Chapter Fifteen What Nuck Gave Up
Nuck was closing the bay for the night, alone, radio off for once, running through the day’s invoices in his head, when two men walked into the garage without knocking and without the particular hesitation of customers.
He knew trouble the second he saw it, the way anybody who’d grown up in East Baltimore learned to know it — not from anything either man said or did right away, but from the specific quality of quiet they carried into the room, the kind of quiet that meant the conversation had already been decided before it started and Nuck’s part in it was just to catch up.
“Nathaniel Warren,” the older one said. He was lean, gray at the temples, moved like a man who’d spent a career being underestimated for his politeness right up until it was too late to matter. Nuck didn’t recognize him, which scared him more than recognizing him would have. “We need five minutes.”
“Shop’s closed.” Nuck kept his voice even, reached slow for the wrench on the bench beside him, more for the feeling of having something in his hand than any real belief it would help. “Come back tomorrow, whatever this is.”
“This isn’t about the shop.” The man’s eyes moved around the bay, unhurried, cataloging — the Civic still up on the lift, the framed photo of Nuck’s kids taped to the toolbox, the calendar from the auto parts supplier on the wall, absorbing all of it with the specific patience of a man who wanted Nuck to understand exactly how thoroughly his life had already been mapped out before this conversation began.
“It’s about Jerome Ellis. We know he works for you.
We know you’ve been in contact with him the last several days, more contact than a boss usually has with an employee who’s supposedly missing. We’d like to know where he is.”
“Don’t know.” Nuck’s grip tightened on the wrench. “Man didn’t show up to work, that’s all I know.”
The younger man, silent until now, took a slow step further into the bay, and something about the deliberate quality of the movement made Nuck’s stomach drop before the man even spoke.
“You got two kids,” he said. “Seven and eleven, is that right? Go to Cardinal Shehan. Your wife picks them up most afternoons, except Tuesdays, when it’s you, because she’s got that shift at the hospital. ”
The wrench went cold and heavy in Nuck’s hand.
He hadn’t said a word about his kids. He hadn’t needed to.
The fact that these men already knew — school, ages, the specific Tuesday pattern of who did pickup — landed with a violence that no explicit threat could have matched, because it told Nuck with total clarity exactly how long they’d been watching before they ever bothered to walk through his door.
“We’re not here to hurt anybody,” the older man said, and something in the careful, almost gentle way he said it made it worse rather than better.
“We’re here because Mr. Ellis has something that belongs to people with considerably more patience for polite conversation than you’re currently seeing demonstrated.
That patience is running thinner by the hour, and every hour it runs thinner, the conversation gets less polite with whoever we have to have it with next.
Right now that’s you. I’d genuinely rather it stayed that way than escalate to your family, Mr. Warren, and I suspect, given the photograph on that toolbox, you’d prefer that too. ”
Nuck stood very still, the wrench useless and heavy in his hand, running through every option available to him in the space of about four seconds and finding, at the end of all of it, exactly none that didn’t end with either his family or Rome’s family paying a price Nuck had no right to make either of them pay on his behalf.
He thought about Rome standing in this same bay four days ago, grease under his nails, doing math about a water pump that seemed, now, like it belonged to some other lifetime entirely.
He thought about Tookie, who used to come by the shop sometimes after school and beg Nuck to let him hold the impact wrench even though he was too small to control the kickback.
He thought about his own two kids, safe right now at home with their mother, utterly unaware that a stranger standing in their father’s garage had just recited their school and their pickup schedule back to him like a threat wrapped in courtesy.
“Otis,” Nuck said finally, the word coming out of him like something physically torn loose. “Otis’s sister’s place. Off Belair Road. I don’t know the exact address, I never went there myself, but that’s where they’ve been staying. That’s all I know, I swear to God that’s all I know.”
The older man studied him a long moment, weighing the truth of it, and whatever he found in Nuck’s face — the genuine anguish, the specific quality of a man who’d just betrayed someone to protect people he loved more — seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded once, short, and stepped back toward the door.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, in the same even, unhurried voice he’d used the whole conversation, as though he’d just settled an invoice rather than extracted a man’s soul out of him piece by piece.
“For your sake, Mr. Warren, I’d encourage you not to warn him.
We’ll know if you do, and the terms of this conversation will change considerably if we’re forced to have a second one. ”
They left as quietly as they’d come, the bay door swinging shut behind them, and Nuck stood alone in the sudden silence of his own garage with the wrench still in his hand, shaking now, staring at the framed photo of his kids taped to the toolbox, understanding with a sick, hollow certainty that he had just handed a nine-year-old boy’s location to men who’d already once been willing to snatch him out of a school pickup line.
He didn’t warn Rome, not directly, not by phone, because he believed with total conviction that the man’s threat about knowing had not been a bluff.
But he stood in that garage a long time afterward, hands finally steady enough to pick up his own cell phone, and dialed a number he’d been given only once, days ago, folded into his memory the way you fold away something you hope you never actually need.
Detective Avery Moss answered on the second ring.
“This is Nathaniel Warren,” Nuck said, voice rough, forcing the words out before he could talk himself back out of it.
“Rome — Jerome Ellis — he told me to call you if things went bad. Things just went bad. I think I just told the wrong people where he’s hiding, and I don’t have any way to warn him without putting his little brother in worse danger than he’s already in. ”
There was a brief pause on the other end, the sound of a chair creaking, a woman gathering herself fast. “Address,” Moss said, all business now, no hesitation at all. “Give me everything you’ve got, right now, and pray to God I get there before they do.”