There were gawkers in the street, even before they’d parked, the kind of night crawlers a person can find in Manhattan at any and all hours. Homeless people wrapped in blankets. Night workers heading to and from shifts manning convenience stores, vacuuming office blocks, guarding parking lots. A couple of young women in housekeeping uniforms stopped and took up position on the street across from Cristobel’s, hands in their coat pockets, and a potbellied delivery guy shuffled in beside them, close but not creepy-close. Matt reported in to Dispatch, and Engo said loudly that he was going round the back to try to find the power and gas mains for the restaurant.
“Ben.” Matt put a hand on his shoulder, his voice weird, different, hammed up for the benefit of the onlookers and whoever might have been listening in from the apartments above them. Because Matt hadn’t spent the last few weeks giving Oscar-worthy performances to save his own goddamn life. “Get the reader out and do a sweep for gas levels. I’ll do the same down this end.”
They parted. Ben’s breath was coming in short, sharp huffs, sweat already rolling down his chest beneath the turnout coat. The red light from the engine was making the windows howl in every apartment block down the long, narrow street. The curtains were drawn in the front windows of Cristobel’s. Ben walked past and pulled out his reader and turned it on, taking samples as he went. His eyes were on the windows across the street, his thoughts dancing between the witnesses who might appear there and Jake. Jake at his apartment, waiting outside the doors, having just come down after encountering Kenny. Had Kenny been seconds away from busting Jake inside the apartment, where he’d used Luna’s keys to go inside, to retrieve her passport, to aid his mission to make it look like she’d run off on him? Was that how it all went down? Had Luna tried to buy a gun from Edgar because she was beginning to fear the man she was having an affair with, because Jake was becoming unpredictable, violent, possessive? There was so much Ben didn’t know, couldn’t know, couldn’t decide if he wanted to know. Jake had always been a kid to him. The idea that a kid could kill a kid, that he could take Gabriel’s life—
Ben stopped, went to the wall, put a hand on it and closed his eyes. He didn’t realize he’d dropped the reader until Matt was handing it back to him, gloved hands forcing gloved hands.
“Keep it together, fuckhead.”
Ben’s legs were numb. He gripped Matt for strength. “Why did he kill them? Why?”
“I said keep it together.”
“I have to call him. I have to know.”
“Not now.”
“Is it even real?” Ben asked. He was looking at Matt, and the guy was wearing his chief’s helmet, and it all suddenly seemed like a costume to Ben. Like the blackened and burned surface wasn’t real. Matt hadn’t been a chief on 9/11, but he’d have rubbed some of the dirt and ash and grit from the helmet he’d been wearing that day on the one he was wearing now. It was tradition. Superstition. Never clean your helmet. Ben was staring at an illusion, a guy the whole world thought was a hero, a guy who never thought of himself as anything but a coward. How could Ben trust these stories about Jake killing his family? “Was it really Jake, or was it you?”
Matt grabbed a hunk of his turnout coat, seemed to want to punch him but didn’t. His eyes slid to the gawkers gathering in the street, the first wave nonplussed by the lack of activity, the second wave rolling in. “Not. Now.”
Matt let Ben’s shoulder go and stood back. He put his hand out. “Give me the key,” he said.
“What?”
“The key,” Matt demanded. “To the box. You’re not right in the head at the moment. I want to give it to Engo. He can be the one who goes in.”
“No,” Ben said. “We both go in. That’s the plan.”
“I’m changing the plan. Give me the key.”
Ben stared at him. Across the street, the delivery guy yelled out, “Yo, dude!” Matt and Ben looked. “What’s the drama?”
Matt licked his teeth, ignored the man, got a fix on Ben for a moment. When the big guy spoke again, it was loudly, and into his radio.
“Engo, I got some low gas readings at the front. I’m gonna send Ben up to evacuate the building as a precaution. How’s it going back there?”
“Having trouble finding the mains,” Engo reported. “I’ll let you know.”
Matt flicked his head toward the small, discreet door to access the apartments above Cristobel’s and Borr Storage. Ben walked there on legs that felt like stilts, took a skeleton key from his belt, and slipped it into the panel by the door. The door buzzed and clacked as it unlatched. He pulled the fire-alarm tab on the wall beside the elevator as he went for the stairs. The alarm, a gentle pulsing that would rise to a whooping eventually. There was already a guy in boxers standing with one leg still inside his second-floor apartment, watching Ben come up.
“What’s going on?”
Ben looked at the guy. Tried to remember his lines. Tried not to tell him that, in a few moments’ time, there would be an explosion right underneath where he was standing that would be so big it would feel like the Prince of Darkness had tried to punch a hole in Hell’s ceiling. He was supposed to say it was a gas leak. That everything was fine. That the guy should stay calm. But Ben knew the truth, or had thought he did, and wasn’t very sure of anything he’d ever known in his life at that moment.
“Get out.” Ben jerked a thumb toward the door down the stairs behind him. “Get out as fast as you can.”