ANDY

“I needed money.” Jake was trembling all over, staring at the bag at his feet. “I went to Ben’s apartment, looking for him. Luna was there.”

Andy took another step up onto the porch. The gun was still in her grip, down by her side. “When was this?”

“I don’t know. July?” Jake turned, stared into the darkness at the side of the house. He’d pulled his hands into the sleeves of his hoodie, seemed younger again somehow. “I was uh, you know. I was upset. I was down. They were really riding me, the sharks. They were going to do something … permanent … this time. To me. She uh, she said she’d lend me the money, but Ben couldn’t know about it. I’d already borrowed too much from him. She knew he was gonna turn me down.”

Jake’s face twisted. He shook his head hard to carry on.

“The next time we, I … The next time I saw Luna, it was at Matt’s,” he said. “I maybe had too much to drink. It was hot. I’d sweated my ass off mowing the lawns. My-my-my head wasn’t clear.”

“What happened?” Andy asked.

“She and I got talking, just chilling by the pool, and I said, you know, I said Ben shouldn’t be such a tight-ass about lending me a couple of grand here and there. I always pay it back and Ben’s got a lot of money.” Jake mashed his palms into his eyes. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Because she got curious, I guess. She really latched on to it. Wouldn’t leave it alone. Like what did I mean, ‘a lot’ of money? Why would he have a lot of money? He doesn’t seem like he’d have a lot of money. She knew he didn’t have it in his bank accounts. So why didn’t he have it in his bank accounts?”

“She was starting to catch on,” Andy said. “To the whole thing. The crew. The crookedness of you all.”

“It was like Titus all over again.” Jake’s eyes were unfixed, roving the dark, his memories, searching for a safe place. “He was like a dog with a bone, that guy. But that’s, you know, that’s another story.”

The young man fell silent. Andy didn’t push. She didn’t have to. She knew that story. The fire in the disused telephone-exchange building. The chance presenting itself, too perfect to pass up. A fully engulfed building, the crew alone and waiting for a ladder engine to respond as second due. That engine being delayed. The fire growing. Titus and Engo and Matt and Jake inside the blackened and murky maze together, with no witnesses except each other, and a threat much more terrifying than the fire itself dangling over them all: that Titus was beginning to clue in to what they were doing.

That he would talk.

Persistent, and determined, outspoken and inquisitive Titus, a man unlike so many who would have seen the shadows in the waves and got out of the goddamn water. A man who would refuse and stay and try his luck against whatever lurked in the depths. A guy raised not to back down. Ever. Titus, who a team of inquiring officers could easily believe would defy orders and double back inside the fire, simply because he felt he knew better. Andy didn’t need Jake to tell her what that scene had been like. Titus’s last moments. That look in Engo’s or Matt’s or Jake’s eyes, just before they shoved him over a smoldering handrail into the inferno two floors below. Oh, Andy knew the story all right. It was one she’d heard a thousand times before, one that made sense. What she couldn’t decide, yet, was whether Ben had been in on it.

“Did you kill Luna because she knew about the crew?” Andy asked Jake now. “Was it all of you, or just you?”

“No, you don’t get it.” Jake sniffed. “She … She wanted in.”

Andy didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

“With me.” Jake tapped his chest. “With my plan.”

“What plan?”

“I’d been trying to figure something out for a while. How to get Matt and Engo and Ben’s stashes,” he said. “I … I knew that between them there had to be enough to go. Get out of here. Like really go. Leave this life and everything in it.” He shot a hand out toward the horizon, gave a sad laugh that was smothered with sobs. “I wanted to blow out of town. Forever. I just had to think of a way to make everyone run for their stashes and show me where the hell they were. I figured I’d make something happen, and then I’d follow them. Come back and raid them at another time, take everything. But … I just couldn’t make it work.”

“Why not?”

“I’d tried to follow Ben to his stash before, but…” Jake let his hands flop by his sides. “We pull maybe two jobs a year, man, and half the time he doesn’t go. Or he goes ten days later, after the job. Or he goes in the middle of the fucking night. You can’t watch the guy for weeks on end. Following Engo is even worse. You watch him for eighteen hours and then he finally gets up and goes somewhere and it’s to a strip club for another eighteen hours.”

Andy smiled inwardly. It was a sad and painful smile. Because in another universe, she might have taught Jake a thing or two about tracking and following people. It was the reason she was standing there at that very moment.

“I knew I had to orchestrate something,” Jake went on. “I thought about calling in a tip, maybe, about the cop in Kips Bay. Or one of the robberies. Getting everybody raided. But I couldn’t risk myself like that. And then, there was the logistics of it. How could I track them all at once? Who do I follow first?”

Andy watched as Jake vacillated between rational explanation of his plans and waves of emotion. His face contorting, shivering, falling blank.

“Luna said we needed to, uh, to simplify.” He wiped his nose again. “We knew Ben probably had the biggest stash, right? I mean, Matt has a lot of expenses. And he hides it in properties. Engo filters it all through his building. You can’t get near there. Half the residents are patched gang members. They have lookouts. Wherever Engo and Matt’s stashes were, Ben’s would be bigger.”

“Ben’s a hoarder.” Andy nodded. “He’s a pack rat.”

Something moved in the street. Andy and Jake turned. There was silence, stillness, a driveway light on three doors up, someone waiting for a loved one to come home from work. The old porch around them ticked and creaked, still losing heat from the day.

“We thought maybe if she and the kid went missing,” Jake said, “Ben would get sketchy. Like he’d worry that she’d robbed him and go check his stash. Or he’d think maybe someone was after him, and then he’d go check his stash. Or he’d get raided, right? The police would turn him over a little, at least. Give him a shake. You know how it is, when the girlfriend goes missing. The police, they always, they always, they … zero in! They were supposed to zero in on Ben! And—”

“And they didn’t,” Andy said.

“He didn’t go to the stash to check it, either,” Jake said. “He must have trusted her.”

Andy ached inside. It was all so perfectly wrong.

“So you had Luna meet you at the Best Western that night. She drove by that place every day on the way to work. She knew the valets would take care of the car.”

“I knew the camera system was terrible.” Jake nodded sadly. “I scoped it out, after she suggested the valet thing.”

The night stretched around them, dark and heavy with foreboding.

“Luna had put Visine in Ben’s drink,” Jake said. “We did it to a guy in the academy as a prank. You put Visine in someone’s drink, they’re shitting themselves for twenty-four hours. It was supposed to be just that, but actually it made him real sick. Like, actual sick. We’re pretty lucky he didn’t go to the hospital, because we needed him to have a terrible alibi. The car would be at the local hotel, he’d have no witnesses as to where he was … I mean, it was going to look like Ben was good for it. Perfect for it.”

“Where did it all go wrong, Jake?”

“It went wrong two months after that.”

“Two months?”

“Luna and Gabriel were supposed to be in the hotel room for, like, a week at best.” Jake’s lip trembled. “I booked it under a fake name. They were supposed to wait there. The cops were going to come down on Ben like a ton of bricks, and the longer and harder they pushed him, the more likely it was that he’d go to his stash. I mean he should have gone there! Why didn’t he go there? I was following him day and night. I was sleeping in my fucking car. If it was me, I’d have emptied my stash spreading money around town trying to buy up information. I’d have hired guys to beat information out of people. I’d have put a price on her head, you know? With guys who would kill to claim it. We know people like that. Matt’s little black book is full of people like that.”

Jake hid in his hands again. Andy thought about Ben. About the route he had actually taken to finding his girlfriend and her child. Through the police. Through Simmley, and then Newler, and ultimately, her. It was all so ironic that Andy wanted to break into tears herself. Because if Ben had just trodden the darker path, the path Jake expected him to, Luna might still be alive.

“I was going to be there,” Jake said. “Waiting. Watching. Following. But the, the police took half a glance at Ben and then they dropped the case.”

“Meanwhile, Ben’s busy searching for his family.”

“He’s hunting for Luna and Gabe like a madman.” Jake nodded. “He’s … he’s walking the street. She can see him out the hotel fucking windows. He’s in the lobby, harassing the managers for footage. Days are passing. Weeks. I’m trying to tell Luna: Just wait. Just wait. Just wait.”

Andy imagined it. Luna in the room with the kid, the kid going nuts with boredom, having to be quiet all the time. Asking for Ben constantly. Throwing tantrums every time Jake presents himself, tantrums they have to stifle and bribe him out of. Luna pulling her hair out. Jake having to rebook rooms and move them every few nights when the halls were quiet and unpopulated. Luna, Gabe, Jake creeping around the hotel like ghosts staying off the cameras, Luna’s belief in a life-changing, mind-bending, once-in-ten-generations payoff beginning to dwindle. Jake switching them to a different hotel. Not having the money to make it comfortable, and not being able to access Luna’s accounts so that she could chip in. The nerves making him gamble. Luna trying to control him, hardly knowing him, his lies starting to rack up. Jake coming in with a new promise: that the crew were about to pull another job. A jewelry store. Ben would go to his stash, afterward, surely. He had to. He had to.

Jake grabbed two handfuls of his hair.

“It’s going to be the biggest payoff of your fucking life!” Jake snarled at the Luna who wasn’t there, the Luna who was decaying in her bed of shipping oil and crab shit. “Just wait!”

He let his hair go. Opened his eyes. Looked at his hands. They were shaking hard. Andy could see it in his face. All that happened next. When Jake came back to the hotel room one night and had to tell her that yes, they’d pulled the jewelry-store job but no, Ben hadn’t gone to his stash yet. Luna saying she didn’t believe the plan was going to work anymore. That she couldn’t bear the waiting.

That she wanted out.