Chapter Five Eleven Missed Calls
Rome was under a Honda Civic at Nuck’s, elbow-deep in a brake job he’d taken on because he needed the cash and needed something to keep his hands busy more than he needed the money, when his phone started buzzing against the concrete floor beside him.
He almost let it ring through — he’d told the front office at Tookie’s school that Renata would be doing pickup for a few days, since Rome’s hours at the garage had gotten unpredictable in a way he didn’t have the energy to explain — but something made him slide out from under the car and answer anyway.
“Mr. Ellis? This is Ms. Denny, front office at Callaway. I’ve got your aunt here — she says nobody came to sign Tookie out, and she’s not finding him in the aftercare room, and I wanted to check with you before we —”
Rome didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. He was already moving, wrench still in one greasy hand, phone pressed so hard to his ear it would leave a mark.
“What do you mean he’s not in aftercare.”
“He signed out at dismissal, three-fifteen, with — the sign-out sheet says a name I’m not familiar with, and normally we’d call to verify but the line was—”
“Who signed him out.” Rome’s voice had gone somewhere flat and cold he didn’t recognize in himself, a register he’d only ever heard his mother use exactly once, the night a man tried to come through their apartment door when Rome was twelve.
“It says — I’m looking at it now — it says ‘Uncle D. Ellis.’”
Rome didn’t have an uncle. Their father’s side of the family had scattered before Rome could remember any of their names, and their mother’s only brother had died in Afghanistan before Tookie was even born. There was no Uncle D. There had never been an Uncle D.
“Call the police,” Rome said, already sprinting for his truck, tools forgotten on the garage floor, Nuck shouting something behind him that didn’t register at all. “Call them now, tell them a child’s missing, tell them—”
He hung up before he finished the sentence, because eleven missed calls had just lit up his lock screen, all from the same blocked number, all inside the last four minutes, and some animal part of his brain understood before his conscious mind caught up that the school office wasn’t where this was going to be resolved.
The blocked number called a twelfth time as he was pulling out of the lot, tires screaming against gravel, and Rome answered it with his heart trying to climb up out of his own throat.
“Ellis.” A voice he didn’t recognize, younger than the man in the gray suit, rougher, with none of that man’s patience in it. “You still got something that ain’t yours.”
“Where’s my brother.” Rome’s hands were shaking so bad on the wheel he had to grip it with both of them, phone wedged against his shoulder, running a red light on Federal Street without slowing down at all. “Where is he, if you touched him I swear to God—”
“He’s fine. He’s gonna stay fine, long as you do exactly what I say and don’t waste my time being stupid about it.
” A pause, and Rome could hear something in the background on the other end — traffic noise, or maybe just wind, impossible to place.
“You bring the book. Just the book, nothing cute, no police, no phone in your pocket recording nothing. You do that, your little brother goes home tonight and none of this ever happened.”
“I need to hear his voice.” Rome’s own voice cracked on the last word, cracked in a way he hated, a way that gave this stranger something he didn’t want to give him. “Right now. I need to hear him or we got nothing to talk about.”
A shuffle on the other end, muffled voices, and then — “Rome?” Tookie’s voice, thin and scared but whole, alive, breathing, the single best sound Rome had heard in his entire life and also the worst, because underneath the relief was a fear so total it felt like drowning.
“Rome, I’m sorry, I didn’t know the man, he said you sent him, he said—”
“I know, I know, it’s not your fault, you hear me? None of this is your fault.” Rome was crying now and didn’t care, tears running down into the collar of his work shirt while he drove sixty in a thirty-five down a residential street. “I’m coming, okay? I’m coming right now, you just—”
The phone changed hands again. “Touching,” the rough voice said, sounding anything but.
“Here’s how this works. You got two hours.
You bring the book to the loading dock behind the old Sonneborn plant on Boston Street, you come alone, and I mean alone, Ellis, I will know if you don’t.
Anybody else shows up, anybody follows you, this goes different than either one of us wants. ”
“Two hours isn’t—”
“Two hours.” The line went dead.
Rome sat at a red light he didn’t remember stopping at, phone still pressed to his ear, listening to nothing, the whole world gone narrow and strange around the edges the way it did in dreams right before you understood you were dreaming.
A car behind him laid on the horn. He didn’t move for a full three seconds before the sound of it reached him.
He called Nuck first, hands shaking so bad he had to try twice to hit the right contact. “I need you to do something for me and I need you to not ask why right now.”
“Rome, what the hell is going—”
“The notebook’s in the water heater panel at my apartment, taped behind the access door on the left side.
I need you to get it and meet me — no.” He stopped himself, some instinct screaming that involving Nuck any further than this put Nuck in exactly the kind of danger Rome had spent four days trying to keep everyone he loved away from.
“No, forget it. Stay away from my apartment. Stay away from all of this. I mean it, Nuck, I’m serious. ”
“You’re scaring me, man.”
“I’m scaring myself.” Rome pulled the truck over two blocks from his own building, hazards on, hands still shaking on the wheel. “Somebody took Tookie.”
The silence on the other end lasted a long time. “I’m calling you back in five minutes,” Nuck said finally, voice gone hard in a way Rome had never heard from him. “Don’t do anything till I call you back.”
Rome didn’t wait five minutes. He was already at his apartment door, key shaking so bad in the lock it took three tries, already pulling the panel off the water heater with fingers that didn’t feel like his own anymore, notebook still wrapped in its two bags exactly where he’d left it.
He stood in the hallway of his torn-apart apartment with it in his hands and thought, with a clarity that scared him more than anything the man on the phone had said, that four days ago this had been a stack of paper he found by accident, and now it was the only thing standing between his little brother and whatever those people were willing to do to a nine-year-old kid to make a point.
There was no version of this where Rome weighed the value of the notebook against anything else in his life. He would have burned every name in it, would have burned the whole city down around it, before he let anything happen to Tookie.
His phone rang. Nuck.
“I got a cousin drives for a car service downtown, does pickups by Sonneborn all the time, knows that whole waterfront back to front,” Nuck said, talking fast, none of his usual easy rhythm in it at all.
“I already called him. He’s gonna be parked two blocks out, not close enough to spook anybody, just close enough that somebody’s watching your back that they don’t know is watching.
Rome — you can’t go into this alone. You hear me? Whatever they told you—”
“They said alone.”
“They also snatched a nine-year-old out of school using a fake name, so forgive me if I don’t put a whole lot of stock in what they think is a fair deal.” Something in Nuck’s voice broke slightly, the anger underneath it plain now. “You’re not doing this by yourself. I don’t care what they said.”
Rome stood in the hallway with the notebook against his chest, looking at the framed photo of his mother that whoever tore this place apart had set down gently instead of breaking, some small scrap of decency in people who’d apparently run clean out of it by the time they got to snatching children off school property, and felt something in him settle into a kind of grim, focused calm he didn’t know he had until he needed it.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Tell your cousin two blocks, not one inch closer, and Nuck — if this goes bad, you call the one detective in this city whose name I have not seen written down as dirty. Avery Moss. She did the interview after my cousin’s case, she seemed real, she seemed like she actually gave a damn.
You call her, you tell her everything, you don’t wait for permission from anybody to do it. ”
“Rome—”
“I gotta go.” Rome was already moving, notebook tucked flat against his back the same way he’d carried it into that school parking lot four days ago, keys in his hand, ninety minutes left on a two-hour clock that had already started eating itself alive the second he answered that first call. “Ninety minutes, Nuck. I gotta go.”
He drove toward the waterfront with his hands finally steady on the wheel, steadier than they’d been all day, because somewhere in the last twenty minutes the fear had burned down into something simpler and harder to shake — not fear of what might happen to him, not anymore, but a promise he was making to a nine-year-old boy who’d once made their mother laugh so hard at the dinner table she had to leave the room, a promise that Rome intended to keep no matter what it cost him to keep it.
The old Sonneborn plant sat dark and hollow-eyed against the evening sky, windows broken out decades ago, the loading dock at the back exactly where the voice on the phone said it would be.
Rome parked, killed the engine, and sat there for a moment with the notebook in his lap, looking at the building where his little brother was somewhere inside, and understood with total finality that whatever happened in the next hour, the life he’d had four days ago — the one with rent math and water pumps and math quizzes at the kitchen table — was already gone, and it wasn’t coming back no matter how this went.
He got out of the truck and walked toward the dock.