Sean
Iwake up on a couch that does not belong to me.
The light is wrong. Soft. Gold. Coming through a window that is not mine. The ceiling is wood. Pine, knot pattern, beam every four feet. I have stared at my own ceiling for a long time. This is not it.
The pain announces itself before I move. Left side. Below the ribs. Hot but contained. Someone has done very good work on me.
The last thing I remember is the kitchen island. I am not there anymore.
She moved me at some point. I do not remember the moving.
That tells me something about the state I was in when she did it.
I do not move yet. I let my body finish the inventory. Both legs functional. Both arms. The wound is dressed clean. There is a thin pull at the suture line when I shift weight. The work is recent enough that I should not be testing it.
I test it anyway.
I sit up.
"You shouldn't be doing that," she says.
Her voice. From across the kitchen.
She is at the counter. Coffee in her hands. Same blouse and skirt as last night, the jacket gone. The sleeves of her blouse pushed to her elbows.
Her dark hair is loose. Flattened on one side from a few hours of uneven sleep, damp at the ends from a fast shower.
No careful perfection this morning. No version of Nadia built for other people’s eyes.
There is, technically, me. She has decided I do not count.
That should bother me more than it does.
The Chemex sits beside her on the counter.
Glass vessel. Wooden collar. The paper filter still folded back over the rim where she set it after the pour.
The kind of pour-over coffee maker that takes four minutes per cup and demands you stand there for all four of them.
Whatever else this cabin is, she did not stop being herself when she walked into it.
"Coffee."
"You shouldn't have that either."
"I'll risk it."
She looks at me for a second before pouring a second cup and bringing it to the couch, setting it on the side table within reach. Steps back before I can reach for it.
That is deliberate.
She is also doing it from about three feet away, which means I am now aware of exactly what she smells like. Something clean and specific. The kind of thing a woman wears when she is not trying to be noticed, and is impossible not to notice anyway.
I drink the coffee. It is good coffee. Black.
"How do you take it?" she asks.
"Milk. Two sugars."
She looks at me.
"That is how a child takes coffee."
"I'm aware."
She picks up her own cup and looks at it for a moment. Then, with the particular expression of a woman who has decided to conduct a brief scientific experiment, she already knows the results of it, she adds milk. A small amount. Then sugar. Two. She stirs it once.
She takes a sip.
Her face does something.
It is not a large thing. It is the face of a woman who has been drinking espresso since she was twelve and has just been handed a glass of warm birthday cake and told it is coffee.
"How do you drink this?"
"Very happily."
"It tastes like dessert."
"That's the point."
"Coffee is not supposed to taste like dessert."
"Says who?"
"Says everyone who has ever been to Italy." She puts the cup down. "I cannot. I am sorry. I genuinely cannot."
I laugh.
It is the first real laugh I have had in I do not know how long. It comes out before I can stop it. Big enough to pull at the wound. I do not care about the wound.
She is trying not to smile. She is losing.
"Your taste is terrible."
"My taste got me through fifteen years of night shifts."
"That explains the taste."
I laugh again. She gives up on not smiling. It is a small smile. She takes it back almost immediately. But it was there. I saw it.
I drink my coffee, her way, black, which is in fact better than my way and always will be, a fact I am taking to my grave.
She watches me drink.
Doing the thing she did in the warehouse, staying very still while everything underneath the stillness does math at a rate I cannot see.
I look at her hands.
They are no longer on the coffee cup. Now they rest on the edge of the counter. Index fingers tapping once, twice. A tell.
"Your hands shake when you're not working."
"They don't shake."
"They tap."
"That's not the same thing."
"Tells aren't always the same thing as fear. You'd know that if you played poker."
"I do play poker."
"Then you know."
She stops tapping.
I drink the coffee without looking at her face. I do not need to. I can hear her recalculating.
This is the closest thing to flirting I have done in a while. It is not very good flirting. I have been told that my flirting style is approximately the same temperature as my interrogation style. The only meaningful difference is the smile.
I am not smiling right now.
"What's your name?"
"Liam Walsh."
It is the alias on the backup ID I am still wearing.
She does not respond or push. She refills her own cup, walks to the kitchen window, and looks out at whatever is past it. Trees. Light. The middle of nowhere.
She is letting me lie because the lie is information. She knows Liam Walsh is not my name. She does not yet know what it is. She will. She has channels for it.
That is a chess move I would respect in someone else.
I respect it differently.
"Liam," she says, without turning around. "How's the side?"
"It's been better."
"It'll be better again."
"That's a guarantee?"
"That's a probability."
"Reassuring."
"You'll live."
"Less reassuring."
The corner of her mouth twitches. I see it from across the kitchen, even with her in profile.
I am not going to mention it.
I am going to keep that small piece of information for myself, the way she is keeping my real name for herself. A count we will both pretend does not exist.
She turns back to face me.
"Eat something. There's bread in the cupboard and eggs in the fridge."
"You're going to feed me?"
"I'm going to let you feed yourself, Liam. There's a difference."
"Generous."
"I'm a generous host."
"Are you a host?"
"Today I am."
I drink the coffee. I look at her across the counter.
"Thank you. For last night."
She does not move. She looks at me.
"You saved me first."
"That's not how the math works."
"It is in this kitchen."
She holds my eyes a half-second longer than I expect before turning and walking past me out of the kitchen. She does not look at me when she goes. She does not need to. I am aware of her the way I am aware of the wound. Constantly. With the same quality of pull.
Frank used to say there were two kinds of women a man should be careful about. The ones who rearrange a room without trying. The ones who leave a room without leaving anything.
Some of them do both, Seanie. The ones who do both are the ones you don't walk away from.
I drink the coffee.
I do not think about which one Nadia is.
The cabin is small. It is also not small.
Small in footprint. One main room. Kitchen open to the living area where the couch sits. A short hallway with two doors. A bathroom. A bedroom. A back room I can see is locked from where I am sitting.
Not small in any of the ways that matter.
The walls are reinforced. The windows are not single-pane glass.
The locks are not the locks anyone puts in a Catskills cabin.
The cabinets are flush with no visible hinges.
The pantry has a pressure plate at the threshold.
I almost did not notice it. I noticed the second one, which is what gave away the first.
This is not a Moretti safehouse. I have studied the Moretti safehouses. They have a signature, same contractors, same systems, same configurations, down to the brand of fire suppressor in the kitchen.
This place has none of it.
Which means it is hers.
She built this place. Or had it built. She owns it through whatever shell company she registered it under. The only person on this earth who knows it exists is the woman who walked out of the kitchen pretending she does not know my name.
The woman calling herself Nadia has a private safehouse in the Catskills.
She brought me to it.
I am going to figure out what to do with that information.
She goes back to her bedroom for a few hours.
I hear her go in. I hear the door close. After that, the cabin takes on the kind of quiet a place has when only one person is awake inside it.
I get off the couch.
I move slowly. Not because of the wound. The wound is manageable. I move slowly because I do not know what kind of monitoring this place has.
I find a coat closet by the front door. Then a hall closet with linens. The locked back room with its biometric pad.
She has not given me her thumb.
I move on.
The kitchen has a lamp on the counter. Small. Ceramic. Ugly in the deliberate way a lamp can be ugly when no one in the building cares about lamps. I know this lamp. NYPD has used the same shape for surveillance plants since before I made detective.
I unscrew the base.
The interior is empty.
She has not bugged her own kitchen. Whatever happens here, she does not want a record of it.
I take the small tracker out of the false heel of my boot. I put it inside the lamp base. I screw the base back together.
You're a dirty cop now, Seanie. Don't ask me whether I approve. Ask me whether it works.
It will work. The signal is one-way. Doyle's team will pick it up the second I get within range of any cell tower.
I stand at the counter and look at the Chemex again.
A woman who keeps a Chemex in a Catskills safehouse is a woman who does not lower her standards for anything. Not for hiding. Not for the road. Not for the man bleeding on her kitchen island.
That, and the fact that I have just spent ten minutes analyzing her coffee setup when what I should be doing is running her name through every database I can access.
I know her first name. I have not run it yet.
I will.
Just not yet.
Her phone is on the counter beside the Chemex. Face down. Charged.
I lift it. The screen is dark, locked, of course. Recently used. I set it back down exactly the way I found it.
She ran my face.
Before she went to sleep. Before she let her body rest in a house with a stranger in it. She did the work first. Whatever name came back on her screen, she has it now.
She has my real name. She has not used it.
That is the second chess move I would respect in someone else.
I sit back down on the couch.
I drink another cup of coffee. Cold now. Still better than most coffee I have had in my life.
I am not proud of myself.
I would do it again anyway.
The woman in the bedroom is the most interesting person who has walked into my life in a long time. That does not change what the job is. It just makes the job harder.
I have also, in the last little while, started to wonder whether I have been understanding it the way Frank understood it.
Or the way the people around Frank wanted him to.
I push it away.
She is crying in her sleep.
I hear it from the kitchen. Not loud. The kind of crying that has been done quietly for a long time and has learned to be small. A breath that catches. A sound that almost makes it out of the throat and then does not.
I stand in the hallway outside her bedroom door.
I do not go in.
I am not going to go in. Whatever she is dreaming, it is not mine to interrupt.
I do not get to walk into her bedroom because she is dreaming.
I tell myself I am in this hallway because she said something and I needed to hear it more clearly. The intelligence gathering lasted about ten seconds. I have been in this hallway for two minutes.
I stay anyway.
She says something. Half a word. Not English.
Non era mio padre.
He was not my father.
She says it three times. Quieter each time. The kind of repetition that means the sentence has been said a long time and the saying has worn it smooth.
Then she goes quiet.
I stand there without moving.
There is a piece of information I just received that I am not prepared to have. I am going to keep it the way she is keeping my real name. I am going to fold it into everything else I know about her. I am not going to ask her about it.
The man who was not her father.
Whoever he was, he made her who she is.
That is going to matter.
I am still standing in the hallway when I hear the front door alarm chirp.
Once. Then a second time.
I move.
I am back on the couch by the time her bedroom door opens. The coffee cup is in my hand. The window is where I am looking.
She walks past me without looking and goes to the counter. Picks up her phone. Taps it. The chirping stops.
Nadia speaks first, eyes still on the phone. "Moretti runs a perimeter sweep once a day. On every habitable structure in their territory."
"This place is in their territory."
"This place is not on their registry."
"That is not the same thing."
"No. It is not."
She puts the phone down. Walks back to the hallway. Does not look at me as she passes. The bedroom door closes behind her.
I am still on the couch.
She knew I was in the hallway.
The cabin is quiet.