“He got in trouble moving the body, of course.” Engo took out a cigarette, lit it, his eyes never leaving Ben, afraid to miss the deliciousness of the pain dancing in his eyes. “Luna. Okay, she was petite. But that’s still a full-grown woman right there. It takes experience to know how to move a thing like that.”
Ben eased a hard breath out of his lungs. Barely stopped himself from leaping at the older man, because he knew it wasn’t worth it, knew that Matt’s spread hand would slam into him like a steering wheel into the chest of a drunk driver as he wraps his car around a telephone pole. Ben swallowed and looked at his boss.
“What did he do with Gabe?”
“He said he took care of that one himself,” Matt said. “But by then he’d used up all his available brain cells so he called us in for the mother.”
“The thing,” Ben seethed. “The mother. This was someone you knew.”
“They were all someone I knew,” Engo said, almost to himself, staring at his cigarette. The words made all the hairs on the back of Ben’s neck stand on end.
“You didn’t do anything,” Ben said to Matt. “To Jake. Afterward. He was untouched. I’d have noticed if he was beat up. You didn’t lay a finger on him.”
“Of course I didn’t,” Matt scoffed. “I knew if I touched him at all, I’d kill him.”
Ben tried to turn away. Matt seized him by the collar before he could.
“I told you”—Matt’s finger was in his face—“I’m not a kid killer. I meant it.”
“But you let Jake get away with it.”
“Who says I let anybody get away with anything? Just because I haven’t done anything yet, doesn’t mean I’m not going to.”
“You’re a fucking hypocrite,” Ben said. “You worked beside him. You let him work beside me. And he killed a child!”
“You wouldn’t believe the kind of people I have worked beside while I had to bide my time,” Matt said. And in his words, and his eyes, Ben heard echoes of all the stories he’d heard about Matt over the years. About a guy who had been a part of the Ground Zero cleanup effort who had taken several extra pairs of boots from a truckload donated by some shoe company to the response effort. The guy selling them on eBay. That same firefighter being seriously injured in a hit-and-run up in Brooklyn about a year later. About the chief who had divided his firefighters between those who had to stay at the firehouse to man everyday fires, and those who had to go down to the Towers and dig for bodies in the weeks after the disaster. That chief pulling names from a hat and writing them on a whiteboard, the Ground Zero column entitled “Losers” and the firehouse column entitled “Winners.” That chief getting beaten and left for dead in Central Park in an apparent mugging, leaving him with permanent hearing loss.
About the only guy who ever asked Matt outright why his entire firehouse was up on the forty-first floor of the North Tower when the collapse happened, while he was on the street, feeding an unconscious woman into an ambulance.
That guy ending up being crushed to death when an air conditioner fell on him out of a seventh-story window. He wasn’t even on duty. He was walking his mother to church.
“Why did he do it?” Ben asked. He felt tears burning at the backs of his eyeballs but refused, refused, to let them form and fall. Bit his tongue to stop it. Locked his teeth to stop it. “Did he say?”
“He didn’t need to.” Matt shook his head. For once, Ben thought he glimpsed a flash of pity in the boss’s face. “Come on, Benji. You go down sick one night, and the first thing Luna does is go meet Jake at a hotel in secret? Then two months later, after she’s been completely off the radar with you, he’s calling us to help move her body? Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened, bud.”
“I don’t buy it. I don’t.” Ben shook his head. “There’s something else there.”
“Well, whatever it is, it was on his end, not ours.” Matt jerked a thumb at Engo and himself. “Okay, so we covered for him. We fed you some bullshit about Luna running off. What was the alternative, Benji? We have another crew member suddenly go down, so soon after Titus? And it’s not like we haven’t covered for you, Ben, under similar circumstances.”
Ben saw it. The street behind the Book Bonanza. The way the penlight gripped in Engo’s teeth bounced off the enameled surface of the safe and hit him in the eyes. It was dark back there behind the dumpsters, the van like a block of blackness waiting, open, by the wall. Willstone’s shape had split off from it the way that water separates a glob of oil from the mass. Ben had heard the cop call out “Hey!” He’d dropped his corner of the safe and turned, slid his gun from his waistband, fired twice with only a single thought in his brain as his body went on autopilot. His family. Not the men huffing and sweating around him, trying to move the stolen safe, but Kenny and Luna and Gabe. Ben hadn’t cared who the man was. Whose shape crumpled in half and hit the deck. Man or woman, civilian or cop; it could have been a priest standing there with a baby in his arms. Ben knew only that he wouldn’t be caught. Not then. Not that way.
“You had yourself a murdery little brain-snap that could have ended it for all of us,” Matt went on. “And we cleaned up your mess. We did what was best for the crew. This, with Jake? It was just the same kind of thing.”
Ben felt his heart constrict. The threat rang in Matt’s voice, a silent warning against argument. He thought about taking his gun from his waistband again now, letting the rage over what had happened to Luna and Gabe take him over, the way the fear of losing them had then. He saw himself murdering Matt and Engo right where they stood. But he was cold. He was numb. He knew what was smart, then, and that was to bide his time. He put his hands in his pockets and looked at his feet and smiled, because Matt was right. In the end, it was the crew above all else. His real family. This pack of killers and thieves.
“Let’s get this thing done,” Matt said.
Ben nodded. “I’ll call the others,” he lied.