Chapter Seven Rules for Disappearing
Nuck’s cousin’s Town Car was still idling two blocks out when Rome finally reached it, Tookie’s hand locked around his own so tight it had gone half-numb somewhere around the third block.
The driver — a thin, quiet man named Otis who didn’t ask a single question, which Rome appreciated more than he had words for — pulled off the second both doors shut, taking side streets Rome wouldn’t have known existed if he’d driven this city his whole life twice over.
“Nuck said take you wherever, long as it ain’t home,” Otis said, eyes flicking to the rearview more than the road. “That still the plan?”
“That’s still the plan.” Rome had Tookie pulled in against his side, the boy’s breathing finally starting to even out from the ragged hitching sobs he’d let go the second the car doors closed and it was safe to stop being brave. “You got somewhere we can think for twenty minutes that isn’t a car?”
Otis took them to a diner on Erdman, the kind of place that had been open twenty-four hours since before either of Rome’s parents were born, fluorescent lights and cracked vinyl booths and a waitress who didn’t so much as blink at a grown man walking in with a crying nine-year-old at ten-thirty on a school night.
Rome ordered pancakes Tookie didn’t eat and coffee he didn’t drink either, and sat across the booth from his little brother trying to figure out, in real time, with no roadmap and no one to call who wasn’t already more tangled in this than he had any right to be, what the rest of his life looked like now.
“Are we gonna be okay?” Tookie asked, finally, voice small and raw from crying.
Rome reached across the table and put his hand over his brother’s, the way their mother used to when either of them woke up scared in the night.
“Yeah. We are. I promise you that.” He meant it with everything he had, even though some cold, honest part of him understood he had no actual way to guarantee it.
“But some things gotta change for a while. Can’t go back to the apartment.
Can’t go back to your school, not right now, not till I get this sorted. ”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know yet.” It was the truest thing Rome had said all night, and he hated how it sounded out loud, how small and helpless it made him feel saying it to a kid who deserved better answers than that.
“I need you to trust me on some rules, okay? Same as when Mama was sick and we had rules about the medicine schedule. You remember that?”
Tookie nodded, eyes still red but steadying, latching onto the familiar shape of rules the way kids sometimes did when the actual world went too strange to hold onto directly.
“Rule one — you don’t go anywhere without me or somebody I tell you by name is safe.
Not Renata’s, not a friend’s house, nowhere, unless I say the name out loud first. Rule two — if anybody comes to get you and says I sent them, and I didn’t call you myself first, you scream and you run and you don’t stop till you find a grown-up in a store or a school, somebody with other people around.
Rule three—” Rome’s voice caught, just slightly, before he pushed through it.
“Rule three, if something happens to me, you go straight to Renata, and only Renata, and you tell her everything, every bit of it, the notebook and the man in the suit and Problem and all of it. You don’t protect me by staying quiet. You understand?”
“Nothing’s gonna happen to you,” Tookie said, fierce in the particular way only a little kid trying to will something true by saying it hard enough could manage.
“I need you to say you understand the rule anyway.”
Tookie’s jaw worked for a second, and then he nodded, small and tight. “I understand.”
Rome’s phone buzzed against the table — Nuck, checking in for the fourth time in twenty minutes — and Rome answered it quiet, one hand still resting over his brother’s.
“We’re good,” Rome said before Nuck could get a word out. “Both of us. We’re at the diner on Erdman with Otis.”
“Thank God.” A long breath on the other end, Nuck’s relief audible even through the phone. “What happened out there?”
Rome glanced at Tookie, who was watching him with the particular sharp attention of a kid trying to piece together an adult conversation from half of it, and stepped out of the booth, walking toward the door with the phone against his ear, keeping his voice low.
“It wasn’t just the people who took him,” Rome said once he was out of earshot, standing in the cold under the diner’s buzzing sign. “Somebody else showed up. Somebody bigger. Dre Fields.”
The silence on Nuck’s end went on long enough that Rome checked the screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.
“Problem,” Nuck said finally, voice gone flat with something that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite anything else Rome had a name for. “He’s out?”
“Month, maybe less.”
“Rome, listen to me.” Nuck’s voice had dropped into a register Rome had never heard from him before, urgent and low, the voice of a man choosing his words with real care.
“I did some work on cars for people connected to him, years back, before you started at the shop. That man ran half of East Baltimore out of a rec center basement for the better part of a decade and did it without the police touching him once, not once, in ten years, and you don’t run something like that clean without either being smarter than every cop in this city or having every cop in this city on payroll.
You understand what I’m telling you? If he’s part of this now, this ain’t street business no more. This is the whole machine.”
Rome thought about the notebook, the tight careful handwriting in the later pages, the councilman’s name, the judge, the badge numbers threaded through two decades of dates.
He thought about the man in the gray suit who’d found him inside thirty-six hours and called himself the polite option.
He thought about a nine-year-old boy zip-tied on a loading dock because two low-level enforcers had gotten a phone call from somebody, and that somebody had answered to nobody Rome had even met yet.
“Yeah,” Rome said quietly. “I’m starting to understand that.”
“You still want me to call that detective? Moss?”
Rome hesitated, the notebook’s contents running through his mind again, the names he’d copied onto a scrap of paper now folded inside his wallet.
He didn’t actually know if Avery Moss was clean.
He’d seen her on the news enough times to have an impression of her — sharp, unshowy, the kind of cop who talked to community groups instead of just posing for cameras with them — but an impression from a news clip wasn’t the same as knowing, and knowing was the one thing Rome couldn’t afford to get wrong twice in one week.
“Not yet,” Rome said. “Not till I know more. I need you to sit tight, Nuck, and I need you to not talk about any of this to anybody else, not your wife, not your kids, nobody. I already got Tookie’s fingerprints all over this because of me. I’m not adding your family to that list.”
“Rome—”
“I mean it.” Rome looked back through the diner window at his little brother, small and hollow-eyed in the fluorescent light, poking at cold pancakes he had no intention of eating. “I already lost Mama. I’m not losing anybody else behind a notebook I didn’t even want.”
He hung up before Nuck could argue further, and stood a moment longer under the buzzing sign, breathing cold air that tasted like exhaust and rain coming, running through the short, brutal list of what he actually knew for certain.
He knew a man in a gray suit wanted the notebook quietly, with money, no mess.
He knew somebody rougher had been willing to grab a child to get it, and that whoever that was answered to somebody Dre Fields had a score to settle with.
He knew Problem believed the notebook was his by right, believed it hard enough to walk onto a dock with three armed men behind him, and had let Tookie go anyway — a mercy Rome didn’t fully trust yet, because men who’d run whole neighborhoods out of rec center basements didn’t get there by being merciful without a reason.
And he knew that somewhere in this city, threaded through two decades of careful handwriting, were names of people with badges and robes and campaign signs who had every reason in the world to make sure a tow truck driver from Biddle Street never got the chance to tell anyone what he’d read.
Rome went back inside, slid into the booth across from his brother, and pulled the pancake plate toward himself, cutting a bite and holding the fork out.
“Eat something,” he said. “Even a little. We got a long night.”
“Where are we going?”
Rome thought about it — really thought, running through every place he could name that wasn’t connected to his apartment, his job, his family, anywhere the trail could be traced back to a nine-year-old boy who deserved none of this — and realized with a strange, hollow feeling that the honest answer was he didn’t know yet, that for the first time in his adult life he had no plan at all, only a notebook that made him the most wanted man in a city he’d lived in his whole life, and a promise to a little boy that he had absolutely no way of guaranteeing he could keep.
“Somewhere they won’t think to look,” Rome said finally. “We’ll figure out where when we get there.”
Tookie took the fork, finally, and ate a small bite of cold pancake, and outside the diner window the first thin rain of the night began to streak down the glass, blurring the streetlights into long yellow smears, and somewhere across the city — in a downtown office with a view of the harbor, in a rec center basement with the lights still on past midnight, in an unmarked car parked outside an apartment that had already been searched once and would be searched again before morning — people who had spent decades keeping their names out of writing were beginning, one by one, to understand that the ledger of everything they’d built their lives on hiding was now loose in the world, carried by a man none of them had ever heard of a week ago, and could no longer control.