by C. S. Poe
What was the name of your first pet?
Jesus Christ. Spot? Skippy? Shitty pet names popular with children ran through Rufus’s mind, but there were too many to consider. Definitely too many to try at random before getting locked out indefinitely.
Rufus got out of bed, quickly dressed, and climbed down the ladder. “What was the name of Jake’s first pet?” he asked, joining Sam at the counter.
Sam passed Rufus a mug of coffee. “He didn’t have any pets, I don’t think. Try ‘none.’”
Rufus took the beverage in one hand and typed with the other. “Hmm… no. Try again.”
For a long moment, Sam was silent. Then he shrugged. “He didn’t have a pet. At least, not that I knew about. Oh, shit. Hold on.” Digging through the pile of clothing on the floor, Sam produced his phone, tapping the screen. “What about this?” Turning the phone, he displayed a photo album from Jake’s Facebook page. The picture was of Jake standing next to an enormous hog. Overhead, a banner said: Earlena - Georgia State Champion - 2015.
“Earlena?” Rufus said, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “All right.” He typed it in, then gave Sam a leveled look. “You’ve got one more shot, handsome. Screw it up and we aren’t having morning sex.”
Sprawling on the couch, Sam scratched an armpit. “Handsome?”
“Did I stutter?”
“Why are you always salty? No, don’t answer that. My future sex life depends on this question?” Hemming, Sam shrugged. “Pet, pet, pet. Honest to God, I don’t know. Maybe when he was growing up, but once we were in the same platoon, we were deployed for too long. He wouldn’t have gotten a dog just to leave it—oh. Uh. Ok. Try bulldog. Actually, Bulldog. Capital B.”
“Are you sure?” Rufus asked.
“That was the name of our camp when we were at Bagram. It’s the only thing close to a pet I can think of.”
Rufus typed it in. Bulldog with a capital B. He perked up when the browser instructed him to choose a new password. “It worked!”
“Of course.”
“Don’t get cocky,” Rufus warned. He sipped his coffee before giving the account a new password. Once successfully inside, he scrolled through the long list of data Jake apparently dumped into the cloud account every Monday morning. “He’s got a lot of text messages from the same number. It’s not any of my burner numbers…. No contact name either.” Rufus looked at Sam. “I’m gonna download it all.”
“Now say something like ‘They’re hacking into the mainframe.’”
“I won’t be your Matrix wet dream.” Rufus tapped at the screen again and then had nothing to do but wait while the download bar inched forward. He set the coffee mug on the desk and walked to the couch. “Hey.”
“Well, hey there yourself, stranger.”
Rufus hovered over Sam. “Last time you were strutting around in your birthday suit, I got a good-morning kiss.”
“You did?” Sam stretched up to kiss him. “Like that?”
Rufus smiled. “Something like that, yeah.”
Sam kissed him again, a little longer this time. When he pulled back, his voice was husky as he said, “I wasn’t joking about that hack-into-the-mainframe comment. You’ve got this crazy, sexy, nerd vibe going on right now. Just try it. Let’s hear how it sounds.”
“There’s something wrong with you.” Rufus looked at his phone when it vibrated in his hand. “Ah-ha, success.” Rufus moved back a few steps, his brow furrowed. “Hang on… these texts look weird.”
Coffee in hand, Sam came to stand at his shoulder. “What?”
“It’s strings of numbers.” Rufus showed Sam the phone. “This first one looks like military time, but what’s the rest of it?”
For a moment, Sam stared at the screen. Then he grabbed his phone from the coffee table, tapped it a few times, and held it out toward Rufus. He had pulled up a maps app, and a pin was dropped not far from where they stood.
“Latitude and longitude,” Sam said. “I don’t recognize the characters there, though. Chinese, Korean, Japanese? No clue.”
Rufus got down into a crouched position and scrolled with his thumb. “Japanese, I think. This character means gold, and when it’s with these other two, it means Friday. I always remembered that because gold was like payday. Don’t ask why I know this.”
“I’ll try,” Sam muttered as he dragged on jeans. “That sounds like a meeting. Day, time, location. Anything else in there?”
Rufus hummed under his breath. “Do you remember old internet jargon?”
“Some.”
“It’s like cruising old sex ads from Craigslist.”
“Let’s see.”
Rufus held up his phone. “2WF—two white females, yeah? 1BM—one black male. So on and so on.”
“1RS.” When Rufus glanced up again, Sam’s face was stubbly innocence. “One redheaded smartass.”
“No need to send a creepy message—you already have me.” Rufus got to his feet.
Sam smiled at that, but the smile faded as he turned to the phone. “That’s some pretty messed-up shit.”
“It corroborates Juliana’s story and what we saw at the house in Queens,” Rufus said. “Jake was backing up digital copies of requests for people, location meetups, fuck—there’s probably costs hidden in these messages too.”
“And he’s got the numbers those requests were sent from, right?”
Rufus glanced at the phone again, already nodding. “Yeah, it looks like it.” He stared at Sam. “The messages weren’t coming and going from Jake’s phone, though. He was backing up another device into his personal account. So… a burner, maybe?” Rufus’s eyebrows shot up at his own revelation. “That’s a small tangible item I might have been trusted to pick up.”
“So where is it?” Sam said, and then he shook his head. “And do we even want to find it?”
“We have to. Jake was killed because of these messages.” Rufus stuffed the phone into his pocket. “But who do we hand it over to?”
“We do what Jake should have done: we make as many copies of this evidence as we can, and we send it to everybody we can think of—starting with Ophelia.”
“And Lampo,” Rufus continued. “Jake clearly didn’t level with him on this shitshow.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Exactly. Why didn’t he?”
“If I understood what made Jake tick-tock, maybe he’d still be alive.”
From outside, the sounds of the city waking broke the quiet in the apartment. “You don’t really think that,” Sam said. “Do you? It’s not your fault, Rufus.”
Rufus put his hands on his hips. “I don’t know why Jake didn’t tell his partner, but can we not study a throwaway comment under the magnifying glass? It has nothing to do with last night—just forget about it.”
Ripping open the ruck, Sam dug out another of the same white T-shirts and his dopp kit. “Yeah. Forget about it. Forgotten. So where’s the phone?” And then he went into the bathroom.
“Sam,” Rufus started, following and flexing his tingling fingers. “Let’s focus on this problem.”
He must have heard Rufus coming because he kicked the bathroom door shut. “Focused,” he shouted through the door. “One-hundred percent.”
Rufus had come up short when the door closed. “Wow. Ok. Well, I’m going to go look for the phone,” he called.
“Not without me,” Sam said, yanking open the door, toothbrush hanging from the corner of his mouth so he could jab a finger at Rufus. “I’m the one who came here to find out what happened to Jake. I’m the one who’s been fucking focused on figuring this out. So you can wait five minutes for me to get ready.”
Rufus could feel his face flushing. “You’re being an asshole again,” he warned before fetching his Chucks. “I’m just going downstairs to check Jake’s mailbox.”
“His mailbox? What the fuck?”
Rufus slipped his shoes on. “That’s what I said.”
“I’m being an asshole,” Sam repeated before retreating into the bathroom ag
ain. The door crashed in its frame.
It was painfully clear that last night was still in the forefront of Sam’s mind, and Rufus’s attempt to shut it down, to pack it into a box and deal with it another time—never—was not what Sam wanted to do. Sam will have to deal, though, Rufus thought as he left the apartment. Sam might have wanted him to see someone—a therapist—and just the idea made Rufus break out in a cold sweat, but there wasn’t time for that. Rufus wasn’t the priority. Jake needed justice. Those kids needed rescuing. Heckler needed to be wearing a pair of handcuffs for the rest of her life.
Rufus sat on the handrail at the stairs and slid down to the landing below. He considered the idea of a burner phone being the pickup Jake had played hot potato with. It was small and easy to hide. So where would it be safe until he felt he could enter it into official evidence? Where would no one check but his trusted CI—Rufus?
Jake would have given Rufus the address to this secondary apartment and Rufus would have pretended he didn’t already know it. He’d have asked Jake were the pickup was, and Jake would have done something like tap, tap, tap Rufus’s forehead. Because Jake knew Rufus had a thing about mailboxes.
He slid down the next handrail, then the next, all the way to the ground floor. Rufus walked to the vestibule, stopped at the wall of mailboxes, and took out the lockpick tools from his jacket pocket. He stuck the sharp tips into the lock of 9F and worked the tumblers. Rufus had been so hyperfocused on opening the mailbox, and with the tink, tink, tink of his tools echoing, he hadn’t heard the approach of footsteps.
Then a hand wrapped around his mouth and it was too late to scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Fuck Rufus was becoming a common refrain in Sam’s head lately. He indulged in a few verses while he brushed his teeth. Through the closed door, he heard Rufus leave the apartment, presumably to check the mailbox—which was what he had told Sam, and that wasn’t necessarily the same thing as the truth. And as soon as the thought went through Sam’s head, he felt guilty for thinking it. And then he was mad at Rufus for making him feel guilty. And then the fuck Rufus hallelujah chorus started up again. And then Sam decided to take a shower.
A shower hadn’t originally been on the agenda, but it moved up the list pretty fast once he thought of it. He smelled like Rufus. Could smell the redhead all over him. And he smelled like Manhattan, which was its own unique funk of sweat and grime and hot garbage. And he even smelled a little bit like Jake, or at least like the cologne that still lingered in parts of the apartment. And all together, combined with the knowledge that, once again, he had screwed up things with Rufus, it threatened to overload Sam.
So he stood under the spray, the water hot, and he soaped up with good old neutral-as-Switzerland Dr. Bronner’s, and then, when it was time to rinse, he turned the temperature down by degrees. He didn’t want to think about Rufus, so he fiddled with the tuner in his head until he got the Bartman game. Cubs. 2003. He’d been twenty-one, posted at Bragg, and drinking the way twenty-one-year-olds do while he watched his team go for the National League pennant. When the asshole fan in the front row—Bartman—snagged a fly ball moments before Alou would have caught it, preventing an easy out and turning the advantage to the Marlins, Sam had knocked a bowl of peanuts off the bar with his elbow and spent five minutes shouting at the umps—along with everybody else he could think of. It was a good game to replay when he was mad, but he didn’t like how that frozen camera still in his head, the one showing Bartman grabbing for the ball like a greedy fuck, kept morphing into a certain redheaded asshole Sam wanted to yell at.
It wasn’t until he was shivering under the cold spray that Sam realized he hadn’t heard Rufus come back. He turned off the water and stood, dripping. And listening.
Nothing except the plink plunk plink.
When Sam rolled back the shower door, it rattled so loudly that he gritted his teeth. He hooked a towel around his waist, dragged his feet on the mat like a dog, drying them enough that he wouldn’t slip and fall on his ass, and went out of the bathroom.
“Rufus?”
Still nothing. Water—cold water, because he’d turned the handle all the way to C, hadn’t he?—snaked down the back of his neck. Sam fought a shiver.
At the studio’s front door, he paused, put his ear to the wood, and listened again.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Pulling open the door, Sam stuck his head out into the hall and glanced both ways.
“Rufus?”
Another fat, cold drop slid down his nape; this time, Sam did shiver.
He closed the door and bolted it. How far to the mailboxes? A two-minute walk? Five minutes tops. Five minutes if Rufus waited for the elevator and got stuck because Mrs. Peabody or whoever the hell in 6B got her shopping cart stuck. Five minutes was an absolute outside. And it had been longer than five minutes. It had been double that, maybe triple, because Sam had taken a shower, had played the Bartman game, had sung a few verses of fuck Rufus.
Possibilities.
Rufus had finally had enough of Sam, and he’d left. He’d walked out the door never intending to come back; checking the mailboxes had been an easy excuse.
The thought was tempting. After all, guys had been walking out on Sam—figuratively, when they couldn’t get away literally—his whole life. And, of course, self-pity was a nice, easy slide.
But, honestly, Sam didn’t believe it. Fight or no fight—asshole or no asshole—he didn’t think Rufus had been angry enough to leave. Not like this, anyway. And Sam didn’t think he’d been wrong in feeling a connection, something real, with the redhead.
And then, in the middle of padding around the perimeter of the apartment, Sam froze. On the sofa, Rufus’s beanie lay discarded. The beanie Rufus wore every time they went outside. The beanie Rufus wore in spite of the brutal July heat. The beanie Rufus wore even though it made his messy hair even messier.
If Sam wanted to, he could believe that Rufus had left because he couldn’t put up with Sam. But he wouldn’t believe Rufus had left without the beanie. Rufus wouldn’t have set foot outside the building without the beanie, not unless he had a very good reason.
Or unless he was forced to.
Dropping the towel, Sam jogged to the bathroom. He pulled on the fresh tee and grabbed his jeans. Socks, too, folded inside out and ready to wear. And then he pulled on his boots and grabbed his Beretta, not bothering with the holster, just tucking it into his waistband in spite of how it felt and pulling the loose tee over it.
He took the stairs two at a time, sometimes three, careening around landings. When he hit the ground floor, his heartbeat ran in his ears at a steady drone.
He had to move more slowly now. He had to be careful.
Rufus was careful, though. And something had happened to Rufus.
As he neared the front door, his steps slowed even more, and all of his attention focused on his hearing: two men arguing outside the building, their voices muffled by the front door; the ding upstairs of the elevator; somewhere in the stairwell, the clap of a fire door slamming shut. Sam’s hand crept to his waistband, sliding under the tee, the cool composite grip pebbled under his touch.
And then he could see the front door and the mailboxes.
Nobody.
No Rufus.
Nobody.
Sam checked the mailboxes; J. Brower was still shut. Sam moved to the door, opening it long enough to stick his head out and check up and down the block. No sign of Rufus, although the men arguing were really going at it now, two guys in their fifties, both of them dressed like they were in their twenties, holding a verbal death match: Rihanna versus Beyoncé. He went back into the building because he didn’t want to fuck up Rihanna’s fanboy.
No Rufus.
And the mailbox? Well, if Rufus had come down here, he hadn’t gotten into the mailbox. Whatever had happened—
—they took him, someone took him, Heckler, Lampo, don’t be a fucking idiot—
Sam forced the thought
away. Whatever had happened, it had happened before Rufus could check.
Then something glinted, and Sam bent down for a closer look. Lockpicks. Sam picked them up; the tremor was worse in his hands now, and somebody had scrambled the tuner in his head. No Cubs games today, folks. Just the staticky need, caught between two signals: find Rufus, and put a bullet in the head of whoever took him.
The static didn’t help, though. Static wasn’t a plan. Sam tried to get his head back on straight, tried to think. Somebody took Rufus; that was the only explanation. And they took him here, from Jake’s building. From his secret second apartment that apparently wasn’t quite so secret.
But not Sam.
That was interesting. Why not? Because he was more of a threat? The opposite, Sam guessed. Because he was a joke, irrelevant. They had taken Rufus because they thought he had the evidence Jake had uncovered. They were desperate for it. And desperate people did horrible things to get what they wanted—and they wanted what Rufus couldn’t give them.
So, step one: find Rufus.
Great. Great fucking plan.
Step zero: figure out how to find Rufus.
Sam’s options were limited. He had exhausted his resources in the city, and his options now were to try to do this alone, in a city he could barely survive, let alone navigate. Or he could try to get help.
He thought of Ophelia Hayes’s card upstairs. She had shown up at the house in Queens because she was worried about those kids. She had held her ground and shot back when things got bad. She had the Rufus seal of approval, which was worth a lot in Sam’s book. Three things that made Sam think long and hard about calling her. He thought about Lampo, too. And he thought about the fact that Jake hadn’t confided in Lampo.
Heading back to the stairs, Sam flicked the mailbox marked J. Brower. It was a little thing. A stupid thing. A Rufus thing, and he had a magpie obsession with Rufus things right now. It felt like a way of keeping sane.