A DEBT COMES DUE #2
“I dislike making men desperate. Desperation is untidy. It makes people careless, and careless people tear the Veil that keeps your voters asleep and unaware of what this city actually contains beneath the version they are allowed to see. I would much rather you simply signed. Quietly. And let us both continue letting them believe the world is only as large as what they can see of it.”
“It is business,” he said.
“Then we can both pretend so. Helena will be very kind in the press release.”
He drew the folder toward himself with two fingers, then slid it to the far edge of the desk, away from the pen. His jaw was tight, and his eyes moved twice between the folder and the door before settling on neither.
I had not wanted to do it this way.
Between one word of his and the next, I was around the desk.
He never saw me move, because nothing in him was quick enough to catch it.
My hand closed over his and pinned it flat to the blotter, and the dagger was already in my other hand and already drawn, a thin clean line opened across the back of his knuckles.
The blood welled up dark against the green of the folder.
“I gave you three chances, and a window with a good view to make one small decision in front of. You chose this instead. When you tell yourself the story later, remember that I asked you four times to let me be polite. Remember that I cut the hand that holds the pen and not the throat, and that the difference between those two things was nothing more than the mood I woke up in this morning. Remember, too, that I could have asked Helena to make this decision for you, in a room you would not have walked out of, and I did not. I gave you a desk with your name on it and a view of a park you like to photograph for your campaign materials. Some men would call that mercy. I would call it patience, and patience is not a thing I extend twice in one afternoon.”
His breath came in pieces. The tremor in his hand had stopped entirely.
He signed the cover sheet with his blood smearing faint along the edge of his palm, and he signed the addendum, and he signed the secondary disclosure Helena slid in front of him without a word, and he set the pen down very carefully when he was done.
“You can't just own everything in this city, Mr. Reed,” he said, hoarse.
I almost smiled. “No. Only the doors that matter.”
I took the handkerchief from my breast pocket and laid it on the desk beside his bleeding hand, because the cut was mine to answer for, and I do not leave messes I did not mean to leave.
Then I stood, and I did not offer my hand this time.
Some courtesies do not survive the rest of a conversation, and we both understood what the room had become.
Amara held the door, and I went out past the aides, who waited in the corridor with small, bright, fixed faces.
Mateo was at the wheel when we reached the car, and he glanced at me in the mirror before pulling the door shut behind Amara.
“Boss.”
“Red Hook.”
He pulled out into traffic without asking why, because he had learned years ago that I told him what he needed to know and nothing else, and that this arrangement worked better for both of us than the alternative.
Amara already had her phone out, scrolling before either of them had finished speaking.
“Do you want me to call ahead,” she asked, “or should it stay a surprise until we get there?”
“They already have him.” She was reading off her screen rather than waiting on my answer.
“Rowan picked him up out of the Bronx forty minutes ago.
He fought a little on the way into the van, so there's a bruise on his cheek that was not there when Rowan found him, and Rowan wants you to know that was necessary and not recreational.”
“Coherent?”
“Frightened, mostly. He has not been struck since they put him in the chair, and he has asked twice for a lawyer, which tells you how little he understands about where he is.”
“Good.”
I sat back against the leather and watched the city slide past the window, the wet gray light of the afternoon catching on glass and chrome and the black umbrellas of people who did not know what had just happened four floors above their heads, in a building they paid taxes to maintain.
I did not look at my own reflection. I knew what I would find there, and I did not particularly want to find it yet.
The Red Hook was a warehouse the city had forgotten about three separate times in the last forty years, condemned twice and rezoned once, and each time the paperwork had gone missing before anyone acted on it. Rowan opened the door for us.
The room beyond was clean. The concrete floor had been scrubbed pale, there was a drain in the center doing the work a drain does, and a single bank of fluorescent lights overhead hummed at a pitch I had stopped noticing decades ago.
Cruelty done in dirty rooms was a peasant's habit. The rooms my work was done in were swept and well lit, and the chair bolted into the floor at the center of this one had been bolted there for nine years, through three other men who had needed it before Remy did.
Remy was in it. He was not as bad as he might have been, because Rowan was a careful man.
A split at his lip had already stopped bleeding, there was a swelling under one eye, and his shirt hung open at the collar where Rowan had checked him for wires.
A smear of his blood sat on the concrete near his left foot, perhaps a tablespoon of it, and Elias marked it with his eyes the moment I walked in, filing it away to account for within the hour.
His head came up when I entered.
“Mr. Reed.” His voice came out rough, and there was anger riding under the fear in it, plain even before he finished the sentence. “Nice room. You bring all your guests here, or is this the good one?”
I let that sit for a moment, because it told me useful information. A frightened man begs first and finds his anger later, if he finds it at all. Remy had found his early, and that, more than anything else about him so far, was the first detail that made me look at him twice.
I came to a stop in front of him and let him keep his head up to look at me, and Amara stepped to my left with the file open in her hand.
“Three days, Mr. Venn.”
“I know how to count, Mr. Reed. I've had plenty of time to do it, tied to a chair in a warehouse that smells like bleach and old fish.”
“Is the money in this room?”
“Does it look like the money's in this room?”
“That was not an answer.”
“No.” His jaw worked. “No, the money's not in this room. There is no money. I don't have twenty-two thousand dollars, and neither does anyone I know, and if you were half as smart as everyone says you are, you'd have figured that out before you had your men break my face.”
I had expected as much. Men like him rarely had the money, because the money had never been the actual point of any of this.
“You went to a shop on the first afternoon, after Mr. Moreau spoke with you. In Astoria.”
His chin jerked up, defiant before he had even decided what he was defiant about. “That wasn't anything. That was just getting food. A guy's allowed to eat.”
“Second Life Antiques. On Thirtieth, off Steinway.”
The color went out of him. Until that sentence, he had believed there was one thing left in the world I did not already have.