They met on the street outside a dentist, Ben giving Matt and Engo the address, watching them both pull into parking spots that had miraculously opened up right outside, at almost the exact same moment, like it was all meant to be, this whole thing, this whole time.
Matt and Engo got out of their cars and came toward him, and Ben stood under a huge blue neon sign shaped like a perfect set of teeth and thought about how he’d started in when he met Luna trying to create a family, and now he was back here with his real brothers, the brothers he didn’t choose, the brothers he was lumped with. A toxic, dysfunctional family coming together now for an impromptu meeting somewhere that suited them all. Crisis talks. Funeral plans. Neutral ground. Disputes over the will. He supposed the Freemans would be doing this soon, sniping across the old man’s still-cooling corpse, trying to deduce which one of them had sucked up to the ancient zombie in the last couple of years and sleeved the cards while he was distracted, sold them on the sly.
Engo seemed pissed off, but Matt looked like maybe he’d expected something like this, and was wary of any ripples in the water with his last wife so close to birthing his last baby.
“We gotta go now,” Ben said. “Tonight.”
“What? Why?” Matt looked at Engo, his lieutenant, searching for hidden knowledge of the source of the ripples. “Have you heard from the lawyer? Is Freeman dead?”
“No, but we’ve got to make this happen tonight or we’re going to lose our shot. The keys are swapped out.”
“When did that happen?”
“About a half hour ago,” Ben said.
“I don’t like this.” Matt’s finger twitched by his side. “Meeting with the lawyer on your own steam? Who said you could do that?”
“It’s done.” Ben shrugged. “Earlier tonight I had him run a story. Told him to get access to the safe. He did. I met him a second time. He had swapped the keys out, and he’s telling me it’s all kosher. The son didn’t raise any eyebrows. So we’re good to go.” He held out the key Ichh had given him, let the blue light from the teeth above them smile down on it. Ben had followed the lawyer to the house on the Upper East Side, been ultra-careful to not get the keys mixed up, knowing that while they appeared identical, the one Paxi had fashioned from his 3D-printed mold almost certainly wouldn’t fit into the lock at Borr Storage.
“Why have you jumped the gun like this?” Matt insisted, still reeling, his words slowing as his mind raced ahead. “This isn’t how we planned it. The lawyer was supposed to be in contact with me. I was the one who was supposed to hit ‘Go.’”
“You want to figure out who’s boss here, Matt, or you want to do your last-ever job?”
“I want to figure out who’s boss here,” Engo cut in. “Because I don’t run into burning buildings or high-stakes jobs until that’s on paper.”
“I just want to be done with this,” Ben said. “I want to take some time away.”
He hoped that his eyes sold it. That he was tired. That he needed a break. That the grief and humiliation at whatever had happened to Luna, or wherever she had gone, had worn him down so bad that he needed to go stare at a slice of unpopulated ocean somewhere or bury his head in a hotel pillow for a while. Ben was hanging on to that desire, the real desire that he had, for the moment he was planning to tell Matt and Engo both the truth. Once they were in and out of the storage facility, and they’d scored the cards, he would tell them. He would tell them about Andy. About the guy, Newler. About the game he’d been playing with them all this time. But he couldn’t tell them now, because it would be his last gift to them, a gift he didn’t know and maybe would never know if they deserved, because he would never know which one of them had killed his family. He loved them and hated them all enough that he knew he owed them this, because he’d decided to let fate take hold of it all now. Whoever survived the job and got away, maybe that meant they were innocent. If one of them died an hour from that moment, maybe that was God or the universe or whatever cutting him some slack and doing away with whoever it was. Ben was doing his part now to bring the suspects into the courtroom.
Ben put the key back into his pocket while he waited for Matt and Engo to get their heads together, read the gold lettering of the dentist’s name on the glass door of the darkened office. Lots of letters after the name, too. Ben wondered if Kenny had letters after his name, why the hell he’d never taken the time to find out.
“We can’t do this now just because you got your panties in a bunch,” Engo was saying. “We’re not on shift for another six hours.”
“So we play it like we always planned.” Ben shrugged. “We go into the station. Hang around. If anybody asks, we say we’re there to set up a drill for Jake. When the moment feels right, we call in a ladder job. Then we call in the gas job and respond to it, once the truck team are all tied up and out the door.”
“I don’t buy this,” Matt said. His eyes bored into Ben’s face. “What’s the hurry? You can wait till morning. You can—”
“I know one of you did it,” Ben said. Because fuck them. Both of them. Fuck the danger that oozed off Matt all the time and the psychopathic glint in Engo’s eyes. He’d been waiting so long to say it out loud, the air rang with the blessed potential of his words and how they might answer them. The knowing. The incredible relief.
Matt and Engo looked at each other.
“I know one of you killed Luna and Gabe,” Ben said. “Probably you, right?”
He glared at Engo. Neither he nor Matt spoke.
“I need to do this job so I can get the fuck out of here,” Ben said. “So I can cut all ties with you.”
Matt shook his head. He closed his eyes, tired, and let all the air out of his lungs.
“Engo didn’t kill them, you fucking moron,” he said, putting a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Jake did.”