In the video, Gabriel was in his car seat. The same car seat Ben had been looking at only a few days earlier, the one dusted with cookie crumbs and spotted with ice-cream stains, Gabe’s little ride-around throne. Ben and Luna were wearing sunglasses. She was driving and chewing gum. The camera swung to her. She glanced over, gave her Harrison Ford half smile, on the screen for a second only, two chews. Ben leaned against the bumper of the old white Chevy in the mechanic’s workshop and rolled the video on his phone back a little, made Luna turn her head, looked at those cords in her neck. In the last ten videos, Ben figured he had maybe two minutes’ worth of footage of Luna. Why hadn’t he taken more? The afternoon sun through the window was fire in her hair.
“Say what you just said again.” The Ben in the video grinned. Gabe kicked his little legs, sneakers bumping off the front of the seat.
“Huh?”
“About being— About what you wanna be when you grow up.”
“I want to be a farmer.” Gabe smiled.
“Your people didn’t come all this way so you could be a farmer, baby.” Luna on the screen again, dropping her sunglasses to look at him in the rearview. “Mama didn’t raise no farmer. You’re gonna be a doctor.”
“Maybe that’s what he means, Lu,” Ben laughed. “He’s gonna work for Big Pharma.”
“Right. Okay. He’ll be a Pharma bro. I can live with that.”
“I’m gonna have lots and lots of chickens.” Gabe threw his hands up. “Thousands and thousands and hundreds! Lots of—”
“Ferraris?” Luna asked. “Is that what you said? Houses in the Hamptons?”
“Jaguars,” Ben said.
“Yeah, jaguars!” Gabe gasped. “I’m gonna have a farm and a zoo.”
Paxi came over from the metal shop and pushed his face shield up on his head. With the manicured orange beard, he was the medieval knight with the flipped-open helmet. Ben shut the phone and put his palm out. The key Paxi handed him was still warm, the edges of the brass still jagged and razor sharp in places. Ben turned the key over in his hand a few times, held it up close, looked at it from afar. Around him, Paxi’s garage was quiet. Apart from the Chevy there was a 1934 roadster in pieces in the bay. Ben wasn’t a car guy but he’d been fostered by one, once. He knew how obsessive gear heads could get about having the right nuts and bolts and stud heads, or replicas cast and hand-tooled. It was what kept Paxi in beard oil.
“I think the whole border needs to come in.” Ben pointed at the key head, showed Paxi the photograph of the original sitting in Engo’s palm. The shot he’d taken at the pet store. The two men looked back and forth between the two keys. “A quarter of a mil at best. Do you see it?”
“Yeah, I see it.” Paxi nodded. The chubby, pockmarked mechanic flipped his face shield down, his eyes googly in the magnified panel. He took the key from Ben and went away again. Ben sat on the Chevy and scrolled back through the videos. Right back, until he found Gabriel in the pool at Matt’s place. The kid had said “Benji, watch!” about six times in the first fifteen seconds. The camera never left him. “I’m watchin’, kid! I’m watchin’!” The vision pulled away after twenty-three seconds, took in Luna sitting at the other end of the pool, her feet in the water, head bowed, talking to Jake. The probie was on the other side of her, in the water, shadow fingers from potted palm trees raking his angular features.
Paxi was back with the key.
“I gotta clean it up, obviously,” Paxi said.
“Looks good.” Ben nodded.
He was walking down the alley behind Paxi’s, traversing a row of hotted-up vehicles with tags in their front windows linking them to the mechanic’s shop, when he passed a dark gray BMW with no tag and a guy sitting in the front seat. Ben was ten feet along past the rear bumper, twenty feet from his own car, when he froze in midstride, struck with the realization that the guy in the Beemer was the same one he’d seen loitering in the parking lot down the block from the Guggenheim. He turned, just as the man was sliding out of the car and straightening his navy-blue, nicely pressed shirt and looking at Ben with a kind of regretful resignation that made Ben’s insides squirm.
“Haig,” the guy said.
Ben thought about his gun, that was resting uselessly under the driver’s seat in his car. He slipped the key Paxi had given him into the front pocket of his jeans.
“You must be Newler.”
The guy nodded. He was carrying. Ben could see the pistol butt in the reflection in the Beemer’s rear passenger window, tucked in the waistband of Newler’s trousers.
“It’s time to come in.”
“You found them?” Ben took a step forward, all caution abandoned. “Jesus, where are they? Are they okay?”
“We haven’t found Luna and Gabriel Denero, no,” Newler said. “And we’re not going to. The terms of the agreement between you and the FBI have changed, okay? I’m here to escort you to my office, where we can sit down and talk about—”
“What do you mean you’re not going to?” Ben felt like the ground was tilting beneath him.
“That’s not a priority of mine,” Newler said. “And I’m in charge of this case now.”
“Bullshit. Where’s Andy?”
“She was too close to this. I’m pulling her off it.”
“Does she know that?”
“Not yet. Right now all I want to do is—”
“Get me into custody.” Ben nodded. He wondered if the car entering Paxi’s was carrying an agent there to arrest the bearded mechanic. If there were people, agents, turning up at Donna’s place now looking for Matt. Or at Engo’s trailer. “I want to speak to her.”
“Of course you do.” Newler smiled. “And you know what? You’re going to miss her. You two have been close throughout this. But you have to understand something, the person you’ve been dealing with for the last few weeks isn’t real. She got inside your head. She got inside your life. That’s what she does. But none of that meant anything.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She came onto this case in the first place to fuck you, Ben. And that’s what’s happening now. I’m just making it all happen faster than she intended, and in her absence.”
Ben stood there, staring at the buttoned-up asshole with the gun, the buildings with their apartment windows yawning all around them. Something about the guy’s words was twisting in Ben’s brain. The tone wasn’t right. It was too warm. Too deep. Too familiar.
“This is what she does, huh?” Ben asked. “She gets inside your life.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Gets inside your head.”
Newler nodded.
“Fucks you.” Ben watched the guy’s eyes carefully.
Newler didn’t answer, but Ben saw everything he needed to in the way the guy’s body stiffened, the way his jaw muscles twitched defiantly. Ben knew the whole story then, could smell it on the wind. Andy, or whoever she was, and this guy, who was probably her romantic partner or even her husband. This guy who’d been watching them two nights earlier on her mattress in her apartment with the curtains thrust open and the city light pouring in, neither of them giving a fuck who saw them. A thought occurred to him, that Andy had slept with him knowing Newler was out there watching, wanting to toy with the man, using Ben as a chess move in some sick-ass game of tit-for-tat between lovers. Now this asshole was going to punish her by yanking her off her cute little missing-mother-and-child case and make her get to the fucking point of it all: the burglaries, Willstone, Titus. The real cases. Ben wanted to be surprised but he wasn’t. He’d been dodging wild haymakers like this from law-enforcement psychopaths since grade school.
“You must have been watching us this whole time,” Ben said. “She said you were. Running, uh, ‘overwatch’ on us. That’s what you call it, right?”
“That’s right.” Newler nodded. Ben thought about the night out in the woods. The portable building. The test Matt had run on him at the burning school. Tests and games and experiments. Chess moves and mind games.
“You must know about the upcoming job, then. Next month,” Ben said. “Over in Queens. The bank.”
“I do.” Newler gestured to the car. “Get in. We’ll go to my office and you can tell me all about it. There may be an opportunity there for us to renegotiate the terms of your cooperation on all this.”
Ben walked forward. Put his hands up, the way he had when Ed Denero and his crony led him into the alleyway behind the bar in East Orange. He waited until he was within a few feet, then let Newler reach down and pull the passenger-side door open for him, turning his head in profile to Ben. The firefighter raised his fist, put his whole shoulder into it, smashed Newler in the temple with a savage right hook that dropped him like a dead weight, his whole body whumping onto the asphalt beneath them. Ben looked up at the apartments around them as Newler fought for consciousness, groaning, trying to guard his face from further blows as Ben took his pistol and kicked it under the car. He fished around in the pockets of Newler’s trousers and on his belt for cuffs. He found a car key, but nothing else. He felt a little zing of sad humor then, about men who spent so much time behind desks they forgot they were once skilled warriors, law enforcers, who would have seen a smack upside the head from some two-bit thief coming a mile off. This guy had a hand in training Andy, it seemed. She was still the leopard out on the prowl, while this fat house cat had let his claws go blunt.
Ben went to the driver’s side of the car, popped the trunk, came back around. He hefted Newler up and dropped him in the Beemer’s big, wide, empty trunk, slammed the lid, and snapped the key off in the lock.