Matt was late. He rolled in out of the evening air like a storm, the pressure wave hitting the waitstaff as he strode toward the doors, making them wilt. A server near their booth slammed herself up against a table to get out of his way. He slid in beside Engo and reached his crane arm across him to pluck Cristobel’s menu from the holder. It had been two days since she’d seen Matt in the portable building on the abandoned construction site on the Hudson. Two days of silence from all of them, including Ben, while she lay in her apartment scouring hotel CCTV footage, bank accounts, phone records, emails. She knew more about Matt, Engo, and Jake from digging around in their lives; personal things. Engo’s taste for violent pornography. Matt’s sponsorship of a kid from the Detroit projects who needed funds for attending school. Jake’s membership in a choir that sang once a month in a church basement in Hell’s Kitchen. Nothing that would tell her whether she sat now with a group of vicious killers or a run-of-the-mill band of skilled criminals, men with the same kinds of secrets and lies fluttering around the edges of their worlds as anybody else.
“This is where we’re at,” Matt said in greeting. Andy held her wineglass stem on the table before her, glanced at Engo and Jake. “The nurse I’ve got on the pad at the hospital is telling me they’ve moved Freeman to stage-six end-of-life care. There are six—”
“What does that mean?” Engo broke in.
“There are six stages total.” Matt shot him a thin bolt of lightning from the eyes. “The last stage; he’s not conscious a lot. The oldest son is making the decisions now. It’s a rich person’s hospital, so it’s all what kind of fucking lamp the guy wants on when he finally bites it. If he wants music or incense. All that shit.”
“Sinatra,” Engo said. “I want Sinatra when I go.”
“Better stick it on now, then,” Matt said. Engo shriveled. “It’s time for the lawyer to strike in there. Get the keys swapped out so we’re ready to go.” Matt looked at Andy. “Where’s Ben?”
“That’s what he’s doing now,” Andy said. “I think.”
“You’re not talking?”
“It was weird enough, me joining the firehouse.” Andy widened her eyes. “Now I’m here for this. This is more commitment than you’d get in a marriage.”
Matt gave a small, rumbling laugh. Engo leaned across the table.
“I am so here for this,” he said. “Tell us everything. Did you fight? Was there make-up sex? This is what we’ve needed in the crew. A bit of hotness. Something juicy.”
“Don’t act like you and Jake haven’t been blowing each other for years.” Matt rolled his eyes, beckoned the waitress over. She snapped to it like a starting gun had been fired. “I see you two coming out of the storeroom with that just-sucked energy.”
Jake sighed.
“So this is the wall we’re talking about,” Matt said when he’d ordered a burger and fries. He reached across Engo again and rapped a big knuckle on the painted bricks. “Half an hour’s worth of natural gas pumped in through the back should be enough to split it. Andy, you and Jake are gonna be on the hose at the front making a show for the crowd of knocking down the fire while Ben and Engo go through the wall to get the cards. You two should be in and out before things get hectic at the front.”
Andy looked around Cristobel’s restaurant, imagined their plan. The grand room she was in now, blown out by a fireball burning hot enough to pulverize every piece of glass in it, to vaporize anything paper—the napkins, coasters, menus, signs—to scorch the carpet and curtains and tablecloths and set them to flame. She watched sad lobsters lolling about the bottom of an otherwise empty tank behind the bar, bubbles rising steadily from an algae-furred tube. If the glass held for some reason and the initial explosion wasn’t enough to boil the water in the tank, Andy knew the ensuing fire would have the lobsters cooking in the water within minutes of the blast. She felt like ordering one of them now just so the creature’s death wouldn’t be so pointless. Then she reminded herself that none of this was going to happen. The explosion. The robbery of the safes. It was a reality only in the minds of the men around her.
“You are very lucky to be a part of this,” Engo was saying to her. “And to come in the way you did.”
“Oh, yeah, that was a real party out there in the woods.” Andy smiled brightly. “I just wish I’d taken more photos.”
“If I really thought you were a cop I would have just dropped you with a Halligan in the firehouse engine bay, Andy,” Matt said. “I was just doing due diligence.”
“That happened to a guy up in Harlem.” Engo nodded. “Halligan fell off the top of the truck. Clonked him right on the skull while he was bending down to look at a tire.”
“It’s nice and neat,” Matt mused.
“You seemed pretty convinced,” Andy said.
“I wasn’t,” Matt said. “Cops don’t cry like that.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Please, please, don’t kill me!”
The men all laughed. Andy sighed.
“You better not think being dragged out into the middle of the woods and having a gun put to your head was the worst thing that could have happened to you.” Engo smirked. “Count yourself lucky. You shoulda seen what we did to Jake.”
Jake’s cheeks and neck were blooming with red spots.
“What did they do, Jake?”
“It wasn’t that bad.” He looked away.
“I needed him last minute,” Matt said. “Like you. It was for a cash thing. I got word that a big-whale poker player was coming in from Washington. Was trying to be smart about it. Staying off campus near the Resorts World but not at the Hyatt itself.”
Andy straightened, fiddled with her bra strap, made sure the camera affixed at the second button on her shirt was pointed right at Matt.
“I had a guy all ready to ram the whale’s car. But I needed the new probie Jake not to squeal like a little piggy when I bagged the briefcase in the middle of the fire.”
“You made out like all the money got burned up?” Andy said.
“That job took more research than you’d think.” Engo nodded. The night stretched outside. Office workers heading in. Tourists heading out. He watched them with his milky, bloodshot eyes, sipping his scotch. “It sounds like a smash’n’grab job but we had to source the exact same type of briefcase without a paper trail. We had to make sure the hit was just right. Make sure we didn’t kill the guy in the process, or his driver.”
“Plus about five grand in sacrifice money to burn up in the car,” Matt said, swinging the Finger of Death around. “That came out of my wallet because you’re a tight-ass and you’re a degenerate.”
“Jake, though.” Andy looked at the kid.
“I had a detective I know put him in a room for nineteen hours,” Matt said.
“Nineteen hours!” Andy looked at Jake.
“It was fine,” Jake groaned. “Can we leave it?”
“I gave him an hour before he folded,” Engo said.
“I gave him less,” Matt chuckled.
“He held out, though.” Engo nodded appreciatively. “All the detective was trying to get him to admit was that he’d been on a certain shift with Matt. It wasn’t a big thing. But Jakey held out to the end.”
“Aww, Jake. You’re good for some things, aren’t ya, bud? Not many things. But some.” Matt kicked him under the table. Jake jolted, rubbed his shin.
“It sounds really tough.” Engo smiled over the rim of the glass at Jake. “It wasn’t tough, though, was it?”
Jake kept rubbing his shin.
“How many times you throw up, Jake? Five times?”
“The guy ruptured my kidney.” Jake frowned. “I had two perforated eardrums.”
“Threw up like a little bitch all over his own shoes.”
“I threw up last night, Jake.” Andy stroked his arm. “It’s okay.”
Jake nudged her off.
“What did you do to Ben, then?” Andy asked.
“I never did anything to Ben,” Matt said. “I didn’t need to. You take a wild, starving dog off the street and feed it nothin’ but sliced ham, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s loyal.”
“Okay. What about Titus?” Andy asked. The table fell silent. “Don’t tell me. You waterboarded him.”
Sheet lightning in Matt’s eyes. “Titus wasn’t in the crew.”
“How inconvenient.” Andy examined each of their faces. “Must have been a pain in the ass, trying to pull jobs while he was around.”
She waited. Engo was playing with his phone. Jake was tearing a napkin to shreds. Matt leaned forward. When he spoke, Andy could feel his dragon breath against her cheeks from all the way across the table.
“You’ve been in the crew five minutes, sugar plum,” he said. “You haven’t earned shit. You can pick up your Access All Areas pass when you start proving your worth.”
“Bullshit. You can see my worth.” Andy felt nervous energy radiating off Jake beside her. “I’ve been proving it to you this whole time. You knew I was worth something that first day, when you heard where I’d come from. Matt, you got some level of respect built in for anybody who’s been through something, because you went through something.”
Now it was time for Jake to kick someone: Andy, in the ankle. She didn’t flinch.
“And you knew I was valuable when this lil bitch told you about how I’d punked his ass in his own trailer.” Andy nodded at Engo.
Engo laughed.
“Matt, honey”—Andy leaned forward—“I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of you. And that’s got to be the rarest thing in your life right now. The rarer something is, the more it’s worth, right?”
Matt sat back and looked at the others. For the first time since Andy had met him, the man seemed like he didn’t know what to do or say or think.
“So.” Andy straightened, nodded to the waitress for more wine. “Tell me. What’d you do to Engo? You make him take a shower?”
Jake choked on the water he was sipping. The men all fell into laughing together.