Chapter 22
Jeff found me before I found him.
I’d been gone forty minutes, working a payphone three neighborhoods away, when the burner buzzed with a text from a number I didn’t know.
Sal’s. Back room. Come alone and I’ll give you Voss. You know it’s me, Z. You’ve known since Jones.
Nobody had called me Z in thirty-four years, except a dead girl and the man who’d just texted me.
Sal’s had been a social club on Fourth Avenue when we were boys — a front for a numbers operation, a place where men who ran the neighborhood drank coffee and decided things.Where Jeff and I had swept floors, run envelopes, and learned the shape of the world we were going to spend our lives inside.
It had been closed for two decades. The fact that Jeff knew it was still standing, knew I’d know what he meant, knew that naming it would land somewhere under my ribs that an address couldn’t — that was Jeff.
He had always understood exactly which door in a man to knock on.
I went. Of course, I went. The wolf in me had been pacing since Jones said his name, and there’s no holding a thing like that off forever; you only choose the ground.
The front was boarded, but the side door gave to a shoulder, the way it always had.
Inside, it smelled of damp, pigeon, and thirty years of nothing.Under all of it, faint and unmistakable, Jeff.
Older. Sick, maybe — there was something in his scent that hadn’t been there when we were young, a thinness, the smell a body gets when it’s been at war with itself for a long time.
He was in the back room, sitting at a card table with a bottle of water in front of him and both hands flat on the surface where I could see them, which told me he’d thought about how this would have to go and had decided not to make it worse.
Thirty-four years.
He’d been a big man once, broad through the shoulders, quick.
The man at the table was smaller than that, sanded down, gray at the temples and gray in the face, with the loose skin of someone who’d lost weight he hadn’t meant to lose.
But it was Jeff. The eyes were Jeff’s. He looked up at me and something moved across his face that I’d waited three decades to see.
I found, now that it was in front of me, that I didn’t want, because it was grief, and grief implied a debt I wasn’t ready to let him start paying down.
“You look like your father,” he said. “Around the eyes.”
“Don’t.” My voice came out flat and final. “Don’t do the thing where we talk like men who knew each other. We knew each other. Then you killed her.”
He didn’t flinch from it. That was the worst part. He absorbed it like a man who’d said it to himself ten thousand times in worse words.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
The wolf wanted the table out of the way and my hands on him. I stood across the room and let it want.
“Sit down, Z.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Then I’ll talk and you stand.” He turned the water bottle a quarter-turn, the small fidget of a man who used to smoke.
“You came for two things. Voss and me. You can have both. But you’re going to get the second one in an order I choose, because I’ve been carrying it for thirty-four years, and I’m not going to die without setting it down.
From the look of you and the look of the city, one of us is dying soon. ” He met my eyes. “So. Me first.”
“I don’t want your confession.”
“I know you don’t. You want to put me through that wall.
” He nodded at it. “You can, after. I won’t lift a hand.
But you’ll get the wall and nothing else, and you came here for more than the wall, or you’d have brought it to me already, instead of standing there letting me talk. ” He waited a beat. “Sit down.”
I sat. The chair was cold. The wolf settled into a crouch inside me, not gone, just waiting, and I let Jeff Alli have the thing he’d called me here to give.