by Karen Ellis
Why do people hide?
Why do they leave?
Why can’t they just stay with you and face you and love you?
His exhausted mind conjures a two-headed beast gnawing him from either side: his first mother, Nina, on the left and Adam on the right, with Lex, pulpy, dissolving between them. He takes out his phone and scrolls through his personal cloud until he finds her, the young mother holding her smiling son. What if, that craving for answers flaring even now, what if she is still alive?
Now, he thinks without thinking. Now. He reaches into his pocket and pushes at the zipped seal of that tiny packet. He could go to the bathroom and snort it. No one would know.
Dinardo returns holding an interoffice manila envelope and heads for Lex. “Just came in—front desk asked me to bring it up.”
Lex puts down his phone, pulls his hand out of his pocket, straightens out his face, takes the envelope. “Thanks.”
Det Cole is scrawled in an unfamiliar hand on the line beneath the crossed-out names of all the previous recipients. Inside is a black smartphone—a Samsung Galaxy—along with a note saying it was found in a trash can on Lorraine Street in Red Hook.
Lex powers it up and after a moment an orange screen saver with a big leopard print P materializes—the Princeton logo. To confirm that it’s Crisp’s phone, he dials the teenager’s number on his own phone and almost immediately the Galaxy rings with a jazzy syncopation.
He stares at the pass code screen. Stares at it some more. Then his weary brain generates the useful thought to call Carlotta, the tech whiz over at DAS.
“Hey, Lex,” she greets him. “Need another face?”
“Actually,” deciding on the spot, “yes.”
“Pop it over.”
“Will do—thanks. And there’s something else. I need to hack into a cell phone. You know how?”
“Hold on.” She muffles the call with something, maybe her hand, and speaks to someone in the room with her. “Not my wheelhouse, but I’ll put you through to Ajay and he’ll help you out.”
While Lex waits for the call to transfer, he returns to the family photo, pinches out the image to take a screenshot of just Nina’s face, and sends it to Carlotta. He’s put his mother’s name through databases before, but not in a very long time, and as he’s just learned from Mo Crespo, these days a picture really is worth a thousand words.
Ajay comes on the line and breezily instructs Lex through the steps of unlocking Crisp’s phone. A text alert appears center screen:
9174892752
The message was sent at 8:06 a.m., when Dante’s phone was in Crisp’s possession. He must have sent it to himself as a reminder of something. Lex wonders why it didn’t come up on the trap and trace; he’s never understood how so-called topflight technology can have fault lines that things vanish into, but they do. Just like people.
He dials the number into his own phone.
A man with a flinty voice answers, “Uber.”
“Who is this?”
“You called me.”
“I need a ride.”
“Who are you? Why didn’t you use the app?” The driver abruptly hangs up.
Lex starts dialing his way through the Uber maze before reaching a supervisor and being told that if he wants personal information on one of its drivers he’ll have to provide a warrant. So he plows through the bureaucratic paces until he scores a home address for a driver calling himself Wilson Ramsey at the number Crisp sent through to himself.
Lex borrows a precinct car and starts driving. Out of Brooklyn. Into Queens. All the way to the far end of College Point, where he pulls up in front of a row of two-story brick houses. The lights are off in the second-floor apartment that Mo Crespo aka Wilson Ramsey calls home. He gets out, rings Crespo’s bell several times, then returns to the car to wait.
He tunes the radio to a pop rock station with music so annoying he’s sure it will force him to stay awake. Watching, waiting, a crackle of heat up his spine gives him the eerie feeling of being observed. He untucks his Glock from behind his belt and puts it on the passenger seat in quick reach.
He leans back against the headrest and is about to drift off when his phone vibrates in his pocket. A new file has arrived in his case file.
He taps open the DAS app and there, there is Nina as she’d presumably look now: more than twenty years older, with a rounder face and the start of jowls and deeper lines around those loving eyes. Carlotta has given his mother a slightly receded hairline and a touch of gray. She looks so real that Lex can’t help greeting her, “Zdravstvuy Mama.” He uploads the image to Interpol and stares at the spinny wheel that freezes his screen while the system searches the world for any trace of Antonina Fedorova Chkalov.
Finally the wheel vanishes and four definitive words appear.
Subject cannot be found.
He sends the image to his personal e-mail and deletes it from the case files, but the memory of this new face, this now face—it lingers.
27
Crisp squeezes through the tear in the chain-link fence and the Yankees cap he took from home pops off. He jams it back on and tugs the bill low over his sunglasses—a meager disguise that has gotten him this far. Hatted, hidden, sans his signature fro, he slipped past the surveillance cop returning from his pee break, continued unseen along Brighton Beach Avenue, and made it back into the subway. Then he rode the train south to north and north to south, thinking, until he forced himself to decide.
He promised JJ he’d come back so he’s doing it: coming back.
His mind bends around the darkness, the moonlight, the water’s surface undulating in expanding circles as if reacting to a sudden movement with no obvious source. He glances back through the chain link and sees a couple in the distance, walking along Van Brunt, but they don’t appear to have noticed him.
Inside the musty building, the fibrous history returns but he won’t breathe it in this time…and he won’t think about Officer Russo or Robert Moses or the NRA or anyone who raises up his or her hand to squash down others who look weaker. You look weak and then they make you weak, that’s how it works…his mind bouncing light off that idea as it crystallizes…
Stop.
He holds his breath and takes the stairs. Steps into JJ’s squat. Slung with shadows, its emptiness hits him hard.
“JJ?” His voice bounces from wall to ceiling to floor and back to him. “Are you here?”
“Crisp.” In one quick movement Glynnie is on her feet and there he is, looking almost like someone else in that cap and with those dark glasses. She feels like hugging him but something, a stiffness, tells her that he wouldn’t welcome it so she holds back. “What happened to your hair?”
Surprised to see her standing there, the Beats slung around her neck, he asks, “Have you been here the whole time?” But then he notices the white T-shirt she wasn’t wearing yesterday glowing in a shaft of light slanting in from the window.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she says. “I’m so sorry about last night.”
He resists the drama in her tone that yesterday felt compelling but now grates. “It’s a little late for that. Where’s JJ?”
She doesn’t want to tell him, but she has to. She takes a breath. “This morning, when I was home, the cops were there.”
Cops. “Is that why they’re looking for me?” A whiplash of anger fades when he realizes that that’s also probably how the cops knew to pick up Dante on Governors Island, why Crisp was able to get off the island without the gun dealer intercepting him. Glynnie, in her priceless way, hurting and helping all at once. “What did you tell them?”
“Not much. But Crisp, they know about JJ.”
“We promised to help him—not give him away.”
“I did not tell them.” Firmly. Because she needs him to know that.
“Then how did they find out?” But before she can even try to answer, the realization hits him. As soon as their parents started to worry, as soon as they called the cops, t
he surveillance state would have kicked into action; all those hidden camera eyes you never really think about would have opened at once. The three of them walking around Red Hook last night, around IKEA, in and out of the projects.
“I waited at his school but he wasn’t there,” Glynnie says. “And I sat here all afternoon but he didn’t come back. Look.” She gestures toward the small bookcase, at the fixed-in-time image of a once-happy family. “That’s the phone I bought him. I did it. I kept my promise.” She needs Crisp to know this too.
He wants to trust her, he does, but how can he? He watches her face crumple and it’s as if she’s a different girl, or at least could be someday, and the feeling slips past his defenses and into his mind. He lets out a breath. She takes a step closer and he doesn’t move away.
“I screwed everything up,” she says.
You kind of did. But, even now, he can’t say that to her face.
“Listen,” she says, “this might sound crazy, but I have an idea about JJ. About where he might be.” There are so many places a placeless person can go, but she’s had so much time to think about it and it won’t stop flickering through her mind: a vision of JJ not just hiding, but resting. Crisp, with his excellent bullshit detector, will let her know if it’s a decent idea. “Last night…” she begins, picturing JJ serene on that bed at IKEA, looking as though he remembered what it felt like to be home.
* * *
Without the buzz of fast friendship and strong weed, IKEA’s charms of last night are gone. Instead, Crisp feels a vulnerability he can’t shake as, the cap’s bill pulled low to hide his face, he follows arrows through the labyrinth of displays. Living room after living room. Kitchen after kitchen. He pauses to rip a paper measuring tape off an inch-thick sheaf and continues until he reaches the bedrooms.
At the threshold of the orange and mahogany display, he glances around to make sure no one’s watching him. His breathing grows shallow as he enters the life-size diorama, pulls out the desk chair and glances underneath, pretends to inspect the dresser, runs his hand along the smoothed-out duvet—no sign now that JJ ever lay down here last night. Recalling how delicious it felt, this afternoon, to lie on his own bed after just two nights away, Crisp is filled with sadness at the thought of JJ’s year without a bed. He falls to his knees onto the fake bearskin and pretends to measure the clearance between floor and bed frame.
Ten inches.
His eyes roam the empty under-bed space where he hoped to find the boy. Instead, he takes in a clear view of moving pant hems, calves, ankles, sneakers, sandals, boots walking both ways over the showroom’s floor arrows. He wonders why he thought this was a good idea; no one could hide under here—you’d be spotted too easily. He backs out and, kneeling, telescopes his disappointment onto the measuring tape, as if he’s just a random shopper and whatever he hoped to stash under this bed would never fit.
“Crisp.”
The faintest whisper. His own wishful thinking, he decides.
But then he hears it again, and freezes.
He ducks back under the bed and it’s still a void.
The whisper repeats: “Crisp.”
He turns to the dark edge where floor meets wall, beneath the top of the headboard, and sees him. Or it: a long boy-like shape pressed into a deep shadow.
JJ whispers, “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” Crisp whispers back. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting. Soon as it closes, I can come out.”
Crisp reaches a hand across the floor into the shadow. “Come out now.”
“Can’t. Dante had me—he was looking for you but I didn’t know where you lived so he grabbed me. I told him I don’t have your address. He didn’t believe me.”
“When?”
“On my way to school. Took me to his baby mama’s place, and me and Rodrigo, we waited.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. But Dante got picked up. Rodrigo, he saw it on his phone, some video. Then he took off. So I took off. Saw someone in my window at my crib so…”
So he came back here. “Have you been here all day?”
“Most of it.”
“JJ, please.”
JJ backs deeper into his shadow.
Crisp stretches, manages to touch the boy’s pant leg, pulls against his resistance. He wonders if it would help or hurt for JJ to know that the cops are looking for him and decides that for right now less fear could mean more courage. “Last night, when I said I’d help you, didn’t you believe me?”
A pause, and JJ admits, “Yeah, I did.”
“I came to find you, didn’t I?”
Another pause. Another “Yeah.”
“I was just at your place, looking for you. Glynnie’s been waiting all afternoon. She got you that phone she promised.”
“Really?”
“Come out.”
JJ hesitates, then rolls away from the wall. His eyes appear bright in the under-bed dark. A whole highway of tear tracks glisten down his cheeks. He squirms closer and the cracked lips and snot dried under his nose finish the job of breaking Crisp’s heart.
“What time is it?” JJ asks.
“Not sure, but it isn’t nine yet or they’d be closing.”
“It’s night already?”
“We’re getting out of here.” Crisp pulls him all the way out from under the bed. “Act as natural as you can, don’t run but keep moving. Can you be cool?”
“I’m as cool as they come,” says the tear-streaked boy, attempting a smile, shifting to his feet, standing for the first time, Crisp would guess, in hours. “Hey, why’d you cut your hair?”
“Tell you later.” Crisp removes the Yankees cap and snugs it low over JJ’s eyes. “Keep the visor down. Don’t look at anyone. If we get separated, plan A is to meet me downstairs in the parking garage. Plan B is to go to the IKEA dock, jump on whatever comes first. We’ll reconnect on the other side.”
“Why would we get separated?”
“I’ll explain that later too.”
28
Lying on the floor of the squat in the charcoal darkness, Glynnie wonders if she should have gone with Crisp to look for JJ, but something was nagging at her and still is. A feeling. A need to understand what happened last night, what really happened—how and why that man died. Obviously she killed him, but why can’t she remember pulling the trigger?
She covers her ears with the Beats, canceling out the scant ambient noise, and tries to think. But she can hardly hear herself even in the absence of sound. She takes off the headphones and puts them on the floor and waits with all her might.
Minutes pass in the effort. Hours. Years. Centuries. The world outside the windows gets darker, the quiet heavier. She has to pee but it’s too late now; if she leaves to find a bathroom, she’ll lose all her nerve and she may never come back but there’s something she needs here. Something she needs to learn about herself.
* * *
Saki walks the length of Van Brunt, passes Fairway on the right and shuttered artisanal storefronts in the rehabbed Beard warehouse on the left, and reaches the end of the street, where it meets the bay.
Each time she walks this path, her search ends right here.
Where does JJ go when he vanishes from sight?
But this time something different happens: a raft of clouds shifts northward, the night sky brightens, and lucid moonlight washes over the end of Van Brunt. Things veiled in darkness turn silvery bright: the slick black paint on the building’s huge arched shutters shines with a gloss unexpressed even in day, the diamond-shaped end sign on the iron fence splashes its yellow color into the dark, and she sees an opening in the fence that wasn’t there earlier, where a vertical bar angles out at the bottom like a loose tooth. Big enough for a kid to get through.
Or a slight woman.
Saki pushes through a foot, leg, hip, torso, which isn’t easy but she manages—and then she’s on the other side of the fence. Testing her hunch,
she presses the iron post back into place. Whoever passed through last neglected to replace it.
She follows the oceanfront path that edges the old factory building all the way to its end, where water wraps around two sides. The wind whistling. Waves crashing against the embankments.
Here, at the blunt end of land, a warped and torn chain-link fence is all that separates you from easy access to the bay. And what else?
She shoulders through an opening in the chain link and observes that the far end of the old factory is untouched by renovation, its bricks crumbling, a pair of second-floor iron shutters wide open on a glassless window, taking in air.
The door is unlocked.
Inside a broad foyer, history appears to have frozen a century ago. Cobwebs hang from the ceiling. Yet in the thick layer of dust on the floor there is a heavy traffic of footsteps leading up a wide old staircase.
Saki follows them, her shoes squeaking, echoing, into the emptiness.
Halfway up the stairs she stops to listen. Hears nothing. Wonders if she should be afraid, here alone, if a “normal” person would feel afraid. She doesn’t. Wonders if she’s wasting her time and reminds herself that she won’t know until she looks.
* * *
Glynnie feels the vibrations in the floorboards before she hears the squeak of footsteps coming closer. And then…
And then.
The redheaded detective appears at the door, wearing her all-black but not-cool clothes. Glynnie sits up, surprised by her own calm.
“Hello, Glynnie,” the detective says.
“Hi, Detective Fin…Fin…”
“Finley.”
“Right.”
“You can call me Saki, if you want.” Saki Finley glances around the moon-slashed dark. “Is JJ here too?”