Chapter 2
VI
I make it about thirty feet down the corridor before Alice appears.
Not from any door that opened. She’s just there, stepping out of a gap between a collapsed display rack and the wall, like she's been standing there all day. Maybe she has. She’s still got the shaved head and scar across the cheek, making her look like something out of a Mad Max movie.
It’s crazy to think she used to work for the city and even crazier that she worked with my dad, with how subversive and badass she looks now.
"I was coming to find you," I tell her.
"I know," she says.
I don't ask how. Alice somehow always knows. It's one of the things about her I've stopped questioning because the answer is probably just that she pays attention and most people are freaking clueless.
She tips her head toward a side corridor, directing me to one narrower and darker than we’re in right now.
We head for one of the service passageways running behind the main thoroughfare, narrow and unlit, like some kind of creepy circulatory system, and I follow her without question because that’s what you do with Alice.
She moves fast for a woman her age, quiet on her feet, taking turns I have to hustle to keep up with.
After a minute, she stops at a junction where two passages meet.
There’s a light source somewhere above us allowing me to see her face.
It’s not enough that anyone passing the main corridor thirty feet away would notice us standing here, but it’s enough for me.
She turns and waits.
I get straight to it.
“We had a conversation with Tommy tonight. Also known as Fischer.”
“Tommy? The supply guy?” she asks.
I nod. “Turns out he knew my father. While he was telling the guys and me about the case Dad built against the people running the city corruption, he slipped and said something very interesting.
In the middle of it all, he said—" I stop to make sure I have her attention.
"He said ‘your father is a smart man.’ Present tense. Is. Not was."
I watch her while I say it, the way I've learned to watch faces in this place, the way you have to when you're reading people who've learned to make sure their faces give nothing away.
I'll take anything she gives me—a small tightening around the eyes, the shift of a jaw, the quick involuntary blink people do when they hear something unexpected.
Nothing. Her expression doesn't move. Not a flicker, not a twitch.
I keep going.
"He caught himself the second he said it. Shut down completely after that, and wouldn't give me another word. But it was too late."
She inhales a long breath and looks at the ceiling above.
"You don’t seem surprised, Alice.”
She neither confirms nor denies. Of course. Everyone around here is so fucking secretive. "What else did he say?" she asks.
"Nothing. That was it. One word and then a wall went up," I say, enacting an imaginary barrier. I take a step closer. "Alice. You're not surprised by this, I can tell, which means you knew. Or suspected. You have been sitting on it this entire time."
"I've been sitting on a lot of things," she says. "That's how I've survived here."
"Please tell me what you know, Alice."
She looks at me steadily. The few times I’ve spoken with her, she’s never been rattled, not once, not by the guys, not by the Rot's politics, not by anything. She operates at one temperature and one temperature only. It’s frustrating, but I have to give her credit.
The woman is surely better at self-preservation than I am.
But right now, it makes me want to put my fist through the wall next to her head.
I stand still and wait her out.
"Your father," she says finally, "was building a case for over a year before he disappeared. You know that. I gave you the documents." She pauses. "What I didn't tell you, what I wasn't sure of until recently, was the way it ended. The way he ended it."
"What do you mean?"
"The official story is that he was removed.
Discredited. That the pressure became too much and he—" She stops and chooses her next words carefully.
"Well, that’s never sat right with me. Your father was not a man who broke under pressure.
I knew him. I watched him take hits that would have finished other people.
But he came back each time with more documentation, more questions, more fight.
He didn't crack. Men like your dad don't crack. "
Hearing her say dad, a word so intimate and familiar, makes my mouth go dry. "So what happened to him?" I ask, my voice wobbling.
"I think," she says, slowly, "that at some point, he realized the case wasn't going to move through official channels.
That the people above Fischer were too well protected, too embedded, too connected to everything that could have exposed them.
I think he looked at what he had built and understood it wasn't enough, not enough to prove his case, at least not against the crooks behind it all. And I think he made a decision."
"To disappear."
She doesn't confirm it. She says, "Your father was smarter than all of them."
The tense on that one is past, but the rest of what she just said is present. I think. Not I thought. She's doing it too, the same thing Fischer did, doling out information in a way that gives her cover but gives me the picture if I'm paying attention.
"Alice." I keep my voice flat. "Is my father alive? Yes or no."
She just looks at me.
"Please."
She holds my eyes. The scar on her cheek is an old one, long healed, white against the rest of her skin.
I've never asked her about it and she's never offered.
There's a version of this woman I will never know and I’m okay with that being the case.
She deserves the little privacy the Rot affords her.
"What I know," she says slowly, "is that a man who spent years quietly building a case against the most powerful people in this city, who watched every ally abandon him one by one, who knew what was coming before it arrived, had options you and I haven't considered.
He had time. He had documents. He had the one thing none of the people coming for him had. "
"What? What do you mean?"
"He had knowledge. He knew they were coming," she says. "They thought they were surprising him. They weren't."
The corridor is quiet. Somewhere deeper in the Rot something mechanical ticks. Maybe a generator cycling or a pipe contracting in the damp chill.
"Find the people above Fischer," Alice says.
"The ones who ran the operation, the ones who walked away clean when Rothwell went under.
Whatever your father knew, wherever he may be, the path runs through them.
" She straightens up. She's done. I can see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she's already angling slightly toward the passage she came from. "That's what I have for you."
"Alice, please," I say.
"It's all I know."
And she's gone. Back into the passage, around a corner, swallowed by the dark.
I stand at the junction alone. The light from the crack above me throws a pale stripe across the concrete floor. I stuff my hands in my blue jean pockets to steady them. It works, but the rest of me is shaking like the mess that I am.
I push off the wall and start walking back. I have no interest in standing in a service corridor with this information by myself. Mara is fifty feet away and she heard the same word I heard, and she's the only other person in this building right now who I trust with any of this.