CHAPTER FIVE
Wren
I do three ordinary days and I want to talk about them, because they're the last ones.
Wednesday: a hoarder job on Ivory Hill that we quote for and lose to a firm that undercuts us by nine hundred dollars and will do it in a day, which is not possible, which means they will not do it.
Mari says nothing in the van for six minutes and then says "he'll call us back in March," and she is right, he calls us back in March.
Thursday: nothing. A genuinely empty day. I do the accounts and Mari does the licence renewal and we eat lunch on the step outside the office in the cold because the office has one window and it faces a wall.
"Right," she says, with her mouth full. "The abuela thing."
"You said not on the phone."
"We're not on the phone." She wipes her hands. "So. My abuela's brother. Sofronio. Ninety-two now, if he's anything. He went out for cigarettes in Cabanatuan in 1974 and came back to the house at three in the morning looking twenty-four years old."
I put my sandwich down.
"She didn't open the door," Mari says. "She sat on the floor against it until dawn and he talked to her the whole time. That's what she told me, once, when I was nine, and she never said another word about it in her life, and every August she drew that mark on the frame in chalk."
"Mari."
"I know how it sounds."
"I'm not saying it sounds like anything."
"You're doing the face."
"This is my listening face—"
"It's your pointy face, mahal." She shrugs, and looks at the wall opposite.
"Anyway. That's what I've got. A story from a woman who's been dead eleven years and a mark on a table in a penthouse.
I'm not saying it's anything either. I'm saying I saw it and my stomach went out from under me and I told you to delete it, and I'm sorry. "
"Don't be sorry."
"I'm not sorry enough to want to talk about it more," she says, standing up, brushing crumbs off. "So. Licence renewal."
Friday: two quotes, one insurance job, and a phone call at eleven at night from a woman with the specific brittle voice of a person standing in a room they can't be in anymore.
◆ ◆ ◆
But before Friday there's Thursday night, and on Thursday night I go to get the van.
We keep it on level three of the parking structure on Corvin, because level three is where the working lights are, and because I've been in this business long enough to have opinions about parking structures.
It's half eleven. I've been at the office since seven doing a year's worth of filing badly. There's nobody on level three but me and forty empty spaces and the fluorescent hum and the specific parking-garage smell of cold concrete and old exhaust.
I've got the tailgate open and I'm checking the kit list on my clipboard when I stop writing.
There's no reason to stop writing. Nothing's happened. Nobody's said anything. The hair on my arms just stands straight up like it's been called to attention, and every animal part of me that predates language sits bolt upright and says, very clearly, something is looking at you.
I turn around with a clipboard in my hand like it's going to help.
He's about twenty feet away, standing between two pillars where there's absolutely nowhere for a person to have come from.
Tall. Black coat, wet at the shoulders. Dark hair pushed back off a face that belongs on a coin — all of it too still, too symmetrical, the kind of face that makes your brain flag an error. Late thirties, maybe. Standing the way a building stands.
And he's staring at me like I've just told him something terrible.
"Nope," I say.
That's it. That's my whole contribution. Four years of safety training, a first-aid certificate and a taser at the bottom of a bag I cannot reach, and what comes out of me is nope.
He doesn't move. "You were in the Ansel apartment."
His voice is low and worn and there's an accent under it that's been sanded down over a very long time.
"I was in a lot of apartments. It's a whole thing I do. Big apartment girl." I take a step back toward the driver's door. "You a cop?"
"No."
"Family?"
"No."
"See, this is going great." My hand finds the door handle. "Normally at this point in the conversation the other person says a job title, and I say 'oh, cool,' and we both go home."
Something happens in his face. Not a smile. Something that would have to walk a long way to become a smile.
"You found a mark," he says. "Under the table."
Everything in me drops about a foot.
"Nope," I say again, and get the door open, and he's — he's not there, he's at the door, one hand flat on the panel above my head, and I didn't see him cross the ground between us. There was no crossing. He was there and now he's here and my brain refuses the file.
He's close enough now that I can see there's no colour in his skin at all. Close enough to see he isn't breathing.
Close enough to see him flinch, hard, when he inhales — a sharp, ugly, involuntary thing, like a man leaning over a stove.
"Get out of Ashmoor," he says.
"Buddy—"
"Tonight. Take your friend. Drive south and don't stop and don't tell anyone why."
"I have a lease—"
"You have," he says, very quietly, "about two days."
"Two days until what?"
"Until it finds you." His eyes come up. "There's something in this city that was made three weeks ago and abandoned on purpose, and it has been going through people at a rate of one every other night, and it is not looking for food.
It's looking for you, and it does not know that, and it will not stop, and when it gets to you it will be so happy about it that you will have about four seconds. "
The strip light above us has a fault in it and it ticks.
"Right," I say. "Okay. And you're what — the good one?"
And he laughs.
It shocks both of us. It's a cracked, rusted-open sound, like a door in a house nobody lives in, and his whole face changes with it and for a second he looks less like a coin and more like a man, and something in my chest does a thing I will be annoyed about for weeks.
"No," he says.
Then his eyes drop to my throat and stay there for one second too long, and I understand — not with the thinking part, with the older part, the part that lived in caves — that I am standing in front of something that is deciding.
I don't scream. I've always assumed I'd scream. Instead I hear myself say, in the reasonable voice I use on grieving relatives:
"Whatever this is, you should know I've had a really long shift."
"I know," he says. "I've been watching you for three days."
And then he's gone.
Not walked-away gone. Gone. The space where he was is just concrete and cold air and a van with the tailgate up.
I sit in the driver's seat for four full minutes with my hands at ten and two, not turning the key.
Then I drive home, and I check the mirrors the entire way, and there's never anything in them, and I go up two flights past the smell of the dryers and lock a door that has never once in three years kept anything out, and I do not tell Mari, because what would I say.
◆ ◆ ◆
Mrs. Alaimo calls at eleven o'clock the next night.
"They've taken him away," she says. "They took him this morning. They said — they said it was an animal."
"Okay."
"In a basement."
Mari's cousin has her Hyundai in pieces on a driveway in Cordell Heights and Mari is two hours away at a christening she has been threatening to skip for a month, and the address is a rowhouse on Cadger Row, near the water, and rule one of this job is that you don't go to a site alone.
"I'll come now," I say.