Wally held the paper at an angle to the daylight coming in through the window and discovered that the redacted phone number had been written in a hard-tip pen and made an impression in the paper just visible when read from an oblique angle. It turned out not to be a phone number at all, but a PO box address on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, completely unfamiliar to Wally. She copied down the address and looked at it again, feeling a quick thrill of adrenaline rush through her. A voice inside her told Wally that she finally held in her hand a direct connection to her mother.
Wally secured the address inside her shoulder bag and then scanned the room, looking for a way out. She now noticed that the office’s window—looking out at the fire escape—had been completely removed. Her luck was turning. Wally unlatched the iron security grate from the empty windowsill and stepped out onto the fire escape. She climbed down to the alleyway below, and she was gone.
TWENTY-THREE
It was early evening—dark outside—when Wally slipped through the back entrance of the old dry cleaner’s and found Tevin asleep—he had dozed off on a rusty cot that had been left behind in a back room of the cleaner’s. She was changing out of her Thanksgiving clothes and into her warmer street threads when he stirred awake.
“Wha—”
“It’s okay, it’s just me,” Wally said.
“Hey. You’re going out again?”
“Yeah. Where are Jake and Ella?”
“Times Square. Figured the holiday crowds would be a good time to get rid of the last phone cards.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“I was worried … the way we all split up today. I wanted there to be someone here when you came back.”
“You guys said what was on your minds, Tev, and I have no problem with that.”
“But what I wanted to say is that you being happy is the most important thing to me. I’m going to help any way I can until you find what you want.”
“That means a lot,” Wally said, and it was true. “I felt bad about today too, especially after …”
“Yeah, especially after. I know. Is this going to be weird?”
“I don’t know. I mean, not necessarily …”
They looked at each other and cracked up just a little, embarrassed.
“Oh man,” Tevin said. “Maybe if we just ignore it for a while, see how it sits?”
“I vote for that too,” Wally agreed, and Tevin seemed relieved.
“Where are you headed now?”
“A place near the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” she said, and recounted the lead she had found in Dr. Rainer’s files.
“You’re taking a cab?”
“Nah, there may be someone waiting. I rented a car.”
Tevin beamed at this news. “Seriously?”
Wally shrugged. “The new ID is good, and I used Claire’s AmEx again. I mean, at this point why not?”
“Wait … can you even drive?”
“Really badly. I barely made it out of their parking lot.”
Excited, Tevin rose off the cot and began lacing his shoes. “I’m killer behind the wheel. Leave a note for the others so they don’t stress, okay?”
Wally was about to object, but she could see that Tevin would not be denied this adventure.
Tevin was beyond psyched to find that Wally had rented a Lincoln Town Car; he’d expected something boring and beige—an anonymous Toyota sedan—and instead found himself behind the wheel of a classic American whip, cruising the streets of Manhattan.
“It was the only car they had left,” Wally said.
“Now I am truly happy,” Tevin said, unable to stop smiling. “This is better than the—”
“Better than the what?” Wally cautioned him. “If I were you, I would choose my next words very carefully.”
“Better than the turkey. Duh.”
“Whatev,” she said. They both smiled.
Tevin drove downtown and onto the Williamsburg Bridge, crossing the East River to Brooklyn and exiting at Broadway.
“Broadway south and down around Flushing Avenue,” Wally said, and Tevin followed her instructions. This route led them south of Williamsburg toward the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but they turned off Flushing before then, heading toward the intersection of Myrtle Avenue and Carlton in Fort Greene.
“Mail boxes,” Tevin read out loud, pointing to a sign over a small storefront on Myrtle.
“That’s the address,” Wally said. “Park back there …” She pointed to a spot on Carlton where they could park with a good view of the PO box store but remain out of sight. Tevin did a U-ey and grabbed the parking spot, then shut off the engine.
It was just after noon by then, and the neighborhood shoppers were out on Myrtle, many of them seniors pulling their little rolling shopping carts and ducking into the bodegas that lined the street. The PO box store had an all-glass front, with several hundred mailboxes covering the walls of the main room and a service desk to the side with one clerk sitting by, a smallish freckled woman with short-cropped red hair and a tat creeping up from under her shirt collar—a club chick daylighting as a store clerk.
“Stay with the car, okay?” Wally said to Tevin. “I’m going to check the box.” She climbed out of the car, buttoned her coat against the cold air, and crossed Myrtle, walking straight into the shop as if it was a part of her daily routine. She headed directly to Box 310. Wally had to bend down a bit to get a look and was disappointed to find that there was no small window on the box to reveal whether or not there was mail waiting inside. The space behind the boxes was lit, however, and in the light squeaking through the side of the box door, Wally thought she could make out the shadow of at least one letter inside.
“Can I help you with something?” the clerk asked, bored as she looked up from some ink drawings she was scribbling on an art pad. “That’s not your box, right?”
“No,” Wally answered, and turned to the clerk without hesitation. “It used to be a friend’s and I haven’t been able to figure out if she’s still in town. … The thing is, she was with this guy who was hitting her and all of us kept saying she should get a restraining order and she kept saying she would but in the end she would just go back to him and—”
“Christ …” moaned the clerk, exasperated already, “tell me what box number.”
“310.”
The woman typed into her computer monitor. “What’s your friend’s name?”
“Oh … it’s Yalena, but she was having her mail sent care of a friend so the asshole who was beating her wouldn’t be able to—”
“Stop. Do you at least know her friend’s name?”
“Uh … no,” Wally said.
“Then I can’t help you,” said the rocker clerk, and returned to her artwork. “Have a nice day.”
Wally sighed and walked out of the shop, crossing back over Myrtle and sliding into the Town Car again.
“What happened?” Tevin asked, and Wally explained the situation. “So,” said Tevin, “we just figure that it’s still her box and wait her out.”
“And hope she checks her mail more than once a month,” said Wally.
“Friday is a big day for people to get stuff done,” Tevin said confidently. “Before the weekend, you know? Something will happen.”
“Then we need to get closer,” Wally said. “We can’t pick out the individual box numbers, and we need to be sure if someone is using the right box.”
“I don’t think so. If we get closer, we might spook her.”
“Yeah,” Wally agreed.
“You know what they do in the movies?” Tevin said with a mischievous grin. “They send a huge red box to the person at the box number so it’s obvious who picks up the mail.”
Wally smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I can’t believe I forgot to bring a huge red box.”
Tevin laughed. “I have an idea,” he said, then reached into the seat well for his backpack, rifling through the various contents until he found a cheap ballpoint pen. He opened his door and
climbed out of the car. “What’s the PO box number again?”
“310,” Wally said. “What’re you doing?”
“Workin’ it out.” Tevin shrugged with that mischievous grin again.
Tevin crossed Myrtle and entered the store, walking straight up to the clerk, who looked up from her “artwork” with her standard expression of annoyance. “Yeah?”
“You got a piece of notepaper?” Tevin asked. “I need to leave a message for my friend Sisco.”
“Sisco,” the woman repeated in a snide tone, annoyed again at the interruption of her work. She pulled out a piece of notepaper and slapped it onto the counter in front of Tevin. He scribbled some words onto the paper and then folded it in half, writing Box 617 on the outside. He held the note out, and the clerk took it without looking up at him but made no move to actually deliver it to the box. Tevin remained at the counter.
“What?” the clerk said.
“The message is really important.”
“Oh my God.” The clerk groaned the words, as if being subjected to torture. She slammed down her art pen and rose from her stool. With Tevin’s note in hand, the woman left her post and walked back around behind the wall of PO boxes to place the note in the appropriate box. As soon as she was out of sight, Tevin scrambled across the floor of the shop and headed straight for Box 310. Once there, he jammed the tip of his pen into the box’s keyhole and twisted it hard to the side, breaking the tip off inside the keyhole.
“Thank you!” Tevin called out to the clerk as he turned and left the store.
TWENTY-FOUR
Near the corner of 94th Street and West End Avenue, a gypsy cab was pulled halfway back into a service alley, its nose poking out far enough to allow the passengers a full view of 94th Street. In the backseat of the cab sat Klesko and Tiger. Behind the wheel of the cab was Ramzan, the Bulgarian from the basement credit card shop in Queens, fidgety and sweating despite the cold of the day. Klesko and Tiger kept their eyes on the abandoned dry cleaner’s on the first floor of an empty building, half a block away.
Within an hour, they spotted three of the four teens arriving—none of them the girl—and watched the youths as they snuck in the back entrance of the dry cleaner’s, using their own key.
Locating the new hiding place had not been difficult; once Klesko had figured out the girl’s scheme with the empty commercial space, it had been a simple matter of obtaining the real estate listings from the same company—Desmond & Green Realty—and searching for the empty location that best suited the girl and her crew.
Soon afterward, two of the kids had reemerged and walked off, leaving the black one alone in the dry cleaner’s.
“We wait for the girl,” Klesko said, and Tiger nodded.
Tiger watched his father, anger and impatience growing in the old man with each passing hour. So far, Tiger had been able to rein Klesko in, to keep him focused on their goal so that his thoughts would not drift back into the vortex of rage that was clearly swirling inside the dark recesses of his father’s mind. The violence at the office building of Charlene Rainer had done nothing to appease Klesko’s need for vengeance. If anything, the urgency of his need had been whetted by spilling all that blood.
Tiger wondered how long it would be before his father’s actions surpassed reason, surpassed the man’s ability to control himself or to be influenced by his son. What would Tiger do then?
The men’s patience was rewarded when the blond girl—the one they had encountered at Dr. Rainer’s office—arrived on the scene by herself and behind the wheel of a large American sedan. She proceeded to park on the street in front of the cleaner’s, a very bad parking job in fact, and entered the cleaner’s. Within minutes, she reemerged with the black kid. The two of them climbed into the Lincoln and drove off, the boy behind the wheel.
Within thirty minutes the three men in the gypsy cab were parked half a block up from Carlton Street in Brooklyn, watching the two teens. The men had a clear view of the Town Car but were still partially hidden behind a red-and-white-striped tow truck parked just in front of them. Behind the wheel of the cab, Ramzan was anxiously alert to the mood and movements of Klesko, seated directly behind him.
“Klesko,” Ramzan whined, “I say it again. So long ago, Klesko, troubles came to you in our deal, but it was not me who brought them.”
“No, not you,” Klesko grunted.
“I offer to help because we do business over many years, trusting each other. Making each other much money. That day … the police were there already … twenty Darzhavna and there was nothing I could do—”
“A truck full of Abakan rifles and nothing you could do?”
“By myself and just the two Serbs? Just muscle, a couple of patsani only?” Ramzan could see that Klesko had no appetite for his arguments. He mumbled a lament, mostly to himself: “It was so long ago.”
Bringing Ramzan and his gypsy cab with them had seemed like a good idea at first—the girl did not know Ramzan’s face at the time, so having him behind the wheel would be good cover—but after several hours in the Bulgarian’s presence, Klesko was tiring of his incessant mewling and the sour smell of fear that reeked from the man’s pores.
“Something …” said Tiger, who had a pair of binoculars trained ahead on the Town Car. “The black one is doing something.”
Klesko took the binoculars and watched as the girl’s companion entered the postal shop, the same shop the girl had visited just a few minutes earlier. The boy ran some sort of game on the witless girl behind the counter, getting her out of the way with a ruse and then fouling one of the box locks when she wasn’t looking.
“A plan,” said Klesko. “They are watching one of the boxes.”
“I want to smoke,” said Ramzan.
“So smoke, pizda,” said Klesko.
“Outside,” he pleaded. “I need air.”
Klesko stared for a moment at the back of Ramzan’s head, boiling up with irritation. Every sound and smell and motion of the man seemed to inflame Klesko’s wrath, and finally he was unable to contain it. Tiger kept one eye on his father and recognized his mood.
“No …” Tiger began to urge restraint.
Too late. Klesko reached forward and with his left hand grabbed hold of Ramzan’s thick, wiry hair, pulling the man’s head back as Klesko drew an ice pick out of his coat pocket and thrust it into Ramzan’s neck, slipping it with a discernible crunch between his vertebrae. Ramzan’s body went slack.
“Father …” Tiger began, betraying his thoughts with a look of disapproval.
“Yes?” Klesko growled. “Something to say, Tigr?”
But Tiger changed his mind and remained silent. Klesko reached to Ramzan’s face, closing the dead man’s eyes and gaping mouth. He turned Ramzan’s head to the side, shielding his seeping wound from view in case any curious pedestrians should pass by. Tiger wanted to speak but waited a moment, listening to his father’s breathing to determine when calm had been restored to the man.
“What after this, Father?”
“Eh?”
“We will find the stones.”
“And the whore,” said Klesko.
“And then?”
“She dies.”
“Of course. What then?”
Klesko gave Tiger a look of incomprehension.
“America is big,” said Tiger. “Many places to go when we have what we need. Yes?”
Klesko just shrugged and returned his attention to watching the street, waiting for the girl and her black boy to make their next move.
TWENTY-FIVE
In the four hours that Wally and Tevin had been waiting, at least three dozen customers had come and gone from the PO box shop. No one had tried to access box number 310. The interior of the rented Town Car kept going icy cold, and each time, Tevin had fired up the engine to reheat the air so the two of them wouldn’t freeze solid.
“I don’t know,” Wally said. “What are we going to do? Stay watching here for days? A week?”
&nbs
p; “She’ll come,” Tevin said.
“Eight years,” Wally said. “That’s how long it had been since I had my last appointment with Dr. Rainer. The address has got to be at least that old.”
“If the address is no good, then that’s what you’ll find out today. An answer you didn’t want is still an answer.”
They had been waiting for almost an hour more when a woman entered the shop from the east, wearing a knee-length French army surplus woolen overcoat, with mismatched knit gloves and a rainbow-striped scarf wrapped around her neck. On top of her head was a bright orange hunting cap with earflaps that flopped down. The overall effect was artsy bohemian. The woman moved directly to a different section of the PO boxes and removed some mail, shuffling through it casually and tossing the junk in a blue recyclables container. Wally sighed and checked the car’s clock for the twentieth time that hour. It was a quarter to five and almost completely dark outside.
“Shit,” she said.
“Hold up a sec,” Tevin said, his eyes still focused on the shop. Wally looked ahead and saw the woman with the rainbow scarf move to another section of the boxes—somewhere very near box 310—and shuffle through the keys on her chain until she found the one she was looking for. She tried to stick the key into the lock but failed and tried again, pushing harder and twisting at different angles. The lock wouldn’t take the key. The woman bent over and seemed to be looking at the box’s keyhole, and then she turned away and stepped to the service counter. From their watching post fifty yards away, Wally and Tevin could see the shop attendant leave her post to walk around behind the mailboxes. She returned a few seconds later with a small collection of envelopes—maybe three or four—and handed them to the rainbow scarf lady.
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