Chapter Four Open Door
Rome knew something was wrong before he got the key in the lock, because the door was already open a half inch, resting against the frame instead of latched, and Rome never left that door anything but locked and dead-bolted, not since Tookie was old enough to reach the handle.
He put his arm out, flat across Tookie’s chest, the same gesture their mother used to make in the car whenever she braked too hard, an old reflex from a body that remembered danger faster than the mind could name it.
“Stay here,” Rome said, low.
“Rome—”
“Stay on the steps. I mean it.” Something in his voice must have carried the weight he intended, because Tookie, who argued about bedtime and vegetables and screen time with the tenacity of a much older kid, went quiet and stayed put on the third step down, backpack still on, eyes wide.
Rome pushed the door open with two fingers, slow, and stepped into a living room that had been turned inside out.
Not ransacked the way it happened on television, drawers dumped and furniture flipped for chaos’s own sake.
This was worse, somehow, because it was methodical.
Every drawer in the kitchen pulled open and gone through, contents shifted but not scattered.
The couch cushions off but stacked neatly to the side instead of thrown.
The one framed photo they had of their mother, from her cousin’s wedding two summers before she passed, taken off the wall and set down gently on the coffee table, frame intact, like whoever did this had enough humanity left to not want it broken, or enough discipline to not want to leave evidence of anger.
Rome moved through the apartment fast now, adrenaline burning off the last of his hesitation, checking his bedroom — mattress shifted off the frame, dresser drawers pulled, closet gone through — and then Tookie’s room, which stopped him cold in the doorway.
They’d been in here too. Tookie’s dresser drawers open.
The shoebox where Tookie kept his baseball cards, the ones their mother bought him for his eighth birthday, dumped out onto the bed and sorted through, cards fanned out like someone had actually flipped through each one checking for something hidden between them.
Rome stood in his little brother’s doorway with his hands shaking, not from fear anymore but from something hotter, something that felt a lot like the particular rage that lived right next to grief and never quite let itself be told apart from it.
He checked the hall closet last, heart going hard enough he could feel it in his teeth, and pulled open the water heater’s access panel with fingers that didn’t want to cooperate.
The notebook was still there.
He almost laughed, the kind of laugh that has nothing to do with anything being funny.
He’d taken it with him that morning, actually — tucked flat against his back under his jacket out of some paranoid instinct he hadn’t examined too closely at the time, the same instinct that had him checking his mirrors twice as often on the drive to Renata’s — and only put it back that afternoon before heading out to finish the water pump job, which meant whoever tore this apartment apart had come and gone sometime in a window of maybe five hours, and had found nothing, because the one thing they were looking for had been strapped to Rome’s back the whole time they were pulling his dead mother’s photo off the wall.
He thought about the man in the gray suit, his stillness, his patience, I found you inside of thirty-six hours, and understood immediately that this wasn’t him.
This was too rough for that man, too willing to leave a mess behind.
The suit had offered money. Whoever did this hadn’t bothered asking first.
Rome went back to the front steps, where Tookie was sitting exactly where he’d left him, knees pulled up, backpack still on, watching Rome’s face for information the way he always did.
“We got robbed?” Tookie asked.
“Somebody came in, yeah.” Rome sat down next to him on the step, made himself breathe slow, made his voice do the thing it needed to do for a nine-year-old who’d already lost one parent and didn’t need to watch the other person holding his life together fall apart on a stoop in front of him.
“Nothing’s missing that matters. You good? You didn’t touch anything, right?”
“I stayed here like you said.” Tookie’s voice had gone small, the particular small it went whenever the world reminded him it wasn’t as safe as a nine-year-old deserved to believe it was. “Somebody went in my room?”
“Yeah, man. I’m sorry.” Rome put an arm around him, felt the boy’s shoulders shaking slightly, working hard not to cry in a way that made Rome’s own throat go tight. “We’re gonna stay at Renata’s tonight, okay? Just till I get the locks changed.”
“Is it ’cause of the truck? The one you bought?”
Rome went still. Tookie had a way of asking exactly the question Rome least wanted answered, always had, ever since he was small enough to ask their mother why the lights sometimes went out at the end of the month.
“Why you say that?”
Tookie shrugged, picking at a loose thread on his backpack strap. “You been weird since Saturday. Man came to the garage yesterday, you told Nuck it was insurance, but you never lie about insurance stuff, you always tell me boring insurance stuff for real.”
Rome almost smiled despite everything, because his little brother wasn’t wrong, and it scared him a little how sharp the kid was, how much he picked up on that Rome had assumed went over his head.
“I bought something I shouldn’t have,” Rome said carefully, choosing each word like it might explode in his hands.
“Not on purpose. It’s — it’s paperwork, it’s not drugs or anything like that, I need you to hear me say that clear.
But some people think I have something that’s theirs, and they’re wrong about that too, mostly, but they don’t know that yet. I’m gonna handle it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.” It was the most honest thing Rome had said all day, and something about saying it out loud to his little brother on the front steps of a torn-apart apartment made the fear in his chest sharpen into something closer to resolve.
“But I’m not gonna let anything happen to you over it. That’s the only part I know for sure.”
They packed two bags that night — clothes, Tookie’s homework, the shoebox of baseball cards restacked as best Rome could manage, the framed photo of their mother wrapped in a towel and placed carefully on top — and Rome called Renata from the car before they even pulled off the block, kept his voice light for Tookie’s benefit, told her they’d had a break-in and needed the couch for a few nights, didn’t mention the notebook or the man in the suit or the particular careful way somebody had gone through his little brother’s baseball cards looking for something that had never been in that room to begin with.
He drove three different routes to Renata’s house that he’d never normally take, doubling back once on Chase Street just to watch his mirrors, feeling something close to insane doing it and unable to stop himself anyway.
It was only after Tookie was asleep on Renata’s pull-out couch, breathing even and slow the way kids managed even in the middle of chaos that would keep an adult up for a week, that Rome sat on Renata’s back steps in the cold with his phone in his hand, scrolling through his contacts, trying to figure out who in his life he could actually call about any of this.
Not the police. Half the names in that notebook wore badges, and Rome had no way of knowing which half.
Not Nuck, who had a family and a garage and enough on his plate without Rome dragging danger onto his property.
He thought, briefly, about the receipt he’d found under the passenger seat that first day — the phone number written in that careful, deliberate handwriting, the one he’d thrown away without thinking twice.
He wished now he’d kept it. Some part of him understood, sitting there in the cold with his little brother’s baseball cards still slightly out of order in a shoebox on the seat of his car, that whoever had written that number down might have been the last person who touched that notebook before Rome did, and might have been the only person left alive who could tell him what he’d actually gotten himself into.
Instead he had nothing but a torn-apart apartment, a hundred-thousand-dollar deadline closing in by the hour, and a growing, cold certainty that the man in the gray suit had been telling the truth about one thing at least.
He really had been the polite option.