21

This time, she was determined to find his place herself. No phone calls, no shepherding. She was going to get to him if it killed her, carried on the chaos in her heart alone.

She kept rehearsing it in her mind. Run away with me. Four words that summed up the great rock-and-roll dream— leaving the old life behind, reinventing yourself on the road, holding on to nothing but each other. Forget college, and Hamm, and the simple future she had lying ahead of her. They’d go to California, because that was where musicians ran away to, the land of hot days in the practice studio and long nights on the stage. She knew the actual undertaking was probably more complicated than she could imagine—there were going to be cops they’d have to dodge and shitty motels they’d have to suffer through, maybe even a rat-infested squat or two—but it was about time she went for it. She wasn’t long for Hamm, anyway. She’d known that for ages. And besides, she was quickly learning that what little of her small- town upbringing she thought she knew was all a miserable conspiracy in the name of normalcy.

But Peter made her feel different. An equal, someone who didn’t hold her back but only pushed her to be better. Fiona would sell the farm for that.

She made it to the crossword puzzle of warehouses before she got lost. She would recognize specific structures—the placement of loading-dock doors, the way paint was peeling on block-long brick walls—and feel a sense of relief wash over her, only to discover that same design or appearance two blocks down. She would turn corners and find nothing but dead ends and alleys splitting off them. The few other wanderers she ran into were raggedy street people who eyed her angrily and hunched their shoulders.

For the longest time, she wondered if she was even in the right neighborhood, the right city, the right mind. Then, out of nowhere, Fiona turned a corner and saw a tag in silver paint: ‘sounds.’

The letters seemed to lean in a direction, the final S dragging off like it was sprayed while the artist was being yanked away. She followed its lead and saw another ‘sounds’ on a door across the street, leaning toward a nearby intersection.

She followed the tags, finding them painted on different parts and heights of the buildings around her. Every new ‘sounds’ seemed to be written like an arrow, one part of the final letter stretching off, pointing her to the next scrawled word.

She didn’t realize how close she was until she turned a corner and saw Peter a few yards away, standing outside of the door to his loft. The guy from the club, PM, was across from him, sucking down a cigarette and nodding along to the words Peter was saying that Fiona couldn’t hear.

Something about the look on Peter’s face stopped Fiona dead in her tracks and canceled the greeting she was about to call to him. There wasn’t a trace of the guy she cared about there, but the cold, hard gaze of his alter ego. Her father’s description came to her mind, and while Peter didn’t exactly look like the devil himself, his unblinking eyes certainly suggested sinister intentions.

Peter nodded PM in her direction, and she had barely enough time to duck into a doorway before they came past her, so close that she caught a whiff of him that made her heart ache with memories of their past Saturdays, of the lighthouse and the book and the hours spent inches away from each other at all times.

“How long will he be there?” asked Peter in an icy voice.

“Forty minutes, no more,” said PM.

“Hmm,” said Peter. “Well, let’s get there fast, then.”

Once they were a block away from her, Fiona crept out of the doorway and followed them. She knew she should alert him to her presence, or even just go grab Betty and wait for him, but suddenly she was curious to see Peter when he didn’t know she was around. His face, his tone of voice, it all suggested that he was on his way to some serious business. That, along with her father’s confession, left her wondering what was going on, who he really was.

The farther they walked, the more decrepit and vile the buildings became around them. The clinical warehouses of Peter’s neighborhood gave way to burned-out hovels and vacant lots full of rubble. Everything was strewn with fluttering trash and tie-dyed rotten yellow with water damage. A distant sloshing sound and a thick septic stink made Fiona think there was some sort of open sewer or murky canal nearby. Whatever the men were doing in this neighborhood, she knew it couldn’t be good.

Finally, they reached a half-crumbled brownstone in the middle of a weed-choked lot. Though in total disrepair, the molding and ironwork around its stoop suggested that it had once been nice. A plaque set in the wall next to the stoop read, the Offices of Manute and, but the remainder was destroyed.

Peter and PM stalked up the stoop and into the doorless entryway. Once they were swallowed by shadow, Fiona snuck after them.

Inside, the building was disgusting and terrifying, full of rot and darkness. The floors were sticky beneath Fiona’s feet, and a smell of piss and the wrong kinds of mushrooms hung in the air. She listened for Peter’s footsteps, then realized they were gone, absorbed by the house. Slowly she crept down a hallway, toward a set of stairs.

Closer to the stairs, there was a door, and Fiona looked in to see if Peter had branched off there. The moment she poked her head in, the stench of stomach acid made her nostrils burn, and she reared back and coughed. Against one wall, barely visible in the light coming in from the half-smashed window, huddled a man and a woman, their eyes twinkling wide and hungry out of their emaciated faces. A third person was splayed out in the center of the floor, a puddle of liquid around their head. Fiona couldn’t tell if it was a he or she.

“Oh God,” she said, and then realized the horrible impropriety, and, worse, how publicly she had just declared that she didn’t belong here. “Sorry,” she mumbled and turned to leave, to flee this awful place.

From up the stairs, she heard Peter’s voice.

Each step creaked and groaned under her feet, but none of them loudly enough to alert anyone, until she was at another hallway, not quite as repulsive. As she moved toward the doorway from which the conversation emanated, Fiona heard others along with Peter, mainly a deep, oily voice in an accent she couldn’t quite place.

“And has it been as fulfilling as you’d hoped?” asked the voice, sounding a little tired, maybe even pissed off.

“So far,” said Peter’s. “But I’m not done yet. It’s not enough to just have them love me. The final blow is necessary.”

Despite her pounding heart and the sweat beading on her forehead, Fiona felt cold inside when she heard those words. She pressed herself flat against the wall adjacent to the doorway and peeked around the corner.

The room was dark, but the milky light slicing in-between the boards on its windows illuminated decaying murals on the walls, pictures of cypress trees and swans. Close to the door stood Peter and PM, their backs to her; Peter stood rigid, but PM hunched and shifted like a stray dog. Across from them were two figures; one was the towering acne-riddled guy Fiona had spotted at the club, wearing a pool-blue windbreaker. The central figure, meanwhile, was an older man in a pearl-colored suit with carefully combed black hair and wrinkles that seemed to flow together. He was short, but broad all over—broad shoulders, broad face, and a broad grin full of yellow teeth that he gritted intermittently, as though he ached somewhere. If Peter was a Pit Viper, she thought, then this guy was a poisonous toad.

“Oh, I’m well aware,” said the squat man. “This isn’t happening without a tribute. I don’t need to remind you that you could be out working right now, bringing in real results, you know, instead of following this, eh, passion project. You’re lucky that Hunter and Ericka are doing so well, otherwise this, this would be kaput. Bam, done, over.”

“I just need a little more time,” said Peter, voice firm but submissive. “Things are coming together. I promise you it’ll be worth it.”

The man cleared his throat with an ugly sound. “Yeah, well. Time I can give you. You ever find out the ratio? Just curious.”

A pause, and Peter said, “I’d say about 57 percent of them will be female.”

“Good,” cooed the man. “Better than half, always good. Well, great, just, throw the party sooner rather than later, please?”

“Right now, the plan is Halloween,” said Peter.

“Halloween’s fine. I can wait that long.”

“Thank you, Udo,” said Peter. “I appreciate it. Really.”

“Okay, okay,” sighed the man, Udo apparently. “Anyway. Bill here—” He nodded to the huge figure at his side. “He said you had a special favor to ask of me. Have to admit, given how much I’m doing so far, the thought doesn’t make me very excited. What’s up?”

Peter’s shoulders heaved as he took a deep breath in and out. “When this is over, I need passage for two.”

“Two?” asked Udo. “What, are you keeping one of them for laughs?” A pause, deathly silent. “It’s not a woman, is it?”

Fiona felt a chill stab through her. Her breath caught. Even without a view of his face, she could sense Peter easing up. “I think I’ve found someone,” he said, almost pleading.

“Jesus, it is,” said Udo, holding his palms up as if to Heaven. “Pete, kid, you’re killing me here. What have I told you, a dozen times? Do I gotta remind you about my marriage?”

“She’s different,” said Peter.

Tell them how, thought Fiona. Let them know.

“Help me.”

She barely had time to look toward the voice before ravenous fingers bit into the flesh of her arm.

The woman from downstairs clutched Fiona desperately. Her bloodshot eyes gleamed with glassy want; her papery lips quivered. This close, Fiona could smell her, sour dried pee and musty bad teeth. She reared back, but the woman pulled harder, and pressed her bony frame against Fiona’s arm hard enough that she could feel every rib in the woman’s chest.

“Please help me,” gibbered the woman in a hoarse voice. “I’ll do whatever you want, anything. I don’t need much. Just a little money, just some help. Please, anything you want, just please help me—”

Fiona wrenched against the woman’s grip, but her hands refused to budge. She cried out and reared back a hand to strike her, and just like that the filthy woman gasped, went rigid, and bolted off into the shadows of the house.

Fiona barely had time to collect herself before a new hand closed around the back collar of her shirt and yanked her hard enough to give her whiplash.

She was swung in a wide arch and then let go; for a moment, she was airborne, and then she crashed hard on her side, scraping her hand on the rocky grit that peppered the floor.

Fiona scrambled to her hands and knees. She was crouched in the center of the meeting, with all eyes on her. PM’s mouth hung open, his eyes vinyl-wide as they glanced between her, Peter, the older man, and back again. The big guy with the acne, the one who’d grabbed her, lumbered back over to her with a look of cool disgust and threw a shadow over her cowering form.

But worst of all was when she locked eyes with Peter. He glared down at her not with rage or embarrassment, but surprise and disappointment, as though he’d expected more from her. In his gaze, all her resolve and cleverness evaporated, and she wanted to crawl to him, to apologize and weep at his feet and beg him to take her back to his place.

But the tension in the room told her not to move. This was serious trouble here—not parent or school trouble, life trouble. Acting out of instinct was the wrong way to play this.

After a few seconds of silence, the old guy sighed heavily. “Well, obviously, this is a problem.” He looked up at Peter, face twisted in annoyance. “Anyone you know?” Peter’s eyes never left her. “Right. Bill, pick her up.”

The pimpled giant started toward her, and Peter yelled, “Wait!”

“That’s what I thought,” groaned Udo, waving Bill back. “Jesus, Pete, this her? This your lady you’re trying to book an exit trip for? Because you know this speaks poorly both of her character and your judgment. Please, I beg of you, say or do something that will make me less, eh, alarmed by what I’m seeing here.”

“Fiona’s cracking the third section of the book,” said Peter. The old guy raised his eyebrow, and then, slowly, looked down at Fiona. She could barely see his eyes tucked into the wrinkled folds of his face, but they sparkled out at her eventually, hard and black.

“Is that right?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said in a soft, faltering voice. She tried to stand, but Bill leaned in and grabbed her by the shoulder to shove her back down. Udo held up a hand, and the huge man let go of Fiona and stepped back, letting her rise to her feet.

The old man regarded her for a moment then extended his hand. “Udo Platt. A pleasure.”

“Fiona Jones,” she said, taking the dry hand in hers and shaking it.

“Pretty name,” he said. “Pretty name for a pretty girl. So, you’re working with the sheet music, huh? That’s something. That’s new. What do you play, flute? Lyre?”

“Electric guitar.”

The man laughed in his throat and shook his head. “That’s for ugly British guys, cupcake. You sure you don’t want to try another book? Got plenty better suited for women. Maybe Le Livre de la Vermine, or a Warden’s handbook?”

“You should hear me play,” she said, trying to sound tough against the overwhelming terror that she’d never leave this room alive, that Peter wouldn’t, either. “Well, I can’t wait,” he said, folding his hands over his paunch. “And you’re from this town our mutual friend’s all hung up on, this little suburb, with the mill and the whatnot? I’m surprised you’re kosher with what Pete’s got planned for all of them. You one of those kids who hates her parents?”

What? Fiona’s mind raced for a snappy answer but came up with nothing. She took a quick look at Peter, who stared at the floor and clenched his fists at his sides.

“Oh, she doesn’t know?” said Udo with a smile. “Wonderful. Rich. Listen, Pete, why don’t you have a little talk with your lady friend and get back to me on how many people you want on your reservation. Meantime, be careful. And you, young lady, good luck with your, ah, music lessons.” He smiled and then flicked his fingers at them. “That’s all. Beat it.”