BEN

He told her everything. About how a hard upbringing in New Jersey and the teachings of her tough-love, old-school Mexican parents had meant Luna Denero didn’t fall for the returned-handbag trick. Because she’d gone to sleep every night of her childhood hearing from her father about the kind of things that could happen to a person on the streets of Guanajuato, and from her mother about the same kind of things, only in Sonora. So she wasn’t going to let some grinning white boy, some Captain America wannabe, threaten what they’d set up for her. Her parents had worked their way through the US naturalization process like two people crawling on their naked bellies over a desert of broken glass. She had the schooling, the safety, the American dream, and getting it for her put them both in an early grave.

So Ben dropped two grand—two grand!—on pottery classes in SoHo because that’s what it cost to sit in a rose-gold and pastel studio with a bunch of middle-aged women and learn to turn out misshapen cereal bowls under Luna’s mentorship. He hadn’t been so out of place in a long time, sitting on the tiny stool with his hairy knees up around his shoulders, his finger calluses dragging lines in the slick mud. Clay water spattered over his sneakers and flecked in his hair. In the class were a Hollywood actress, a retired judge, and a modeling-agency exec, and those ladies were all convinced he was the bodyguard of one of the others.

Luna thought it was hilarious. But it still took him six weeks and twelve soul-destroying pieces of tableware before she agreed to go to coffee with him.

That coffee was a head-spinning, heart-soaring hour of exhilaration, a festival of delights in which Ben knew exactly what to say at all times, made her laugh, made her hang on his every word, told her stories that made her cry and gasp, caught her looking at his ass while he paid for the drinks at the counter. He’d never performed so well on a date in his life, and it was for the simple fact that he’d spent six solid weeks struggling with wiggling, spinning clay and coming up with lines, jokes, stories, questions for her that would show how much he liked her. How carefully he’d been listening to her and watching her, because he knew that okay, maybe some women had a thing about firemen but all women—all women—thought being really listened to was sexy as hell.

He’d hoped in the way that kids hope—wishing on stars and pennies and eyelashes—that this magnificent date was his ticket in.

And it was.

He knew it was, because after the coffee date he asked her to come to dinner with him in Chinatown. She came, and walking beside her, his big eyes dazzled by the red lanterns hanging along the street, was the boy Gabriel.

Ben dated Luna and Gabriel. There was no other way of putting it; his efforts to impress Luna turned to ash when Gabriel got tired in the afternoon and turned against him, calling him a meanie, hiding from him behind Luna’s skirts, occasionally treating Ben to a full-arm slap upside the head. Luna never sided with Ben against the child, not once, not ever, and he loved that about her so much it made his mind fill up with pain. It was a hurtful sorrow for his boyhood self, at all the losers his mother dragged through the household in those years after his father left, guys who would beat and belittle him or decide to employ new “household rules” his mom wouldn’t question. The guys who punished him by making him do push-ups until his arms didn’t work, or run laps of the yard in the heat until he passed out. The guys who weren’t so creative, who just took their belts off and whupped the shit out of him.

Ben was a willing punching bag for Gabriel, but after a while of gritting his teeth and bearing it, the punching bag became a jungle gym. Then a lounge chair. A cradle. There came rituals. Gabriel couldn’t go to sleep until Ben said good night—over the phone or in person or whatever. He couldn’t use the apartment block elevator until Ben had cleared it of ghosts.

So Ben became Gabriel’s fount of knowledge about the world, his walking encyclopedia. Ben would answer so many questions over the space of a day that his voice became hoarse and his mind tangled and sputtered like old Christmas lights.

And then, six months after he’d met her, Ben was sleeping on his stomach beside Luna in the bed in her big, bright room under the city sunrise. He was practically living there, and he was so accustomed to the sound of Gabe thumping down from own his bed and running up the hall to Luna’s bedroom that Ben’s stomach braced with pure muscle memory, anticipating the little boy launching himself up onto his back. The kid wriggling and noodling around and talking and playing hiding games between Luna and Ben as they sat up against the pillows and tried to drink coffee without being bumped and spilling it everywhere.

Those were the good days. The days full of light.

Of course, there were problems.

Luna had been eight months pregnant with Gabriel when her ex, Tomas, died, so she was fucked up from trying to welcome one love of her life into the world while she ushered the other one out. Tomas’s death had dissolved all the bad things about him, as death did with most people, so Ben was up against the memory of this guy who apparently never got angry or came home drunk or trashed the kitchen. Luna was afraid of getting serious, of losing someone again, of stirring things up with his family, who hadn’t been the most comforting people in the world when her ex died. Tomas’s family were indeed interested in the kid only as far as they wanted to know who Luna was going to replace Tomas with. They had ideas, and they felt entitled to express them. The separation had been enough. Now this. Luna thought Tomas’s people were half convinced she’d given him the cancer. Like she had the power to corrode a guy’s esophagus with pure selfishness.

And Ben, in turn, had his complications. His parents were deadbeat junkies, and he’d almost destroyed himself rescuing his kid brother from the clutches of the foster care system when he learned of the boy’s existence. Ben was geared to rescue people, because it helped him live out the fantasy of being rescued himself from the violent and chaotic crack house he’d been raised in. Luna didn’t want to be rescued. And she didn’t need some messed-up guy with fantasies of a perfect family getting confused about whether he actually loved her, or he just wanted to play Mommies and Daddies with somebody.

“She had problems with my half brother, Kenny,” Ben said. There were two and a half empty beers on the table. Andy was still cradling her first. “They didn’t get along.”

“Why?”

Ben waved a hand. “It’s complicated.”

“And the ex’s brother,” Andy pressed. “Edgar. She didn’t get along with him, either?”

Ben nodded, looked at the glittering skyline.

“He has cartel ties, is that right?”

He didn’t seem to hear, was rubbing his eyes furiously.

“Maybe I’m crazy,” he said instead. “But you know, I’ve been a firefighter for more than a decade now. I know that every time you want to take a shit, you gotta fill in eighteen goddamn forms and an FDNY lawyer has to sign off on every one. I don’t get how you can just decide we’re playing this game and I just have to go along with it.”

“What part of it don’t you understand?” Andy asked.

“Like shouldn’t I have signed something? Where’s— Who’s supervising you and what you’re cooking up here?”

She laughed. “Who’s supervising me?”

“Are you FBI or NYPD?”

“Neither,” she said. “I’m freelance.”

They stared at each other.

“I was commissioned on this job by a high-ranking official in the FBI,” Andy said. “We’ve worked together before. He used to freelance, too, but he went straight. There were times when he acted as what we call ‘overwatch’ for me. He supervised, or watched over, me. But this isn’t like that. Part of my conditions for accepting the job were that I’m not overseen. He’s handled some background paperwork for me and funded this whole thing but that’s it.”

“So you just get to do whatever you want?”

“It’s not a matter of ‘getting to.’”

“But where did you train for this? Like, Quantico?”

“No.”

“Then where?”

“Nowhere. I’m not official. I’m not on the books.”

“That…” He balked like he’d encountered a bad smell. “I don’t buy that.”

“It’s not for sale,” Andy said. “It’s reality. What? You think every major law-enforcement case in this country is solved by the books? By following protocol?” She laughed. “You’re delusional.”

Ben said nothing.

“Okay. Imagine this. You got a guy in … I don’t know, Chicago,” Andy said. “A lead detective. He picks up a missing-child case. The kid’s been gone maybe an hour, two hours, seen getting into a car that’s identical to the one belonging to the local kiddie fiddler. The detective picks the guy up, finds he’s got scratches on his arms and leaves in his hair. He drags the guy in for all the official stuff. Interview, with the lawyer present. Search of the guy’s known addresses. All that time-consuming and barely useful shit. But he turns up nothing. This detective, he feels like the kid is out there somewhere. Alive still, maybe. The clock is ticking. He lets the guy go. Watches him. But he’s doing nothing. He’s at home watching Cocomelon and eating Pop-Tarts.”

Ben was rubbing his stubble, hiding his face in his palms. “I don’t know if I really want to hear this.”

“The detective’s got two options,” Andy says. “Bring the guy in. Do all the official stuff again. He could even employ an official undercover. Which will take time, and money, and approvals, and forms, and lawyers. Someone who will chitchat with the perp in the holding cells, try to get a disclosure. Or maybe the detective takes the second option. Doesn’t bring the guy in at all. Goes off the books, instead. He has someone, a specialist, come in. It might be somebody he already knows, or someone who’s recommended to him. The specialist might enter the pedo’s home and beat the shit out of him. Take him to a warehouse somewhere and waterboard him until he gives up where the kid is. Now, something like that would completely destroy the detective’s case against the perp. But it would get the kid found, wouldn’t it? And if nobody ever knew about how things really played out, the detective could reverse-engineer the finding of the kid and take credit for it. He could tell everybody that the perp’s story about being waterboarded was complete nonsense.”

Ben looked shell-shocked.

“On a longer-term case, say a murder where it’s pretty obvious who the suspect is but nobody can prove it, a freelance specialist works in all kinds of ways.” Andy shrugged. “They would be free to do all sorts of unsanctioned things that would corrupt an on-the-books job.”

“Like what?”

“Like drugs.” Andy sipped her beer. “You take drugs as a police undercover and the job goes down the toilet, immediately. All a lawyer has to do is argue that you were inebriated when you heard the guy confess to the crime or say where the body was or whatever.”

“What else?”

“You name it.” Andy put her beer down and threw her hands up. “Participate in crimes. Beat people. Endanger people. Entrap criminals. Allow them to commit crimes you can fuck them with later. When I get hired for these jobs, I take a good look at them first. Decide how I want to run things. And if I decide I don’t like the case, I say no. Sometimes I do that even after I’ve begun. I walk away. Nobody’s going to fire me. Nobody’s going to cancel my fucking pension. Sometimes, like if I’ve been hired privately, the people bringing me in don’t want the perp to go to jail. They want other forms of justice.”

A coldness came over Ben. His body seemed to stiffen. Andy shrugged, pressed on.

“I can also fuck the suspect if I want. Or fuck his friends. Can’t do that on a by-the-book job. It’s a big no-no.”

Ben nearly spat out his drink. “You’ve … you’ve fucked suspects to solve crimes?”

“I fuck who I want, when I want.” Andy rolled her eyes. “You can put your rosary beads away, Ben.”

“And you do the same thing once you have the information that you need,” Ben said. “You just … reverse-engineer the police finding the kid or the body or…”

“You really think that many bodies have been found in this country by people out walking their dogs?” Andy asked.

“Don’t you get like, annoyed?” Ben cocked his head. “These cops who hire you. They get all the credit for solving the case. You’re in and out like a ghost. Nobody ever knows you were there.”

“I don’t do it for the credit,” Andy said. “Half the time, that’s the only reason I’m brought in. Because someone wants to save time and money and scoop up all the credit.”

“So why do you do it?”

“To find people. To catch bad guys.”

Ben shook his head. “This sounds…”

“Ben, Ben, Ben.” Andy put her hands out. “I hate to break it to you, honey. But the cops, the FBI, the government … they do this. They just bring people in to do things sometimes.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Depending on how corrupt the organization is,” Andy said, “sometimes this is their main way of doing things. Think New York in the fifties. Think Washington in the sixties. Think Baltimore in the nineties. A clandestine undercover operation is pretty pedestrian compared to some of the stuff that has happened in modern America, Ben.”

“But what if it goes wrong?” he said. “Our case. If it goes right, nobody knows about it. That’s the same if it goes wrong, right?”

“Just don’t think about that.”

“Oh, okay, I just won’t think about it.” Now he rolled his eyes. “Great plan.”

“Ben—”

“Look. It’s three A.M.” He got up. “Do you think we would have finished banging each other’s brains out by now?”

She didn’t answer, because he was already dumping his beer bottle on the counter and heading for the shower.

Ten minutes under the steaming faucet, his hands pressed to his face, the hot water running over the top of his head and down his back. Ben turned it all over in his mind, the embarrassing incident with Kenny, the last phone call from Luna’s brother-in-law Edgar, the shaken and sick look his girlfriend had given him after both of those interactions. In laying it all out for Andy in the dining room, Ben had been forced to take into account the complexities of his connection to Luna. All the moving parts. Because it was never clearer to him than it was in that moment, that one of the characters that featured in the story he’d just told had stolen Luna and the boy. But who was it? He felt paralyzed with exhaustion, yet taut with urgency to get it out. Would the next thing he said reveal to the “specialist” where his lost family was? Or would it be the thing he said after that? When would the deciding beat come?

He stepped out of the shower and almost ran into her. She was standing before the mirror in the small space, raking her hair up into a ponytail, as naked as he was.

“Jesus!” He covered himself. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to catch a couple of hours here,” she said. She bent and opened the drawer in the vanity and plucked out a still-boxed toothbrush, clearly aware of exactly where to find one. “I’m tired, too. And if this was real, I’d probably wait until sunrise to get a cab.”

He snatched a towel from the rack and dragged it around his waist.

“I mean why the fuck are you naked?”

Andy turned toward him. “Ben.” She cocked a hip. “You think we’re going to get through the next few weeks without knowing what each other looks like?”

He was staring at the ceiling. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” he said. “But like, surely…” He had no words.

“Look at me,” she said.

“No. Get out.”

“Fucking look at me!”

“Why?”

“Because you need to know about this,” she said, gesturing to her arm. He glanced quickly, caught sight of the scar. Big, grisly, a chunk missing from her upper arm on the left-hand side. “You’ll need to be able to talk with authority about it. About my tits. My ass. My pussy. Those things might come up in conversation. And if you get it wrong—if you get any of this wrong, Ben—it could cost us both our lives.”

He stared at his feet, shook his head, had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

“I’m sleeping in that bed with you tonight.”

“This doesn’t make any sense!”

“It makes perfect sense,” she said. “We need to play this as close to the truth as possible. At all times. That’s how we get away with this, Ben. By playing it out. You have no idea if Engo is going to turn up here, ten minutes from now, and knock on the door. Do you? You have no idea if he’ll suddenly drop by, because he went home with a woman from this side of the bridge and he’s hoping to catch a ride in to work with you in the morning.”

Ben was silent. She had a point. It had happened. Engo was so desperate, he’d driven out of state for pussy. He’d turned up on Ben’s doorstep at ludicrous hours for all kinds of reasons over the years—business ideas, religious awakenings. The guy was crazy.

“What are you going to tell him,” Andy asked, “when he walks in and finds me on the couch and you in the bed?”

He shook his head, stared at her feet.

“Ben,” she said. “Grow the fuck up.”

That did it. He lifted his eyes to her. Looked her over, briefly, got an impression. She was hard and lean and there were more scars. He wondered if they were from the job, from gunshots or knife fights or car accidents. He looked at her abs and wondered why she’d done that to herself, why she’d shredded off a good five pounds of fat since he saw her last and worked her body until it was a statue of skin-covered steel. It occurred to him that seeing her now, naked, unmasked, it was almost as though he knew less about her than when he’d first laid eyes on her. Like she was actively stealing away those few clues he’d been able to scavenge about who the hell she was.

He gave up. Rehung the towel.

She looked him over and then turned back to the mirror and started brushing her teeth.

“Not bad,” she said, her words slurred by foam.

In sheer bewilderment, Ben went numbly to the bed and crawled into it. He thought about leaving the lamp on for her, and then didn’t. When she slipped in beside him, he lay frozen, turned away from her, watching the lights flicker on the distant apartment blocks. He listened to her breathing, until it slowed and steadied, and then he turned in the glow of the city and watched her sleep.

2008

He peeled his shirt off and dropped it on the wooden bench, stared at it, dazed.

Ben had been on duty for thirty-one hours straight. The shirt was so laden with the evidence of how he’d spent that time that it slithered off the wood and pooled on the floor like some half-liquid, half-fabric creature. There was grease and oil on it from servicing the station engines, piss and shit and disinfectant from scrubbing the station bathrooms. The shirt carried ash and food and extinguisher fluid from a restaurant fire, burned rubber and metal filings from a warehouse explosion, dust and cobwebs from an attic he’d crawled into to free an old man with dementia—the guy had climbed up there to hide from the Viet Cong and scratched the fuck out of Ben’s arms as he tried to drag him out. Ben brushed mystery grit from his chest hairs and looked in his locker for a clean shirt to wear home on the B train, but there were none. It was his fourth straight day on rotation.

An alarm sounded, and Ben jolted hard, his body scraping the bottom of the barrel for reactive juice and finding only adrenaline and cortisol and liquid dread. Because as the station’s probationary firefighter, if he was in the building and the call came, he was on it. Fuck your thirty-one hours. Ben looked across the locker room and saw that the alarm was just a guy from the medic squad’s phone. The stocky firefighter had been napping on the bench and snapped awake at the sound, took the phone off his lap and silenced it.

The adrenaline hit ate up everything Ben had left. He eased himself down on the bench, leaned forward, rested his head against his locker door, and closed his eyes. That was a mistake, and he knew it. The metal was cool and flexible, bent slightly, cradled his brow. He let his shoulders sag. A whole-body shutdown. Ben wondered if he would survive this. It was ten times worse than what they’d done to him as a building-site newbie over in Queens, before he’d found out about his brother and become an instant sorta-dad. Wondering if he would survive being a noob—a probationary—firefighter terrified Ben, because the truth was that he had to survive it, for the kid. But he was reaching malfunction point now. He literally needed to take a minute just to get up the strength to walk out of the goddamn building and he wasn’t even six months in.

“Hey!” someone barked.

Ben was on his feet, robotic, the ability to rise coming out of nowhere. He wondered if he’d actually been sleeping, sitting on the bench with his head against his locker like that. The guy in front of him now, a beast of a man, wore the kind of boiled-blood expression that made him think maybe he was.

“Why the fuck are you so tired?”

Ben had never laid eyes on this guy. He’d have remembered. Just the volume of his voice made his eardrums pulse.

“I asked you a question!”

“I just.” Ben gestured to his locker. Looked at his filthy shirt on the floor. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m the probie.” Ben shrugged.

“I didn’t ask who you are.” The guy edged closer. There were veins in his thick neck that were standing out. They made Ben think about snakes swimming in red milk. “I asked why the fuck you’re so tired. Are you moonlighting?”

“What?” Ben laughed. He actually laughed. The sound got choked off pretty quick when the guy cocked his head like a giant killer clown in a bad horror movie. “I’m just coming off my shift, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

Ben felt delirious.

“How long have you been on duty?”

Someone crossed the back of the locker room, another medic. Eyes wary. Gone in seconds. Ben couldn’t signal for help.

“Are you deaf? How. Long. Hav—”

“I pulled a double.” Ben wondered if he should put his shirt on. “And then, uh … uh … Some guy from night watch called in sick.”

“So you just came off a triple shift?”

Ben’s stomach was hard, ringed with bands of pain.

“Answer the question!”

He couldn’t.

The guy walked off. His stride was long, fast, and he was headed right for Chief Warrens’s office. Ben jogged up behind him, grabbed the big guy’s biceps and got bounced off the wall for his efforts. It was like being bucked off a bull.

“Get the fuck off me, probie.”

“Listen, listen, please—” Ben got in front of him. “Sir!” Ben had managed to stop the bull before he broke down the doors to the hall. “Don’t. Don’t say anything. Please. I need this job. Okay? Okay? I got a kid. My brother. He-he-he’s fourteen. I just got custody. I’ve only been stationed here three … three … three … three months. I haven’t even got my ticket.”

“Get out of my way,” the big man growled.

“I-I-I—”

“You what?”

“I need—”

“You’re so tired you can hardly string a fucking sentence together.”

It was true. The words were cascading out of Ben’s mouth. Exhaustion and raw terror. The big man barged past him. Suddenly they were in Chief Warrens’s office, the lean fire chief rising from behind his desk.

“What the hell?”

“Is this your noob?”

Ben figured he must be dreaming. He was shirtless, wild-eyed, standing in his chief’s office. The big guy, who was obviously a chief too from the sheer gall with which he’d thrown open Warrens’s door, stood there full-arm pointing at him.

“Matt, what the fuck are you doing here?”

“Forget why I’m here. I just found this probie practically comatose in the locker room.” Matt’s mean lips flicked spit as he talked. “Are you overworking your probationaries again?”

Wade Warrens’s chest inflated. His eyes flicked to Ben, back to Matt.

“What I do with my firefighters is—”

“Oh. Please. Don’t say that it’s none of my damn business.” Matt shifted forward, his feet never leaving the ground, a heavyweight boxer edging in for a jab that would drive your eyeball clear through the back of your skull. “Don’t you dare say that, Wade. Because the probie is telling me he just worked a triple shift, and I believe him, because the kid’s so fucked up he can’t even talk right.”

“Matt,” Wade warned.

“It looks to me like you’re pulling the same dangerous shit you were pulling when I was here,” Matt said. “Grinding the probies down until they throw up or pass out because you think it’s old school. That’s not old school, you stupid, small-dicked, no-good son of a bitch. That’s the kind of shit that will get somebody killed.”

Ben watched the two men, his mind tightroping the edge of reality, thinking about a comic book he saw once where King Kong had a fistfight with a T. rex. He tried to lock in to the moment, to decide if he’d really just heard someone call Wade Warrens “small-dicked.”

“Did you just send this kid into the warehouse fire down on Eighth Street?”

“I don’t answer to you, Matt.”

“You did. Didn’t you. You backed up one of your own crew members with this half-bagged little prick.”

“Matt, get out of my fucking office!”

“I’m gonna have your badge this time, Wade,” Matt said. “That’s a promise.”

He turned and walked out. Ben just stood there, half naked, dirty, hollow, a plane-crash victim on a deserted beach. Only Matt’s voice from the hall could unstick his feet from the sand.

“Catch up, probie!”

Ben followed Matt back to the locker room, pulled another stinking shirt on in the icy, aftershocked, postapocalyptic silence, because he was just guessing what he was supposed to do now, and none of it mattered anyway. Other guys in the station had heard the commotion. Probably every guy. They were watching Ben and Matt unabashedly as Ben packed his bag and then the big man led him out of the station, down the stairs. They went along the street to a Toyota minivan parked with one wheel up on the curb in a no-parking zone yet inexplicably ticketless. Ben climbed into the front passenger seat beside Matt for some reason, scooting his feet down into a pile of kids’ toys and take-out containers. Matt was muttering furiously to himself now, fishing in his pocket for his phone, firing off a half-dozen texts, searching in the overstuffed center console for a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, all while somehow pulling off the curb and squealing into the traffic.

“… old school my ass. Just a bunch of fucking … shriveled-dick bitches … trying to feel like big men by pushing probies around … Noobs! Like you can’t make a noob piss his pants just by lookin’ at him…”

They were on the road. Ben gripped the door handle and tried to figure out how he was going to afford Kenny’s school supplies now. Matt fell silent, drove hunched over the wheel, the car ceiling too low for him. The temperature in the vehicle leveled out like a heater had been switched off. Ben figured after they hit Midtown that Matt had forgotten he was sitting there.

He hadn’t.

Matt parked the minivan in the driveway of another firehouse. Ben was staring right at Engine 99. Matt reached over and opened the glove compartment, fishing in the detritus there, raining receipts and scraps of paper over Ben’s knees. He came out with a piece of paper that had a number already written on it. Slapped that piece of paper into Ben’s chest.

“Call that number tomorrow morning,” Matt said. “Engo will get your paperwork started.”