I dozed fitfully for an hour or two before I gave up. Wink’s train-wreck soundtrack had gone silent. I watched Quinn’s chest rise and fall, and thought of my lost camera. Until the last few months, I’d gone for decades without shooting anything. Picking up my camera after so long had been like the first line of coke during a lost weekend, an arrow right into my visual cortex. Losing it was as close to withdrawal as I’d ever been.
I forced myself not to think about it, pulled on a T-shirt, and retrieved Gryffin’s mobile. I opened the camera app and stared at the dim rectangle that framed Quinn’s sleeping face, the tip of one eyetooth where his lips parted, the frozen grimace carved into his cheeks. I saw all these things, and tasted the sour aftermath of all the damage he’d sustained over the decades, a damage inextricable from my own.
Yet gazing at the thumbnail of Quinn on the mobile’s screen, I sensed nothing. Tindra might practice alchemy with silicon sensors and electrical pulses, millions of pixels and photons and electrons. For me, the mobile held as much magic as a chunk of Styrofoam.
I shot a dozen photos anyway, Quinn’s broken face no more peaceful asleep than awake; then deleted them all.
“What are you doing?” His eyes opened and he sat up, rubbing his jaw.
“Taking pictures.”
“With that?” He frowned. “Where’s your camera? The one your dad gave you?”
“I gave it away.”
“What?”
I turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I knew he was still watching me. After a moment he swung from the bunk, tugged on his jeans, and lit up. While he smoked, I got my bag from the upper bunk.
Quinn shook his head. “New hair, new bag. What else new you got, girlfriend?”
“I dunno. Some drugs.”
“Goddamn it, Cass! I’m trying to lay low, and you should be, too. You spend thirty-something years hiding in a downtown bunker, and now that you’re out, you can’t stop pulling shit that’s gonna bring the cops down on you. And me.”
“Fuck off. What the hell did you expect?”
He glared at me, but then his expression softened. “When’s the last time you got some sleep? Or ate?”
“I can’t sleep. And you don’t eat when you live too long.”
He slid a hand under my T-shirt, tracing my rib cage. “Christ. You’re nothing but bones, Cassie.”
“You said I looked hot.”
“Yeah—a hot skeleton. You need to quit that speed. You’re gonna give yourself a heart attack.”
I pulled away and picked up Gryffin’s mobile again, scrolling through his contacts.
“Whose phone is that?”
“Gryffin’s.”
“Is he the one you fucked?”
“I told you back in Reykjavík, he’s a rare-book dealer. His mother was a famous photographer, that’s how I ended up in Maine. His father was a serial killer. As it turns out.”
He peered over my shoulder. “Whose numbers are those?”
“People Gryffin knows. Bookdealers, runners—people who scout books to sell to dealers. This guy Ballingstead, he’s a runner, lives in Wapping. That’s close to here, right?”
“Close enough.”
He began to pace. I had a flashback to when we were kids and did a handful of black beauties, and Quinn thought that knocking off the local drugstore would be a really good idea. He halted beneath the fluorescent bulb, his face the same sickly green as his eyes.
“Why do you have that guy’s phone? You steal it?”
“No. But this book—if we find it, we can sell it ourselves and keep the money.”
Quinn laughed. “That’s insane. There’s no way we could sell it. It’d be like unloading a Picasso. Like unloading the world’s only Picasso.”
“There’s no way to sell it legally. You know people, and any guy you don’t know, you know the guy who does. People like that, they have more money than they know what to do with, and they hire people to acquire stuff for them. If we can find the book, you can pass it on to someone. We take our cut and disappear.”
“What about this guy Gryffin?”
“If he goes to the cops—and he will go to the cops as soon as he can—I’m fucked. If we’re going to do this, we need to move now, before Tindra decides to call the police. Or we could just bail,” I added. “Leave now and start over someplace else. Can’t we just bail?”
Quinn ran a hand across his grizzled scalp. “We could try. But with all this new border-control shit, one of us might get detained at the airport. In which case we’d be screwed.”
“We’re kinda screwed now.”
“Yeah, I know. What’re you thinking?”
“Gryffin says he didn’t tell anyone about this book, or the deal with Harold. He’s either lying or stupid. I’m thinking he’s just stupid. Someone got wind of it, either through him or Harold.”
“That chick Tindra?”
“I don’t think so. She’s too isolated. I don’t think she has any friends, except her dog. And her bodyguards.”
“Why does she need bodyguards?”
“I don’t know. They have—I don’t know what they have. Some kind of weird ménage à trois or something. She’s definitely emotionally fragile. But she wouldn’t have told anyone else about the book—she’s obsessed with getting it for her app. She wants to, I dunno, scan or photograph the pages. She says the book is like an ancient form of computer code.”
“Weird with a beard.” Quinn lit another cigarette. “But the app might be a little moneymaker.”
“No,” I said. “She tried it on me. It’s horrible. Like mainlining angel dust. I had a flashback to when I was raped—it was like I was actually there again. It causes PTSD instead of curing it. Trust me, we’ll be doing the world a favor if we find the book before she does.”
“How’re we gonna do that?” Quinn resumed pacing. “She’s got her bodyguards and your guy Gryffin, who knows all about this book shit. What do we got?”
I held up Gryffin’s mobile. “His contact list.”
“What if he’s already called them?”
“I’ll risk it. I’ll see if I can find Ballingstead, he’s closest. You see if you can find out who put a hit on Harold. Someone nailed him right in the eye; how many people can do that?”
“You’d be surprised.”
I went to the galley, splashed water on my face, and raked my fingers through my hair. Quinn was right: I looked like I’d crawled out of a car wreck. I gingerly touched the scar beside my eye, still an angry red. I wasn’t sure if Boots had enough concealer to hide that, but I got out the overpriced makeup I’d nicked and tried to make myself look less like my own ghost.
When I returned to the bunk, Quinn looked me up and down, then shot me a vulpine grin. “That’s an improvement. I thought you were taking off.”
“I’m gone.” I picked up my bag. “What time is it?”
“A little after seven. You’re not gonna roll this Ballingstead guy out of bed, are you?”
“No. But I have to figure out where he lives. And I want to check the news to see if Harold’s there.”
“You can do that later. Stay, baby.” He pushed me onto the bunk. “Thirty-seven years, we got a lot to make up for.”
I couldn’t argue with that.