I see Thomas wince in pain again. Time to get moving.
We head toward the door that Mikey came through at the side of the church. As we weave through the scaffolding blocking off the front of the church, Mikey says, “So, you got some ideas about where we should go?”
“We?” Thomas says, turning around to look at Mikey. “I’m not sure we need you at this point. How about we find a place to drop you off?”
“But . . . I can’t remember anything, and I’m hoping she’ll help me,” Mikey says, suddenly sounding vulnerable again.
“Yeah, that’s very sad and all, but I’m not sure that you bring anything to the proceedings.”
Mikey shrugs. “I’m good with my hands. I could help you, maybe?”
“I don’t need someone who’s good with his hands. I need someone who’s good with his brain, and yours seems to have a lot of missing pieces right now. Sorry, but we don’t have time to babysit you.”
“Thomas,” I say as we jog down the stone steps. “Hold on.” While Thomas is right about Mikey—we don’t know anything about him and this is a bad time to be taking chances—Mikey has not been without his uses. He’s the biggest reason I found Thomas at all . . . and the only reason I’m not currently sitting at the bottom of the river with an anchor around my neck.
“We can’t afford to ‘hold on.’ Who even is this kid? How do you know he’s not the one who chucked you in the water to begin with?”
Mikey looks at me, half in panic and half in outrage. “I didn’t! Tell him!”
I put my hand up, hoping I can calm things down, and say to Thomas, “I understand your concern, but if he threw me in, why did he fish me back out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what angle he’s working, where he came from, or who he’s working for,” Thomas says.
“I’m not working for anybody! And I didn’t throw her in the water. I was just following her because I wanted to talk!”
“I think we should keep him,” I say.
“Angel! He’s not a stray dog.”
“No, actually, that’s exactly what he is. It’s what I once was to you, Thomas. And you let me follow you to safety.”
“Okay, true, but you were a cute stray dog. This guy, not so much.”
“Hey! I’m right here, you know!”
“It’s just for now,” I tell Thomas. “If he does give us any reason to doubt him, he leaves. Simple as that. Agreed?”
By now we’ve reached the police car. Given that Mikey and I are dressed as cops and Thomas is in a tuxedo, it’s pretty clear that Thomas should be the perp sitting in the backseat, but when Mikey opens the front passenger door of the police car, Thomas’s eyes fasten on the computer.
He points at Mikey. “You, stand back. I need to get my hands on this baby right now.”
“Your girlfriend?”
“He’s talking about the computer,” I clarify.
Thomas is already sliding into the front seat. “What is that awful smell?”
“Could be pepper spray,” I say.
“Pepper spray?”
“You weren’t the only one having some fun with new friends tonight,” I say.
Mikey opens the passenger door to get in.
“Hold up,” says Thomas. “Don’t get too comfortable. I think we need to ditch this ride and find a new one.”
“Aw, no, not the cruiser!” Mikey whines.
Thomas waves his hand toward Mikey like he’s swatting a fly. “At some point, the police are going to figure out that you’ve got this car and cut the engine remotely.”
“They can do that?” Mikey says.
“Yes, they can do that.”
“Then how about we take our friends’ van?” Mikey says, dangling a set of keys from his finger.
“Where did you get those?” I ask.
“Off that guy I punched. Figured we didn’t want them following us if they managed to scrape themselves up off the floor.”
I take the keys from Mikey, smiling at Thomas. “See? Already earning his keep.”
Thomas grunts.
Mikey and I head toward the van, but Thomas stays behind in the cruiser. I double back and see that his head is ducked low, practically under the dashboard.
“What are you doing now?” I ask him.
“We’re leaving the car but taking the laptop,” he says, unbolting the computer from its mount on the dashboard.
Just as we’re about to get into the van, Thomas stops and looks at me. Well, specifically at my chest.
“There’s a bullet hole in your shirt,” he says.
I realize the officer’s name tag must have fallen off at some point while I was climbing up to the church steeple. Or back down from it.
“Why is there a bullet hole in your shirt?” Thomas asks, a false calm settling over him.
Mikey shakes his head like this is the dumbest question ever. “Because people shot at us? And at the cops we were with?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Someone shot at you?” Thomas says.
“Yeah. Guess I forgot about that part too,” I say. “They were in a van just like this one, actually, and probably working with your kidnappers. Trying to keep me from finding you, I guess.”
“Angel, your standards for what’s worth mentioning need some serious adjustment,” Thomas says.
“I will for sure let you know next time someone shoots at us.”
I open the van’s back doors, thinking I’ll hop in the back and let Mikey drive, but Thomas jumps in ahead of me and says, “Mikey, come here a minute. I want to show you something.”
Mikey gets in and follows Thomas. Thomas kneels, sets the laptop down, and points to something on the floor. “Huh. What do you think that is?”
There’s some kind of ring welded into the floor, maybe something you’d use to secure a rope. Mikey looks down at it and as he does, Thomas slaps half a pair of handcuffs onto his wrist. He snaps the other side onto the mysterious floor ring.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Mikey shouts. “Get this thing off me!”
“Just a little precaution for now. Behave and I’ll set you free.” Thomas picks up the laptop and heads to the front of the van, ignoring a now-struggling Mikey. I look down and notice that the handcuffs Thomas took were from my belt. His sleight-of-hand game is strong as ever.
“Angel!” Thomas calls. “You gonna drive this thing or what?”
Once we’re all inside the van and back on the street, I start missing the police car right away. The car was hard enough to handle. This feels like a double-decker bus.
Thomas starts busily tapping away on the laptop like a very purposeful beaver.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“I’m going to run the license plate for this van on the cops’ database. We’ll see where they rented it from and then search for any bowling alleys nearby.”
“Hey, that’s pretty smart,” Mikey says.
If he’s offended that Thomas has handcuffed him to the floor of the vehicle, Mikey doesn’t show it. He just sits cross-legged, takes his police hat off and begins buffing the silver badge above the brim with his cuff.
There’s almost no traffic at this time of night. Just a few taxicabs cruising along with their “On Duty” lights turned off. I feel a little calmer about driving now that there aren’t as many cars on the street. With the windows down, the rushing air brings a little much-needed calm, and I’m trying to read something hopeful into the silence.
“So we’re looking for a bowling alley,” I say, far too cheerfully. “Easy, right? How many bowling alleys can there possibly be in New York City? I mean, who bowls anymore? Other than Mikey, apparently.”
“Even if there are only a few,” Thomas says, “that’s still a lot of lockers to go through in twenty-four hours.”
I hit the brakes hard. “Twenty-four hours? Why twenty-four hours?”
Thomas winces. “Uh, yeah. That’s how much time he said I had to give them what they want, otherwise—” He points
to the crook of his arm. “Whatever’s going to happen to me will happen.”
“You didn’t think to mention that until now?”
“I’ve been distracted.”
“You’ve been distracted? We’ve all been distracted, Thomas. Some of us have even been distracted by bullets. But considering that getting that antidote is our top priority right now, we kind of need to have all the relevant information on the table.”
“And not to put an even bigger damper on things,” Mikey calls from the back, “but that antidote could be even harder to find than you think. I mean, how do we know this bowling alley locker is even in New York?”
Thomas rolls his eyes. “If they’re giving me one day to come up with the info they want in exchange for the antidote, I assume the locker is somewhere in this city and not Tokyo.”
“Unless they were lying,” Mikey says.
“Yeah, Mikey. I don’t need to be reminded that guys kidnapping me and blackmailing me are also potentially liars, okay? They also probably don’t floss or recycle either. Now shut it so I can concentrate.”
A few minutes later, Thomas pumps his fist in front of the screen. “Our Czech friends rented their van from a place in Coney Island, and guess what’s three blocks away from that rental place? A bowling alley.”
“Excellent.”
“Coney Island,” Mikey says in this dreamy, wistful sort of voice. “I feel like maybe I’ve been there.”
I glance over my shoulder at him, and the expression on his face makes me think he’s more confused than ever. I understand that feeling all too well. Pulling a memory free from all the jagged bits of chaos surrounding it is hard enough. And if you do finally manage to remember something, chances are good it’s going to hurt like crazy.
I’m so distracted by this train of thought that I nearly clip the back of a slow-moving off-duty bus. I straighten us out, over-steer toward a fire hydrant, and then swerve back to the center.
“Careful, Angel. We don’t want to get pulled over for reckless driving.”
“If we were still driving that police car,” Mikey grumbles, “we wouldn’t need to worry about getting pulled over by a police car.”
Thomas ignores him. “By the way, how did you find me? Did you follow those guys who nabbed me?”
“No. We used the police computer to trace the signal from your anklet.”
“Brilliant,” Thomas says. His brow furrows. “But problematic. I need to get this thing off my ankle right now. No doubt my parents have noticed that I’m missing, and it won’t be long before they go to the Feds and tell them I’ve done a runner.” He scowls down at the anklet. “I know it’s tamper resistant because, believe me, I’ve tampered with it. Maybe if I look in the security company’s database, I can find the code to unlock it.”
“Use the transmitter’s serial number,” I say. “That’s how we found it.”
Thomas immediately gets to work. I’m about to mention that his name wasn’t in the database when we looked for it, but Thomas suddenly looks so intensely focused that I’m not sure he’d even hear me.
He types like he’s playing the piano, his fingers dancing and then, a moment later, pounding as if the tempo had changed.
At last he looks up and says triumphantly, “Thar she blows.”
“We supposed to know what that means?” asks Mikey.
“It’s, you know, a whaling term.”
“A whaling term?” In the rearview mirror I see Mikey shake his head at me. “This is the guy you date?”
“Shut up back there,” Thomas says just as the ankle transmitter gives three long beeps and releases. He pulls it off. “Ahhh, I’ll miss you, Nessie.” He lowers his window a little more, but just as he’s about to toss the monitor out, he pauses. “Hold on! Pull over right there.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“I just got a better idea about how to dispose of dear old Nessie.”
Thomas jumps out of the car and runs up the sidewalk to the only restaurant that seems to be open at this time of night. He attaches the transmitter to the seat post of a delivery bike parked in front of a Chinese take-out place and then runs back to the car.
“That ought to keep them busy if they come looking for me. You’ve heard of a wild goose chase? This will be a Peking Duck chase. Let’s go. We’ve got a bowling alley to infiltrate.”
Fifteen minutes later I’m caught in the middle of the World War III of arguments about which route to take to Coney Island. Thomas says to take the FDR Drive down the east side of Manhattan, and Mikey is insisting on the Williamsburg Bridge to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
“I’m telling you, the FDR is the totally wrong way to go,” Mikey says. “We’ll be stuck there for hours.”
“And I’m telling you, I’m not taking driving directions from a guy who has no memory,” Thomas says.
“Guys! Just plug the address into the computer, and we’ll take whatever route it suggests.”
When the computer’s directions match Thomas’s suggestion, the van quiets down, aside from Mikey grumbling, “We’ll be in trouble if there’s night construction . . .”
Sure enough, as we approach the on-ramp, we can see that it’s already backed up. There are orange traffic cones and a flag man funneling all the cars onto the shoulder.
“Fine. I’ll just find another way,” Thomas concedes. He types and types and then lets out a frustrated growl.
“Just tell me where I’m supposed to turn!” I say.
Through clenched teeth Thomas says, “Take the Manhattan Bridge to the BQE.”
The tires squeal as I abruptly do a U-turn to avoid hitting the lane divider, but we make it.
Once we’re on the other side of the river, we head south, paralleling the East River. We can now see the Manhattan skyline. I’ve always thought the city is twice as beautiful at night even if it is a whole lot more dangerous.
The quiet inside the van lasts all of two more minutes before Mikey clears his throat and says, “You know, I been thinking . . .”
“Have you now?” Thomas says.
Undeterred, Mikey aims his question at me. “That guy you recognized, the one who took a shot at us? He’s the one who drove you to that party, right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“And if he’s working with these guys who took Big Red here—”
“Never call me that again,” Thomas says.
Mikey ignores him. “I mean, here he’s got the two of you in the backseat, right? Why not plug you both in the head right then and be done with it?”
“They couldn’t just kill Thomas if they want something and need him to find it,” I point out.
“Okay, so that makes sense of why they didn’t shoot him, but what about you?”
“I don’t know, Mikey. Maybe they wanted to put pressure on Thomas by threatening me?”
“I don’t think so. They hurled you into a river, and then they tried to shoot you. Both looked like straight-up attempts to bump you off, if you ask me. It’d be one thing if your boy was standing there and watching the whole thing, but it’s not like he even knew what was happening.”
“Stop distracting Angel while she’s driving,” says Thomas. “I didn’t come all this way to die just because she can’t stay in her lane.”
It’s true that this highway demands my complete attention. Why are these lanes so narrow? Why is everyone driving so fast? If I hold onto this steering wheel any tighter, I’m going to cut off all blood flow to my fingers. I’d rather be climbing cranes. I’d feel a lot safer.
In the distance, I can now see the lights of the Verrazano Bridge stretching from Brooklyn to Staten Island. The river is just an indistinguishable smudge of black against the night.
Mikey only manages to stay silent for a couple seconds. “And on top of everything else, there’s the Fitzgerald lady . . .”
That gets Thomas’s attention. “How does Mikey know about Mrs. Fitzgerald?” he asks me.
I explain that Mikey
was able to track me down in the first place because the guy who tried to kill him had my address in his phone—and that Mrs. Fitzgerald had sent him that address.
Thomas slams his palm on the dashboard. “I told you she was a black hat! But noooo, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Because until now there was no evidence that I should suspect her of anything—”
“I. TOLD. YOU.”
“No need to rub it in.”
I take the on-ramp onto the Belt Parkway and realize at the last moment that I’m about to turn the wrong way on a one-way street. I have to swerve. Thomas braces himself, sticking his hands out onto the dashboard.
Mikey is thrown around in the back of the van. “Geez! Careful!”
“I never asked to be the driver!” I shout. “I hate driving!”
Thomas smiles for the first time since the party. I’m not pleased that it’s at my expense, though. “Don’t you dare laugh at me!”
“My tough chica who climbs tower cranes is afraid to drive? That’s adorable.”
“Have you ever driven in New York City?”
“Nope. Seems utterly terrifying, but you’re doing great. Just proves that the only way to handle fear is to focus on what needs to be done. I learned that from watching you.”
I feel like I used to feel when I reached the top of every building, of every crane. It’s a thrill so deep and resonant, I’m momentarily invincible.
“I’d be tempted to kiss you now,” he says, “but given your bad driving skills, I don’t want you to crash. I’m imagining kissing you, though, and we’re really enjoying it.”
I smile, but something nags at me. His name. His name wasn’t in the system.
Why?
This one little detail shouldn’t be bothering me so much.
There could be a perfectly good explanation for why his name wasn’t listed. Why do I assume he’s holding something back, and if he is, why does it bother me so much?
I trust him completely.
Don’t I?
“You guys,” says Mikey, “I’m not feeling so great all of a sudden . . .”
I ignore him and focus on Thomas. “Thomas, what is going on?”
“I don’t know yet.”
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