Hopper was Laney’s (that is, Kendra’s) guide into the lunatic world of Russian mobsters. Minor Russian mobsters, nothing huge, nothing international. It should have been a straightforward case—he was to help Kendra get in with his boss in exchange for complete immunity.
Except that’s not how it went. Not how it went at all.
Mike gulped a third of his pint in one go. After putting his glass down, he said, “Who knows your new address?”
The cold feeling inside Laney bloomed and spread until it numbed her arms, chilled her legs. “I didn’t tell anyone. But it’s not like I’m in hiding. Why? Why are you asking? Hopper thinks the woman he worked with was Kendra. He never knew who I really was, did he? Mike? Does he know my real name?”
Mike frowned. “He might.”
“Are you fucking with me right now?”
As an undercover, her real identity had been so erased by the NYPD that for the time period she was Kendra, Elaine Bird wasn’t even listed in the database except for payroll.
“I’m not certain. I know he asked a lot of questions in prison and then he stopped asking questions and started with the threats.”
“Mike, what the hell. Does. He. Know. My. Real. Fucking. Name?”
He downed the rest of his beer. “Probably.”
Her words snapped out of her mouth. “Are you sure?”
Mike shook his head. “No. If I were sure, he’d be handcuffed to a hospital bed with his legs broken and his face beat in.” He swigged the rest of his beer. “Apparently he spoke of us extensively while he was away.”
“What do you mean, us?” She sat forward so that their faces were inches apart. “What do you mean? And how do you know what he talked about while he was away?”
“I know.” He gave her a hard stare. “I just know.” He sat back, the space between them open and stark. “I meant he spoke about me and Harry. Not you.”
The hesitation in his voice set her teeth on edge.
He said, “But after he got out, I heard he was asking around about you. A lot. And it’s possible someone told him. That’s it. That’s all.” He lifted his hands, palms out. “I don’t know who told him, so don’t ask. I don’t know. Really.” He squirmed. “I’m leaving. I have thirty days’ vacation saved and I’m going away. I’ll figure out what to do about him before I come back.” Rolled his shoulders. “Or who knows. I might put my papers in and never come back. Maybe you should go someplace else too.”
The coldness seeped into her throat and into her brain.
“I can’t, Mike, because my son is missing.” She took a minute to control herself. “Were you going to tell me?” she asked. “If I hadn’t texted you this morning?”
He looked at the table, at her hands shredding her damp coaster.
“Mike? Were you going to tell me?”
Color rose in his cheeks and his eyes slid to the side, away from her. “I didn’t know where you moved to. I heard you got divorced, so I figured maybe you changed your name.”
She walked to the bar, asked for a double vodka, then swallowed the whole thing in one big, needy gulp. There was a time she’d thought of Harry as her best friend, of Mike as a brother. Betraying them, keeping anything dangerous from them, was just as unthinkable to her as betraying her own family. Now she couldn’t understand the person she used to be. It was almost as if losing her parents and brother had done something to her brain and she’d latched on to the first set of people who were good to her.
And yet it was more than that. She’d trusted her colleagues with her life; she had to, because she wouldn’t have been able to do her job otherwise. After the Russian case fell apart, the thought of trusting anyone like that again induced a breathless panic.
For as long as it took the vodka to hit, she allowed herself the luxury of outrage. For her ex-sergeant to know what he knew, suspect worse, and not reach out to her was devastating, slicing open old scars she’d thought had toughened if not healed.
Then she put her shot glass on the counter, scraped a napkin across her eyes, and shoved it into the glass along with her self-pity.
Her skin a splotchy red, she sat back down at the little table. In a tone that invited zero objection, she said, “Mike, while you’re gone, I need your passcodes. And your laptop. I’m going to VPN in.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER
14
ALFIE JIGGLED THE doorknob again, with the same result as the last two or three hundred times he’d jiggled it over the past two days. A big, fat, dick’s worth of nothing. This predicament was his fault. He owned it. Nobody had forced him into the man’s car. Nobody told him to accept the things the man offered him. That was all on him.
The man had taken his phone from him. Yes, he knew he should have fought for it. But he didn’t. That was on him too. He’d been surprised was all, thinking the man only wanted to check the weather or something. He didn’t expect his phone to go into the man’s inside jacket pocket and be zippered away. And even after the hours-long drive, it seemed rude to demand it back.
Once again, he began pacing, nervous energy burning through his legs, his belly, warming his face to a fevered, blotchy pink. Wood paneling (dark, dull) covered the walls and ceiling. The coffee table, couch, and love seat were also made of wood, stained the same brown as the walls and ceiling. The cushions, upholstered in a monumentally horrendous red-plaid wool, were abusively scratchy to boot—something he’d discovered last night when he finally collapsed on top of them in exhaustion.
The room lacked windows, a television, a phone, or any electronics. No bathroom either. A Spackle bucket had been planted in the corner, where it fumed quietly with Alfie’s emissions. Alfie hated that bucket more than anything he’d ever hated in his entire life. Granted, he’d been okay enough with relieving himself against a tree when camping, but that was different. He didn’t then have to sleep next to said tree in a locked room.
He flopped onto the couch and threw his head back. As far as basements went, this one was at least dry, though cold enough for him to see his breath. He opened his mouth into an O and blew a puff. When was the man coming back? He needed to pee, and today, his second day with the bucket, he awoke determined that if he couldn’t use a bathroom like a proper, civilized human being, he’d rather go the way of Tycho Brahe, whose bladder had burst after he drank too much and refused to leave the banquet table. Alfie’d demanded access to the upstairs bathroom twice already and been denied, but he was resolute. No more bucket.
When the man first approached Jordan and him, he’d said they should call him Mr. Blue. Alfie liked that, despite the name being glaringly false, because who has names like that? He liked other things about Mr. Blue, though they were not the obvious things. Not the things Jordan liked, for example. Jordan sought Mr. Blue for the beer he bought them, and the weed he gave them for almost no money at all, for the pills. For letting them haunt his ratty, weird apartment that always smelled like something done crawled in and died in the basement, which rather than turning them off added a touch of bizarre recklessness to the whole deal. For introducing them to porn.
Alfie liked him for the way he talked, as if they were equals, and for all the different kinds of music he knew about and played for them, and the way he’d put his large hand on the back of Alfie’s neck when showing him things. It was something his dad used to do, and nobody had ever done it since he left. Not until Mr. Blue.
Once, after Alfie declined to visit because he had a chemistry test (he’d been borderline failing chemistry), Mr. Blue said come over anyway, I’ll help you study. And Alfie came over. Mr. Blue made the subject vibrant, describing reactive and stable elements as if they were characters in a play: Fluorine, the crazy hellcat demanding union with everything she touched, toxic on her own, often explosive in her coupling; Iron, stable and independent, needing nothing, strong and popular.
So when he offered the boys weed that first time (fat little blunts nestled inside a tin box), Alfie accepted. And why not?
Mr. Blue was playing dancehall reggae on an old-fashioned turntable (Jordan later said that was so hipster it was practically Brooklyn), and he gave them beers and packets of salt-and-vinegar chips. Alfie couldn’t remember ever feeling as content as he felt that afternoon. Whatever Mr. Blue offered him, he would have taken, no hesitation, no questions.
The pot made him feel odd in his head, like nothing really fit, not words, not meanings. Panic flooded him, and he couldn’t speak, his jaw immobilized as if wired shut. And even worse than that, he couldn’t stop the feeling. In retrospect, he suspected Mr. Blue had added something to the pungent leaves that heightened the effect. Jordan loved it. He lolled on Mr. Blue’s couch, drooling and laughing until (he said) his stomach hurt.
Alfie, on the other hand, coughed, threw up the beers and chips, then left, stumbling along Route 35, the trees lurching toward him. He came home late, dying to collapse quietly in his room, but of course his mother clocked how blitzed he was and they had that terrible fight. He’d been furious with her. She should have understood how horrified the pot made him feel—the panic, the nausea, the crazy fear that he’d never be himself again. His stutter had locked his throat, twisted his jaw, and all he could do was beg her from inside his mind, and she didn’t hear him.
For years she’d told him he needed friends. What’s a life without a friend, she’d say. It’s sad. It’s empty. You need to find a way to get along, to be a friend to someone. If you don’t know what to do, watch what the others do and do the same thing.
And when he finally snagged Jordan, following months of preparation, investigation, and calculation, he’d done what Jordan did.
His mother always told him she loved him and understood him. But the day he got stoned and hated it and came home seeking comfort (or at least peace), he saw the lie in her words. He was just as alien to her as she was to him. As everyone was to him.
He hadn’t smoked pot or taken pills since that day, though he’d pretended to. He watched Jordan and mimicked him, doing what his mother had told him to do after all. Subsequently, Jordan started spending more time with him at school, had introduced him to his cousin, his other friends.
Oh, he knew where he stood in the social pecking order of high school life—all the way at the bottom, even below Oscar, who had Down’s syndrome and always smiled at everyone as he waddled down the hallway. That’s why Alfie started his chart, and the chart led to Jordan, and Jordan led to Mr. Blue, and Mr. Blue had one day up and kidnapped him to this dank, piss-fumed, scratchy-wooled basement. So there you go. All his fault.
Alfie got up off the couch and fiddled with the doorknob again. Then knocked.
“Hey!” he yelled at the door (brown paint, chipped). “I need to puh … puh … puh-ee!” Fuck the stutter. He couldn’t even act outraged without sounding ridiculous. He kicked the paneling.
A few minutes later the door opened, and Mr. Blue blocked the doorway, his face backlit.
“Let me up!” Alfie shouted. He took one step forward, then faltered, unsure of the man’s response, dogged in his intent. “P … lease,” he said.
Mr. Blue swayed slightly, his head dipping. His voice was hoarse as he said, “Fuck sake, you have the bladder of an infant. Didn’t I just empty that bucket an hour ago? There’s no way you need to pee again.” But he held the door open and stepped aside. “Whatever. I’m not the chambermaid.”
Alfie climbed the stairs two at a time, wanting to stretch his legs. He paused in the narrow hallway, taking in the cracked walls and the burnt-orange carpeting that was so matted and old, bits of linoleum it had originally covered showed through the bald spots.
“I thought you had to pee,” said Mr. Blue.
“Yeah.” He wanted to say sorry, but the s would have given him so much trouble that he swallowed the word, ducked into the bathroom, and tried without success to close the door—Mr. Blue had shoved his foot between the door and the frame. The bathroom had a tiny window, and he guessed Mr. Blue thought he’d try to escape through it, a feat only a very small child could realistically achieve.
Mr. Blue was definitely not firing on all cylinders.
Alfie didn’t mind. As the resident weirdo in his old school and the new one, it only made sense he’d attract weirdos. They were reactive compounds, he and Mr. Blue, one needing something the other had. He knew he should be afraid. But like everything else about Alfie, the things that scared him were not things that scared others. He was scared of butterflies, for example. Hated the way they flitted out of nowhere and invaded his space. He felt the same about bicycles, skateboards, scooters—much for the same reasons.
He should have hated Mr. Blue for commandeering his life. But he didn’t hate him. He didn’t understand why Mr. Blue had taken him, and not understanding made it hard to hate. Did Mr. Blue like him? Did he want him for his own? He always acted happy to have Jordan and him around. Perhaps he wanted to make the situation permanent. Alfie wouldn’t have minded having Mr. Blue in his life more permanently, just not in this terrible house. Certainly not in that insufferable basement.
Alfie turned his back on Mr. Blue and peed into the bowl, flushed, washed his hands. Luxuries, one and all. A quick glance in the mirror showed Mr. Blue’s attention elsewhere—looking at something down the hallway. Alfie dropped the towel and bent quickly to retrieve it, nudging the vanity door open a smidge and cataloging everything inside. He neatened and hung the towel. He’d seen what he hoped he would.
As Mr. Blue led him back to the basement, Alfie paused and placed both hands on the doorjamb. “ ’an I ’tay upstairs?” he asked. His speech coach had told him he shouldn’t avoid sounds, but sometimes he just had to.
“No, I told you, you can’t.” Mr. Blue sounded tired, as if he’d been the one who spent the night on an impossibly scratchy couch, not Alfie.
“Why?”
“Fuck sake, boy! Get in there!”
But Alfie bridled, wouldn’t move. A dread stirred within him. Over the past few years, after his father left him, he’d begun a quiet campaign of self-discipline. He’d learned, slowly, to swallow his terrors, to clam up on his frustrations. He’d transformed himself, without any outside guidance, from a tantrum-prone, willful child to an eerily reserved, watchful teenager.
It wasn’t a perfect metamorphosis. Not by a long shot. Faced with another night in that silent, scratchy, fetid, empty room, Alfie’s old worries scurried headward, waiting for him to surrender all that willpower, waiting to spread darkly inside his chest, fill his eyes with night, his ears with rushing water.
“Can I stay upstairs, please?” he whispered. He’d broken out in a cold sweat and the doorjamb grew slick under his hands, but the words came out smooth, as if spoken by someone else.
Mr. Blue glared at him, then shook his head and went down the hallway, leaving Alfie to do as he would, and Alfie followed, grateful to the point of faintness. Behind him was the front door, and he knew it was bolted on the inside with a heavy lock, having seen Mr. Blue fasten it when they first arrived, the key going on a chain around the man’s neck.
The living room, dim except for one flickering lamp, seemed almost as much a cave as the basement. Forest-green blinds blocked any remaining daylight, and from the stuffy, stale smell, Alfie guessed the windows were shut tight. As he passed one, he drew an exploratory finger along the sill, only to have his thumb snag painfully on something sharp. The window was nailed shut. A quick glance at the others showed him they all were, the nails like thorns scarring the sills and frames.
A doorway led to a kitchen, and a damp, moldy odor shimmered in the air, as of a fridge that had never been cleaned out. The fluorescent in the kitchen flickered as well, and Alfie had to squint against the light’s vibration. It bothered him, the way a toothache might.
Then a shape in a corner caught his eye. An old upright piano! He glanced at Mr. Blue, who was scraping a malodorous mass out of a pot into two plastic bowls.
“Mr. Blue?”
The man worried at a blacke
ned lump in the pot, poking it with a fork.
“Mr. Blue? Would you”—Alfie paused, got his breath, relaxed his throat—“mind if I play the piano?” He drew the words out slowly, in a slightly singsong fashion, the way he’d been taught.
Mr. Blue cocked an eyebrow at him, then shrugged.
Alfie sidled into the kitchen to grab a chair and did a quick study of the kitchen windows. Nails all around the sills there too.
He brought his chair to the piano, raised the lid. The keys were, unsurprisingly, discolored, webbed with fine cracks like roadways on a map. He positioned his hands—gently rounded, as if each cupped a sleeping hamster—and played a chord. The sound was thin, plinky, but amazingly, in tune. He closed his eyes and played. Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp minor—not a very original choice, but it seemed apt for the situation.
As a child, he’d started playing before he even knew how to read, or, for that matter, before he could speak properly. He was nearly four before he spoke in complete sentences, and three and a half when he first figured out how to play the Sesame Street song on his toy keyboard. His father had lifted him in the air and twirled him around, finishing with a bear hug, which forever imprinted on Alfie the correlation between music and adoration.
Finished, he sat back in the chair and closed the lid, his hand resting on top.
“Didn’t know you could play,” said Mr. Blue. He had sunk into the couch, his torso angled as if he were too tired to sit up.
Alfie shrugged. “I play,” he said. “Didn’t you see my sax when I got in your car?” The sax was, presumably, hopefully, still in the car.
“Yeah, but. Most kids only play one thing. And badly at that. You’re pretty good.”
“When can I go home, Mr. Blue?”
The man looked away, then stood, went into the kitchen, retrieved the two bowls and handed one to Alfie, setting off the lamp so it blinked like a lazy strobe.
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