by Lolly Walter
“See that light up there?” Victor asked. “Two blocks up? That’s where they’re keeping the kid.” He pointed to a large apartment building at least five stories tall immediately in front of them.
Joe had seen it during the day. The place was bluish-gray, with tons of balconies like Victor had said. Solar panels littered the roof, and Joe had seen lights on in the place before. Victor could have pointed out the building from Joe’s bedroom window, and Joe wondered if, as he’d taken a piss and brushed his teeth the last few nights, he’d been staring at the lit apartment where Ebony’s baby was hidden.
“Why would the baby still be here?” Joe had been curious about that point all along, but seeing the place, being near it, brought the question into sharper relief.
“You don’t trust me?”
“Not a chance. But if you’d been meaning to do me harm, you’d have done it back in my room when you got your switchblade back.”
“True. But I could be scheming to sell blanco’s sweet white ass.” Victor’s teeth gleamed in the darkness, his smile wide and… not mean, exactly, but not nice, either.
Joe felt Devin stiffen.
“He’s playing, papi.” Joe patted Devin’s sweet white ass. “He doesn’t have the kind of connections it would take to sell you. No one local except Boggs can fly people out of here, and scavengers aren’t going to be interested in dragging a musclebound giant across the country on foot.”
“Maybe that’s why Nina’s still here,” Devin said. “Maybe there was a transportation issue or something. The plane’s broken and they can’t get her north, something like that.”
“Maybe,” Victor said. “The plan, Efraín?”
Joe shoved his hands in his pockets and fingered the gun and the scissors. The plan needed to be simple and preferably not involve Devin.
“We circle the building and identify entrances. Then we enter on the first floor and assess the layout, which should be the same for every floor. After that, I’ll come up with a plan for how to get to Nina.”
“Smart,” Devin said, and he set off toward the building.
Joe and Victor shared a shrug and followed.
***
Two wide loops around the building convinced Joe there were, as Victor had said, four entrances, none of them guarded. The balconies didn’t start until the second floor, which was the first floor on every side but the west. Those were strong potential secondary entry and exit points. He elected to try the north entrance first because no one would expect entry from there. Threats were more likely to come from the Flats to the south, the big highway to the west, and from the east, which featured the lit window of the apartment where they were headed.
They approached from the highway side, climbing the steep hill toward the north entrance and taking a long set of stairs to reach the plain metal access door. Like most of the apartment doors Joe had come across in Austin, someone had torn it from its hinges and left it dangling. No handle. Holes where the handle might have been indicated it had been shot off. Apartments had been a scavenger’s paradise when temperatures first started getting so extreme that people fled to the north in high numbers. The buildings were easy to break into and provided hundreds of cupboards to ransack and pantries from which to hoard. Even with solar panels to supply electricity, apartments weren’t an attractive home to the quiet leftover citizens of Austin. The stigma about places like this, the chaos of those early days of looting, was still ripe in people’s memories and fermented in their imagination, so that the threat of danger loomed larger than it probably had ever really been.
The building smelled musty, and the air was stagnant. Emergency lights flickered and lit an empty hallway. Peeling paint and faded carpet blinked into and out of Joe’s view with each fluctuation in the electricity. The hallway stretched to the exit on the opposite side of the building. Joe waited for the lights to come back up, then quickly identified the stairwell they might use to get to the fourth floor and the lit apartment.
He motioned for Victor and Devin to follow him, then went to the door of an apartment in approximately the same location as the kidnappers’ unit three floors above.
From the entry, the apartment seemed to be a standard one bedroom, with a large open space for a living room, dining area, and kitchen. To the left ran a short hall that led to the bedroom and a bathroom, its black floor gleaming in the dim light from the main hall.
“What are we doing?” Devin asked. His quiet whisper echoed around the room, and Joe put his finger to his lips.
“Talk with your normal voice, just quietly. I want to see what the apartment upstairs will look like. This one should have the same floor plan.”
Victor leaned against a wall for a second before he jumped out of the way of an enormous cockroach skittering along the same wall. He yelped and ran behind Joe, latching onto Joe’s wrist and hip and pulling him firmly between himself and the roach.
“Brave, Victor. Really brave.” Joe had never antagonized his former lover, not when they were together and not even after Victor had found him at Flights of Fantasy, but the heartbreak of the last few days was making him looser with his words, and he’d already had a tenuous hold on his shuttered emotions, what with Devin coming into his life and turning it upside down.
“Fuck you, Efraín. I don’t like bugs.” Victor shivered behind Joe and kept hold of his wrist and hip.
“Don’t blame you, man,” Devin said. “But you best let the hell go of my boy.”
“Ooh, possessive. He gets off on that, too. Bet you already knew that, though. Someday you and me can sit down and compare us some notes, blanco.”
Joe bit back his retort as Devin and Victor snickered and Victor let go of the hold he’d had on Joe. If they got Nina back, if they lived, if Joe didn’t get Devin killed even if they survived the night… If, if, if. Joe had thought for a moment that maybe he and Victor could heal their rift; Victor and Devin could be friends. Too many ifs. “Victor, the farthest you got was the hallway, right? Did it look like the one we were just in?”
“Yeah. Doors at each end. Open space about midway down where there’s probably an elevator.”
“Do you think the elevator works?” Devin asked. Because of the ski mask, the only visible parts of him were his blue eyes and pink lips.
“Shut up and let the man work.”
“Says the motormouth.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Joe said. “Did you notice if the apartment doors were still there? Not on the apartment the kidnappers are using, but on the ones in the same hall.”
“Seemed like it. I didn’t get much chance to look before they were chasing us, but yeah.”
“It’s weird, though, right?” Devin put his hand on Joe’s shoulder and waited until Joe was looking at him to go on. “Why would they chase you, Victor? Why not just tell you to get lost?”
The silence lasted a beat too long. Joe frowned and turned to Victor.
“Victor? That’s a good question.”
“Shit, man, I don’t know,” Victor said. His sharp, dark eyes held Joe’s like he had something to prove. “I imagine Boggs showed them photos of the A runners, told them not to let us near the baby.”
Joe shook his head. “Boggs isn’t afraid of us. He’s supremely confident that we’re no danger to him. The only one he’s scared of is me, and…”
Victor’s jaw tensed. His eyes flicked to Devin. “And he found a way to keep you in line, huh, Efraín? Yeah, well, he’s good with the threats. What the fuck are you doing here?”
“What does he mean, Joe?”
Devin moved closer, and with Victor on the other side of him, Joe squirmed. He was pinned in, pinned down, and he desperately wanted to end this conversation.
Victor didn’t let him. “I mean Boggs told him to mind his shit or he’d fuck you up, dipshit.”
And now Joe was physically pinned, Devin’s hands tight on his arms. “Joe?”
Joe pulled away and walked to the kitchen area behind Victor. He lit t
he burners on the stove, one at a time, remembering the faint gas smell from his own kitchen in the house where he’d lived with his father.
“Did that happen?” Devin pressed. “You let us all go on this wild goose chase after a baby you didn’t think was still in Austin, all to keep me safe?”
“Well, to be fair, it wasn’t so wild, I guess,” Victor said. They’d both moved into the kitchen with Joe. “I mean, the baby was here after all, but what I want to know is, what made you change your mind? You could’ve told me no. Devin would’ve stayed safe.”
Joe made a second lap turning the burners on and off. Hold it in. Wait. Stall. Escape. Wait. Stall. Escape. As he turned off the right rear burner, Devin slapped his hand away from the knobs and spun him around. “Answer us, you son of a bitch.”
“I’m not sorry,” Joe said, jerking away and backing up until he hit a corner. “I’m not sorry I tried to keep you safe. Boggs, he… he said awful stuff, and maybe I should have told you, but you wouldn’t have understood how much he meant it, papi. He said I had to keep everybody from blaming him.”
“So you let everyone go on these searches? Searches that got Bea killed?” Devin threw his arms in the air. “You got Bea killed to save me.”
“Yes.” And the faintest bit of spite curled into Joe’s words. “I’d do it again and again and again, and I know that makes me an awful person. I know it. It’s all my fault that Bea died. I’ll carry that with me forever. But I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve played it over and over in my head, and I don’t know what I could have done differently.”
“You could have told me.” Devin reached for Joe’s cheek but let his hand drop before he made it that far. “You should have trusted me enough to tell me. We would have worked it out together.”
“It wasn’t that easy. You wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret. I didn’t just get Bea killed. I let Ebony and Zeke have false hope. You’re too noble to have done that.”
“You don’t know what I would’ve done.” Devin pulled at his hair and turned away.
“Cut him a break, blanco.” Although Victor spoke to Devin, his eyes were glued to Joe’s. “The other day, you rattled on about how ungrateful the other runners were for acting like the things he did to help them were selfish. You were right then. Don’t be a dick now.”
“He is being selfish!” Devin yelled, then clamped a hand over his mouth. His eyes went wide.
Joe grabbed Devin’s arm and Victor’s hand and pulled them into the bedroom. He locked the door behind them, then squeezed the three of them into the closet and closed the door. This way, if someone came looking for them, they’d have the warning of the bedroom door being busted open before they were discovered, and they would still have the element of surprise in their favor.
The seconds ticked by. Joe listened and waited. Now Devin knew precisely how detestable he was, how willing to let his friends suffer. He was selfish. He was sick. He’d put his worry for Devin’s safety ahead of the wellbeing of every other runner. A kind, moral guy like Devin had to be disgusted.
Joe pinched the sides of his neck and shook it off. He had to focus on their current situation. Apologies and explanations would have to wait.
He had counted to 346 in his head when strong hands curved around his sides, smoothing up and down his ribs. He couldn’t remember who was standing in front of him and who stood behind, and he wanted to believe those hands belonged to Devin, but he knew they were Victor’s. Even more, he knew Devin could feel them sliding between their bodies, and he wanted Devin to react, to move them off him. Nothing happened. Joe sighed and moved Victor’s hands away.
“We’ll go in one story below the apartment,” Joe said. No one seemed to be searching out the noise Devin had made, but they might as well plan in here and give it a few more minutes before heading out. “We’ll use one of the apartments to the left or the right of the one directly under the kidnappers’ apartment, or better yet, let’s go in under the one across from it. From there, we’ll climb up over the balcony and enter the fifth-floor apartment that way. I noticed when we were scanning the outside of the property, almost all of the balcony access doors except the one with Nina looked to be broken or open. We go in that way, I take out the guards in the hall, bust open the door, and hope that there’s only one person inside with the baby.”
“That’s a good plan,” Victor said. “I bet there’s only one person inside. How many people does it take to mind a baby, right?”
Joe remembered the day he and Devin had babysat Nina, the way Devin had cooed at that baby like she was the most precious person on the planet. “Devin? What do you think?”
“What the fuck do I know, douchebag? Suddenly you’re interested in my opinion?”
“Papi—”
Someone scuffled around on Joe’s right, and a low thud came from in front of him.
“Victor, you asshole!” Devin hissed, and he reached around Joe, trying to get to Victor.
“Stop it, both of you.” Joe wedged himself sideways between them and pushed at their chests.
“You’re the asshole,” Victor said, ignoring Joe. “You need to grow up and act like a man instead of a little boy, or you don’t deserve him.”
“You want him back, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“You want him, you take him. I won’t stop you.”
Joe sucked in a breath and couldn’t let it out. No. No. No. His knees buckled, but the bulk of Victor and Devin squeezed against him kept him upright. Not enough air to breathe. Pain ripped his lungs, his stomach, his heart. The space around him pressed too tight. He ran. Footsteps pattered behind him as he unlocked the bedroom door and wrenched it open.
In the main room of the apartment, the darkness was deeper, the dim emergency lights obscured by tears or lightheadedness or something more psychological and less physical.
For a moment, he stared at his feet. Still there. Still moving. Do what he always did. No emotion. Use his brain, not his heart. “Get the baby. Keep Devin safe.” He repeated it once out loud and over and over in his head. Nina. Devin. Nina. Devin.
He went out to the balcony, where broken glass crunched under his feet. The room they were shooting for was lit up three floors higher, one unit to the right. Joe left, weaving around Victor and Devin. Hands, he didn’t know whose, tugged at his shirt, but he slapped them away. He spared a quick glance up and down the long corridor before heading for the stairs. He climbed silently, dimly aware of Victor and Devin behind him, maybe half a floor below. At the fourth floor, he exited the stairwell, again checking for anyone in the corridor, and went straight to the apartment he’d decided on. He should have his weapons drawn, should’ve drawn them before he left the closet, but he hadn’t, and some part of him was thankful they’d encountered no one. The other part of him wasn’t thinking at all.
“I’ll go first onto the balcony,” Joe said, not looking at them. “Watch what I do, then do the same thing. You both have pretty big feet, so you should probably take off your shoes and socks and hand them up to me before you try to climb. That way it’ll be easier to wedge your feet in between the balcony railings. Be careful.” He managed to lift his gaze, to check that Devin recognized how careful he needed to be. “You fall, you die. Understand?”
Victor and Devin nodded. Devin was looking at the floor.
“When we get upstairs, you two hang back. I have the gun, so I’ll go out first.”
Even as Joe said it, a new certainty slipped into his brain. If things went right, great. If he could convince Victor and Devin to wait, to not be seen unless necessary, then if he died, Devin would still be safe. Boggs wouldn’t have any reason to hurt his star attraction if Joe wasn’t in the picture. The thought gave him comfort.
“I’ll go out first,” he repeated, his voice sounding stronger to his own ears. “And you two hang back. You can back me up if you need to, but I shouldn’t need help.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. On the balcony, he cli
mbed onto the railing. Years of work had made him quick and nimble and strong, and hauling himself up to the next balcony was easy, the motions automatic. One floor higher, he hopped down from the railing and lay on the ground to hold out his hands for shoes. Victor’s light purple shoes got placed in his hands.
By the time Joe stood, Victor was already clinging to the base of the rails. Joe leaned over the railing and held out his hand. Victor latched on, and Joe hauled him up, taking care to make it seem like he was struggling more than he really was.
When Victor climbed over the rail and landed safely next to him, Joe said, “Do me a favor and haul Devin up. You guys are heavy, and you’ll have an easier time of it than me. I’ll peek in the apartment and make sure the layout’s the same.”
Victor caught his arm before he could turn. “Efraín…”
“Yes?” Joe didn’t try to sound natural, because nothing was natural about any part of the situation. Losing Devin was just one more blow, right?
“Nothing.” Victor shook his head and lay down on the balcony to get Devin’s shoes.
Joe couldn’t watch anyway — he was too scared Devin would fall — so he pretended to inspect the apartment. It had the same layout as the one below. The door was intact, and Joe stood behind it, pulled out his gun, and glanced back to see Victor pull Devin over the rail.
As soon as Devin was safe, Joe threw open the door and ran into the hall.
Twelve
Two armed men stood in the hall, and Joe aimed his gun, took one look, and stopped, his heart falling. He pocketed the gun and put his hands in the air.
With a silent prayer that Victor would hold Devin back, keep him from being discovered, Joe said, “Go ahead. I know you have to kill me.”
“Why, Joesy? Why’d you have to come?” The pity in Sam’s voice was almost unbearable. Dark circles ringed his eyes. His sleek white metal weapon pointed somewhere near Joe’s knees. “You could’ve let this go.”