Jasper
Tolya Semenov has been stealing from the yard since June.
He keeps checking the window that looks down over the loading floor, where my cousins are standing in the middle of the concrete looking up at the window.
"Sit down, Tolya," I say.
He sits.
Eleven pallets have left this yard on paperwork that doesn't match the weight tickets, and none of it would have surfaced for another six months if a driver hadn't mentioned to Mechislav that a load felt light going over the bridge.
"You've got two children," I say. "The younger one is at the school on Fenn Road."
Every bit of color leaves his face at once.
"That isn't a threat. It's an observation. I’m trying to understand why a person, such as yourself, would do something like this." I turn the top manifest around to face him. "You owe eighteen thousand. Can you pay?"
He hesitates long enough to tell me that he considers lying, chooses against it, and tries to figure out how easy he could get his hands on that sort of money. I imagine it’s not a small amount for him.
His tongue darts out to wet his lips. He swallows. "Not immediately, no."
Tolya at least has the decency to look ashamed of himself.
"I’ve worked for your family since I was a boy," he spits, anger trying to mask the shame.
"Yes," I say. "Which is why I haven’t shot you already. But your actions must have consequences."
Dealing with men like Semenov is my job, but that doesn’t mean I like it.
Of my cousins, I seem to be the best one at it.
Mechislav would immediately go to breaking bones, Natan would just shoot Semenov in the head.
Demyan would pull his teeth out with rusty pliers and let him take his chances with infection.
Eduard knows I’m the best negotiator with shit like this. But it costs to keep myself controlled.
Tolya accepts the terms I lay out for him. Three months to pay what is owed in full and a demotion with the opportunity to rise up the ranks once again if he gives me the name of who he was selling to.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he starts talking. By twenty past six, I have a name and address in the eastern quarter, and a man who'll be more useful frightened and employed than he ever would have been broken or dead.
Natan is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. "He walks out of here?"
"He walks out of here owing us money, which is better than him leaving in a van.
Kill him, the whole yard will know in an hour.
Then the drivers go looking for other work and we could lose the route.
" I hand him the folded manifest. "Give that to Eduard.
The buyer is one of Marchetti's people. I'll confirm by the weekend. "
Natan looks at the paper, then at me. "You're in a hurry…" he says, and lets it sit there.
"I’ve got somewhere to be." I leave him standing there with the manifest and a shit-eating grin on his face.
The drive takes thirty-five minutes over the bridge with the water going flat and gray underneath. The lights come up out of the fog on the other side as I check the clock on the dash. Just after seven. She will be home now, so I head straight to the park.
I pull into the small gravel parking lot at the main entrance to the park and wait.
Last November, I was driving back from the city and saw her cross the road by the bandstand in a yellow reflective jacket.
She was alone, the whole park ahead of her, and the last daylight gone off the water.
I pulled in to make sure she got to the gate.
That was all it was going to be. Then I did it again the following night, and after a week, it stopped being a decision and became my evening routine.
It's good security. Purr and Pour is owned by the wife of the head of this family, and anybody wanting leverage over Eduard Federov would start exactly there.
At just before eight, the gate at the Merrow Street end opens and closes, and she comes down onto the path at that unhurried pace she keeps for the first half mile, headphones in, dark hair up and already coming loose around her face.
I stay where I am. That's how this works. I sit in the dark with the window down, listening to her feet on the wet path, and when she comes back around at the far end and makes her journey home, I leave.
It’s the gray hatchback that stops me.
It's parked in the far corner, tucked away under a massive oak tree that’s mostly lost its leaves. I noticed it when I arrived because the plate is a city plate, and there’s a scrape down the driver’s side that needs some attention before rust sets in.
The driver's door opens as Delilah passes the boat sheds.
He gets out slowly and stands for a moment before looking down the path after her.
Boots, not running shoes. I look for signs of a dog, and when he opens the back door I expect one to jump out.
Instead he pulls out a messenger bag and slings it over his shoulder.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
He waits for the distance to open up between them. Then he starts walking, and his wide, quick pace catches up to her quickly.
I'm out of the car and inside the treeline where the ground is wet enough to take the sound within ten seconds. He's watching her. I've walked this park enough times to know the path bends left after the boat sheds and loses the lamps for about eleven yards.
I’ll bet he knows that too.
He picks up his pace, closing the distance between them, Delilah still oblivious to his presence at all. Then he steps into that stretch with his head down and his hands out of his pockets, and I step onto the path in front of him.
He stops so fast he almost falls backwards.
"Long way from home," I say.
Whatever he sees on my face is enough. He begins to step backwards, but I close the distance quickly and put my forearm across his chest, pushing him into the trunk of the nearest oak. Up ahead, her footsteps stop.
Shit.
I look over to her to find her looking right back at me. I wonder if perhaps it’s too dark by now, that maybe she can’t see me. I move my head slowly from side to side, hoping if she can see me, she stays quiet.
The guy struggles beneath my arm.
"Why are you following her?" I ask.
He's twenty-five, maybe thirty, soft in the middle, in a gray coat that’s seen better, and cleaner days. His eyes go past me down the path back toward where he parked his car.
I take my phone out with my free hand and photograph his face at eight inches with the flash on. He flinches hard enough that the back of his head hits the bark.
"You can tell me who you are, or I can find out another way," I say to him, my jaw tight and my teeth clenched. "That way I get to hunt you down if I find out you’re the fucker from the newspapers."
"I’m nobody, man, I was just taking a walk." He is sweating.
I grab the front of his coat in both fists and jerk him against the tree hard enough to make his head rattle.
"I know you’re lying," I say. "But I’m a fair man." He visibly sags with relief when I say this. "So empty your pockets and your bag."
The relief is gone in an instant.
"You can't make me, you psycho," he says, his face twisting into lines of pure fury. That tells me more than he knows. This isn’t some sociopathic serial killer I’m dealing with. This is an opportunist, pissed that I got in his way.
I snatch his bag and let the contents tumble to the ground. A stained cloth and a pair of handcuffs fall out along with a small plastic bottle of clear liquid and syringes. One looks prepped with the hypodermic needle already attached and ready to go.
"You sick fuck."
Delilah is slowly inching her way towards us, close enough now to see I’ve got a man pinned against a tree.
Unfortunately, for him, I’m not an opportunist.
"You don’t know who I am. But from now on I’m going to be right behind you, watching you.
If you go near any woman without her expressed consent again, I’ll make sure you disappear.
Go anywhere near this woman again, and I’ll make sure it’s in the most painful way possible.
Do you understand?" He nods hard enough that his teeth clatter.
I let him go, and he runs back to his car like a rabbit.
Letting him go costs me something I feel in my back teeth. I could have him in the trunk of my car and be somewhere with a floor drain inside the hour, and part of me is already there, laying it out step by step.
That part gets overruled.
I need to know whether he's the man from the newspaper article or just a guy who liked the odds. I need him alive and findable and stupid enough to have driven his own car.
"Jasper?" Delilah sounds cautious.
"Evening."
"Who was that?" she asks, her cheeks are flushed pink from her run. "What are you doing in the park?"
"That man was following you," I say, instead of telling her why I’m here.
Her eyes narrow as she looks at the path behind me. "Following me…" she mimics.
"That's right."
"Are you sure?" she asks, pushes her hair back off her face.
"Yes." I bend to pick up the crap he left behind when he grabbed his bag. The little bottle is a well known date rape drug, already half gone. I pocket it along with the empty syringes and the loaded one. "I’m going to walk you home."
Her eyebrows go up. "Why?"
"I’d feel better knowing you got there safely."
She stands there with her hands on her hips and her breath fogging, looking at me.
"Okay," she finally says, her shoulders sagging an inch.
I let her set the pace and drop in easily beside her as she stretches each arm across her chest, pausing every few steps to stretch her legs.
She fills the walk with chatter about the cats, the café, the gallery across the road.
She skirts around the edges of what happened fifteen months ago outside the café, likely wanting to know if I know anything about it, but I stay quiet.
The way she talks is fast and thorough and for some reason, over the last year or so, I’ve come to crave her conversation. Even the ones she has with herself.
Before I’ve fully registered it, we’re at the door of her apartment, and she pulls a single key out of the hidden waistband pocket of her leggings.
"Come up. I owe you a coffee."
"You don't owe me anything," I counter, because it’s true.
She lowers her chin and raises her eyebrows. "Ten minutes. You look like you've had a day." She is already running up the stairs.
Her apartment is small and warm and smells like sugar.
A bowl of something sits under a dish towel on the radiator, a stack of paperbacks holds up one end of a shelf, and there's a photograph on the fridge of Sammie holding Lilah with one of the cats entering the frame from below. She fills the kettle, then gives up on it, and switches to the little stovetop pot instead. The mugs she pulls down from a cupboard don’t match each other, or the decor of the small, clean kitchen, and yet they’re exactly right.
"Delilah."
"Hm?"
I cross the kitchen. She turns around with the coffee pot still in her hand and finds me a lot closer than I was.
Her lips part with a little puff of surprise.
It’s been too long, I realize.
Too long standing at the end of that counter holding a mug of coffee to stop me from reaching out and touching her.
From pulling her into me. Too long watching her set a plate of something burnt in front of me, with her whole face glowing with hope that I’ll like it.
The entire time I've been telling myself she deserves a man whose evenings belong to him.
That reason held up beautifully right up until now. Now it's just a thing I used to say.
I lift my hand and push the loose hair back off her cheek, and my thumb stays on her jaw.
She turns her face into it.
That's it. That's the whole of my restraint, gone in the time it takes her to move a fraction of an inch.
I kiss her, and she makes a small sound against my mouth like something coming loose. Then her hands are fisted in the front of my jacket, pulling. I have her back against the counter with the coffee forgotten behind us, and neither of us slows down.
Too long of not doing this arrives all at once, and there's nothing careful left in it. She kisses like she talks, warm and unguarded and completely without strategy. When I break away to get at her throat, she says my name, her fingers pushing up into my hair and holding on.
"I’ve wanted this," she says, "for so long, and I have been such an idiot about it."
"Not just you," I manage between the moments that my lips are pressed against her skin.
"How long?" she asks. "How long, Jasper?"
I lift her onto the counter so her face is level with mine, her legs wind around me. I take my time answering because I want to watch what it does to her.
"Since the wedding," I confess.
The sound she makes goes straight through me.
"That’s the first time we ever met…" she trails off as I run my tongue over her throat, her head tipping back.
I push her zippered sweater off her shoulders as she pulls at my T-shirt. Then she's kissing me again.
There's a whole plan somewhere at the back of my head about doing this properly, slowly, with the seriousness it deserves, and it survives about as long as it takes her to get my belt open.