.
Gabriel’s tiny sneakered feet were not among them.
“What do we know about Freeman?” Engo asked. “The old man. How close to the velvet curtain is this guy? Because if he dies tonight, we go tonight. We don’t have to worry about some extra punk from the Forty-Niners.”
“He’s not dying tonight,” Matt said. “But he’s close.”
“How do you know that?”
“The lawyer’s got a burner. I’ve got a burner. He’s keeping me in touch as much as he can. But the guy can’t be hanging around the old man’s bed like a vulture.” Matt glanced back up at the snake. They all followed his gaze. The thing hadn’t moved.
“We can’t move on that place until we have a key.” Matt looked at Engo.
“How are you doing on that?” Jake asked Engo. “Do you need help?”
“If I needed help, it wouldn’t come from you.” Engo rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. There was something going on with his arm. It moved slow. Made him wince when he lifted it. Ben noticed it but passed it off as an old injury that had flared. “I’ve seen you try to open a jar of pickles, Jake. It’s like you’ve got hooves. You’d be about as good at lifting something from a person without them knowing as I’d be at sneaking into a nunnery.”
“What’s a nunnery?”
“It’s where they keep nuns, fuckhead.”
“Don’t they call that a ‘convent’?”
“I got a key last night.” Engo took out his phone.
“You already got a key?” Matt pinched the bridge of his nose. “After all that, you already fucking got one? Jesus.”
Engo brandished his phone for the crew. A picture of a Borr Storage key sitting in the palm of his mangled hand. They all bent in and looked. The key was shiny, brass, a pretty thing people paid whole college funds per year to carry around like an extra dick.
“Don’t tell me that’s the only photo you have of it,” Ben said.
“It is. So what?” Engo frowned. “I did exactly as I was told. I lifted the key from some chick who was on the way to her car. I took a picture with it and dropped it in her parking space. She’ll think it fell out of her pocket or whatever.”
“Engo”—Ben felt his shoulder muscles tightening—“I need to make a 3D-printed replica of that key from the photo. I need to use the printed key to make a mold so my metal guy can make a replica.”
“So?”
“So the picture is just of the key in your hand,” Ben growled. “There’s nothing for scale. I told you to put a quarter next to it so I could get the exact scale!”
“Hey, fucko.” Engo smiled. “All this computer-nerd bullshit you’re telling me right now? It’s all Greek.”
“Why did you think we were taking a photo of the key in the first place, you moron!” Ben barked. “I can’t get a proper scale from your goddamn hand!”
They came together. Matt and Jake pushed them apart. It wasn’t the scale. The key. The photo. It was Engo just being Engo, and Ben thought that if he had to tolerate that in his life for just a second and a half more he was going to spontaneously combust. Like he’d just turn to dust and cease to be. Matt backed him all the way into a tank full of scaly things.
“Engo, take a photo of a quarter in your hand and send it to him so he can try to get a scale,” Matt ordered. He shook his head at Engo. “Ben, chill the fuck out.”
“Well, don’t chill all the way out just yet.” Engo’s eyes slid to Ben. “I want to talk about Andy, while we’re having difficult conversations.”
“Andy?”
“Yeah, Andy. I have some questions about that woman.”
Ben’s stomach did that thing where it suddenly swan-dived and smashed into his bowels. The Fight or Flight road fork popped up before him and he swung hard left. “Jesus, I wish you stupid fucks would leave her alone. She’s out of the crew. What do you want?”
“What’s she doing right now?”
“Looking for a job, probably.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about her the last couple of days,” Engo said. He waited, but Ben didn’t bite. “About who she is.”
Ben felt his spine harden, felt his legs brace automatically, like his body was literally gearing up to run. A sixth sense told him Matt was watching him, had those demon eyes locked on his. Ben wasn’t game to glance over and check.
“What do you mean ‘who she is’? What are you talking about?”
“You know, it’s funny.” Engo cocked a hip, then waggled a finger at Matt and Jake in turn. “You two, with your supreme lack of attention to detail, you probably didn’t notice it. But the other day? When Action Man here ran in to save his bride at the school fire? I saw something very interesting that I didn’t really think about fully until last night.”
“You’re getting into me about a lack of attention to detail?” Ben looked at Matt and Jake, his eyes wide. “Is he for real?”
“You had to shut off her PASS device for her,” Engo said.
Ben balked. When he spoke, his voice was too high. “What?”
“She set off her alarm,” Engo said. “When I grabbed her, when I put her on the ground, she pulled the tag. The alarm went off on her belt. Then, when you two were having your little kissy-wissy afterward and you were checking her boo-boos—”
“Engo, Engo,” Ben tried to break in.
“When you were trying to make sure she was—”
“I don’t need to hear this.” Flight. Ben tried to walk.
“Let him finish,” Matt said. His hand grabbed the back of Ben’s turnout coat and yanked him to a stop, the alpha dog arresting a retreating pack member in his jaws.
“She was fiddling with her PASS device.” Engo licked his teeth, his eyes full of glee. “You had to shut it off for her because she couldn’t work out how to do it. I saw her hit the on switch again a couple of times but she didn’t seem to know you had to hold it down to shut it off.”
Ben couldn’t speak. The hatred was so thick on his tongue it was like wax.
“It was almost like she’d been taught how to set the thing off,” Engo went on, “but not how to shut it up again. Or like maybe she was familiar with the old style of PASS alarms. The ones without the tags. They had an on and off switch.”
“What is your point, exactly?” Ben squinted.
“My point is that the woman seems smart,” Engo said. “Real fucking smart. But only in certain ways. In other ways, she’s not smart at all. I want to know how much of Andy Nearland is capability and how much is cunning.”
“Why is this even relevant?” Ben threw his hands up. “You trying to date her, Engo?”
“I want to know who we’re dealing with here.”
“We’re not dealing with anyone. She’s off the crew!”
Jake spoke up. “You told me she wasn’t who she said she was.”
Everybody turned to him. Ben felt hot air ease out of his nostrils. He had to force his fists into his sides so he didn’t lunge over there and strangle the young man standing before him, the same guy who had only days earlier bit him for five grand and was now trying to tip him into an early grave. Jake, Ben thought. Jake, I will hammer you into the floorboards under us like a fucking nail.
“When did he say that?” Matt asked.
“At the barbecue.”
“Look.” Ben spoke quietly, could feel his lips wanting to pull back over his teeth. “Andy probably didn’t know how to shut her PASS device off because she was in shock. One of her own team members had just tried to break her collarbone for no reason at all. And I said what I said at the barbecue, Jake, because I’d had a few drinks and I was pissed at her.” His voice trembled with anger, fury trying to smother out the fear. “She was needling me about Donna, and I’d had enough.”
“Donna?” Matt cocked his head. “What about Donna?”
“She saw Donna patting my hair.”
Matt laughed. “Oh, that’s funny. You and Donna? Oh wow. Look, Benji, I’ve seen your dick. It ain’t half as big as Donna needs to get her out of bed in the morning.”
“Fuck you,” Ben spat at his boss. He gave Jake and Engo a look. “And fuck the two of you, too.”
He walked to the front of the store, a bigger space lined with nicer tanks and healthier, prettier animals. The survival rate here was higher. The animals were more active, clearer eyed. A gathering of men and women all stopped talking in Arabic and looked at Ben when he walked in. The helmet, the jacket, the boots. Superhero. Supervillain. Ben was about to walk out into the street, was craving a cigarette, but he felt Matt come up behind him and wasn’t prepared to leave the Arabs and Matt alone together. They stopped by a tank that was so full of rats the animals were all heaped in a corner sleeping or trying to make a pyramid of bodies to get to the lid. The smell of their piss made his eyes sting. Matt took out a pack of smokes like he could read Ben’s thoughts and shook one at him and lit up, eyes on the watchful Arabs like he wanted them to try to stop him smoking in their store.
“How well do you know Andy?” Matt asked.
“What the—” Ben almost threw the cigarette down. “What is this?”
“This is Engo coming to me last night at some crazy hour wanting to talk about her.”
“He wants to fuck her, that’s all.” Ben searched Matt’s eyes, looking for tiger stripes in the long grass. “Do not put her back on the crew, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to keep hittin’ that, and this is neater for me. That’s why.”
“Engo’s got all sorts of interesting ideas about the Borr Storage job,” Matt said.
“Yeah. I heard some of them. He wants to use acetylene. The guy wants to make another—” Ben almost said “9/11” but caught himself just in time. “—another Chernobyl. Don’t listen to him.”
They watched the rats crawling and writhing all over each other. Pink fleshy palms spread on the glass. Little baby rats were getting squashed at the bottom of the pile. Matt’s eyes wandered to the tanks on either side. Two big green pythons in one; a mean-looking brown snake in another. Matt’s lip was pulled up by an invisible hook. He turned to the scarfed and bearded grouping in the corner of the store.
“You keep the fucking rats right next to the snakes?” Matt asked.
The group in the corner all turned inward, interpreting, dissecting. A man with a goatee spoke up. “They’re for the snakes. They’re food.”
“Right.” Matt tapped the glass beside him with a gloved knuckle. “But they can see the snakes.”
“Matt—”
“They can see the fucking snakes,” Matt repeated. He tapped the glass dividing the rat tank and the python tank. “The rats can see the snakes they’re going to be fed to, through the glass. You don’t think that’s sick? You don’t think it’s fucking twisted? Letting the rats see the snakes?”
The group in the corner turned inward again, trying to understand. Matt didn’t wait for their response. He gripped the glass at the front of the rat tank and ripped downward, peeled the glass off like it was fabric. Rats spilled out of the tank, dripped on the floor in great brown furry lumps, bolting for the shadows under the shelves and along the walls. The tank was empty but for sawdust in seconds. The store owners watched the rats fleeing everywhere and did nothing.
2013
She walked in and dumped her bag to the side of the doorway, exactly the way he’d told her not to a million times. The house in Pierre Part was small; appropriate for a Fox long-haul trucker and an Amazon factory worker, the latter of which Dahlia had been pretending to be for eight months at that point. The only way Tony could cope with it all—the distant barking of alligators, the steaming dampness lying over everything like a blanket, the clackety air-conditioning unit that overheated and ground to a stop every forty-five minutes—was if everything was kept in order. The guy felt safe in neatness and cleanliness. Tony was standing at the peeling kitchen counter with a glass of paint thinner posing as whiskey in his fist, and when she kissed him on her way to the fridge he didn’t lift his eyes, just shifted his mouth sideways out of habit the way a person reaches for a seat belt in a car.
“I think she’s ready.” Dahlia grabbed a cold bottle of water from the fridge and guzzled half of it, beading sweat just from the walk from car to house. “She’s almost ready to tell me where she buried the baby.”
Tony had his back to her. She looked at his love handles. Southern food, the role, the monotony of pretending to be out on the highway somewhere between Virginia and Maine when really he was sitting in their bedroom fifteen feet away from where they stood now, watching her feed on a laptop screen. The overwatch pounds. Dahlia sympathized. She’d stacked on weight when she took overwatch duty on their last case. But she’d at least had the novelty of watching Tony run a plumbing-supply store. Dealing with the customers. Answering their queries. Chitchatting with his colleagues. All Tony got to watch was her gloved hands scanning uniform brown and black boxes as they traveled along a conveyor belt in a factory so loud workers mostly communicated in hand signals.
He said nothing now. She chattered on.
“I had a good long conversation with her in the break room,” Dahlia said. “You probably saw it. She told me about her father. The abuse. Tony, I’m buzzin’. I think I’m on the edge here. I think Margie’s gearing up to tell me about the first baby, you know? A month or two, and I’ll get it out of her. How her parents making her give it up was—”
“Dahlia.”
“—was too traumatic. That’ll open the door to her telling me how she wouldn’t have been able to face something like that ever again.”
Dahlia got an eerie feeling. It was swimming in the silence of the house, which was not really silence at all, because that didn’t exist down here. There was always something moving or fighting or fucking or singing out there on the bayou, or some dirt bikers rumbling through the reeds. Firecrackers. TVs. Cheap houses made a lot of noise, too. The appliances hummed and clunked and the corrugated-iron roof breathed in and out all day like a living thing slumped over the house. Tony had dropped his accent to say her name. It was weird. They always kept their accents, especially somewhere like the South, where picking up and putting down the drawl could be like hefting bags of cement.
She went around and studied his face. “What?”
Tony licked sweat off his upper lip. Stared at the glass. Shrugged. “You were getting too close to her.”
Still no accent. Dahlia felt her face twist. “What?”
“It’s been eight months, Dahlia,” he said. He let that sink in for a while. It didn’t. “Eight months.”
“Right. So—”
“I’m on overwatch.” Tony touched his chest. “It’s my job to keep ahold of that balloon string so that you don’t float away. And I’m … I’ve … Look. I called it. You were taking too long, and that’s because you were getting in too deep with Margie. You got yourself into a relationship.”
“A what?” Dahlia laughed hard in his face. “You’re not accusing me of—of—of—”
“Hell, I don’t know, do I?” Tony shrugged. “Friday night? The boil, over at Jimmy’s place? You turned your—”
“I didn’t turn my camera off,” Dahlia snapped. “It malfunctioned.”
“It malfunctioned?” Tony’s eyes searched hers. “Just as you and Margie snuck away behind the garage?”
Dahlia stared at him. The creepiness she’d felt when he first said her name hadn’t eased. There was more. She could smell it. Shivers of dread began in her diaphragm.
“I’m not fucking Margaret Beauregard,” Dahlia said carefully. “I’m trying to find out when and how she killed her baby, and where those remains might be. I’m trying to find answers for the Beauregard family and the Peters family and the local PD, who brought us in. I’m doing what I was told to—”
“How do I know that’s true?” Tony shrugged a heavy shoulder. Just one. Like he was tired of lifting them. “How do I know we’re not eight months into a cute little dyke fuckfest here?”
Dahlia’s mouth fell open.
“You said you were bored, back in Portland.” He looked her over. “That’s why we’re here in the middle of the redneck-infested swamplands right now. I’ve been wondering if maybe you weren’t just bored with location, though, Dahlia. Maybe what you meant was that you were bored with me. With us. With solving murders. With the whole goddamn arrangement.”
Her jaw was hanging. She breathed wet panic and Southern summer. There’d been no warning. That was the thing with Tony, the most dangerous thing, the thing she’d learned the hard way. He could hide the black, slithering badness deep down under the surface of his eyes the way the swamp hid things even her nightmares couldn’t assemble, things that bit alligators clean in half.
“What did you do?” Dahlia asked. She thought of her bag by the front door. Her phone. Margie’s number. She imagined going there. Calling her. But she couldn’t move. “Tony? You said…”
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“You said I was getting too close to her. I was.”
“I greenlit the arrest about an hour ago.” Tony watched her eyes. Seemed to be actively looking for the pain bursting there. “I waited until I knew you’d be on the highway.”
Dahlia sucked in air.
“Margaret went for the shotgun under the kitchen sink.” Tony sipped his whiskey. “A deputy took her down.”
“She’s—she’s—she’s not—Margie’s not—”
“She’s dead.”
“No she’s not.” Dahlia went to the bag in the corner by the door. “No she’s not.”
She fell on her knees on the boards, grabbed the bag. The zipper jammed. Dahlia ripped it open, sliced her index finger, knelt in the light from the street pouring in through the mottled yellow glass and tried not to think about a baby rotting in the ground somewhere who would never be found and lifted and rescued from that hole. A baby with no name who deserved a place in the world, a cross, a stone, a plaque, flowers, a notice in the newspaper, something, anything, whatever the goddamn fuck. She knelt and cried in the doorway with her bag on her lap and tried not to think about a mother who made a mistake, the worst mistake a person can make, a mother who deserved to be lifted from the hellishly lightless and airless pit of her own mind like the child she’d put in the soil. They were both gone now. Lost under the surface.
“You were getting too close,” Tony insisted.
Dahlia got up. She hugged the unzipped bag to her chest and opened the door beside her, and set about getting as far away from Tony Newler as she could.