7 Nicole
Nicole
Bathroom break.
Nicole doesn’t have to use the bathroom, but she likes to come in here every few hours and stretch, take a moment to check her phone, focus on a few deep breaths, and just close her eyes.
Saying she needs a break wouldn’t look good though, like she couldn’t handle the job, and going to the roof or outside would imply she’s a smoker, and she knows she’s too young to be a smoker without looking like she’s trying too hard.
She could vape, but every time she’s tried, she’s felt silly, like a kid blowing on a bubble pipe, smelling like cheap candy. Not a good look either.
Next, the shoulders. She turns on her phone as she pulls her head to one side.
Seven missed calls.
Brandon, not in the group chat, weirdly texting just her:
brANDON
SOS
SOS
SOS
NICOLE PLEASE
She frowns and straightens out her neck, then locks the bathroom door and calls him.
“Oh, Nicole, thank god.”
“Brandon, what’s going on?”
“A guy just got shot.”
She shakes her head, assuming she heard him wrong or he’s confused. His voice is high, fast, like that time they did Adderall in college. Everyone agreed Brandon wasn’t allowed to again.
“What?” she asks. “What guy?”
There’s the sound of barking through the phone.
“Hold on!” she hears Ollie say in the background.
“Brandon, Ollie is with you?”
“The dogs ran away!” Brandon says. “We’ve been chasing them. Ollie said we had to. I think we should run, too. Somewhere else. Or…I don’t know, Nicole. I’ve been calling and calling. He’s dead!”
“Brandon, who? Who is dead?” She says it loudly enough that the tile walls echo, the words coming back at her. She walks away from the door, tries to remember to keep her voice low.
“I don’t know!” Brandon says. “I was waiting around the corner so Jon didn’t see me.
He was talking to some guy. Ollie was watching and then the dogs started barking and Ollie screamed and I came out of the alley and Jon was running away and there was a dead guy in the street!
His skull was, like…open, Nicole. It wasn’t just blood, it was… ”
“Okay,” she says softly. “Brandon. Take a breath.” She takes one, too. “Jon was meeting with someone, and that someone got shot?”
“Yes!” He sounds relieved.
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“I called you !” he shouts.
“ Why? ” She works hard to keep her voice low, but she wants to shout, she’s so annoyed.
“You’re a lawyer! I don’t want to get in trouble. I still have Jon’s phone, and—”
“What?” She leans against the wall, slides down to the floor. Of course he does.
“I don’t want him to get in trouble!”
“Samba!” Ollie shouts in the background. Are they at a dance studio? Or are they babysitting?
“Who? Ollie?” Nicole asks, confused by all the noise.
“Sambaaaaaaaaa!” Ollie wails.
“Jon!” Brandon practically shrieks it.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Brandon.” Her head falls forward, and she brings her hand up to rub her neck. Time to be a lawyer. Pretend he’s the client. Protect him. “Okay. Take out the SIM card. You can do that, right?”
“I think so.”
“Do that. Crush it.” It’s not evidence tampering because the phone has nothing to do with the shooting—shouldn’t even be present. At least, that’s what she’d tell a judge.
“Done.” He sounds so proud. “Should I throw the phone away?”
“No,” she says quickly. Fingerprints. Maybe if he tossed it in the water.
But it still has those texts, evidence. At least if the police are looking for Jon now, they won’t find Brandon instead.
“Keep the phone now. I…” She sighs. Calling the cops would actually be easiest. Just tell Brandon and Ollie to relax, give a statement, say they happened to be walking along, they didn’t recognize anyone, didn’t know Jon, just saw some random guy get shot. But Brandon’s a bad liar.
Brandon’s crying now. He’s trying to hold it back, she knows, but she’s heard him cry too many times before. The soft sort of hiccup of a long sob. The way he sniffs twice in a row.
“Where are you?” she asks. “I’ll come meet you.”
“On the street. We have all the dogs back now.” He pauses, and she hears Ollie’s voice but can’t make out what he’s saying. “We’re going to a dog park so they can run around more, get it out of their system, he says.”
“Address.”
She writes it down as he says it, then hangs up.
Her eyes focus on the tile floor. It’s possible this is all just regular old crime.
A bad moment. Or something even sillier—a fight, Brandon and Ollie distracted by the dogs, confused.
Ollie seemed pretty stoned at brunch, said his edible was powerful.
Brandon could still be drunk. He had a lot more mimosas than anyone else; he always did.
Though the description of the skull felt…
She shakes her head. She has to go see everything for herself.
Figure out how much trouble they’re in. Then fix it.
She could have already made it worse, telling them to take out the SIM card, crush it.
It was just a gut reaction, and she was pretty sure of it at the time, but maybe if she’d thought ahead more…
But it’s not like lawyers are always about being the most legal.
There’s Ellen Kang, who represents some shady people—she must give them all kinds of counsel.
Nicole knows she’s not the first lawyer to offer legally nebulous advice.
It was over the phone. There’s no evidence she told him to do it.
She looks at herself in the mirror. Her face is skewed, worried, angry. She readjusts it into a professional smile.
Not many people would be worth this. But Brandon, Ollie, Ian—they’ve seen her at her worst, helped her through a lot.
The breakup with Eva, that terrible time she tried acid, and the bad night.
The smile in the mirror turns genuine for a moment, soft, as she remembers Brandon punching the guy who was trying to drag her out of the club.
He socked him pretty well across the jaw, then hopped away, shaking his fist, flinching in pain.
Had stunned the guy enough that Ollie could help her up and take her back to the party, hiding in the crowd, where they lost him.
Ian took her to the ER, insisted she’d been roofied, and yelled at every nurse until they admitted her, did the blood tests, gave her drugs.
All of them stayed by her bed. Refused to move.
She takes a breath and walks back to her desk, gathers her things up.
Don looks up from his desk across from hers. “Actually taking a weekend off, Nikki? At least part of it?”
“My mom was hit by a car,” she says simply. She hadn’t even prepared the lie. It just fell out of her. Easy. She always thinks of herself as a bad liar, but maybe she’s more like Ellen Kang than she thought.
His face falls. “Oh god, Nikki, I’m so sorry. Do you need to fly down there? I can take you to the airport.” He’s getting out of his chair already.
“She lives in Washington Heights,” Nicole says, smiling as politely as she can.
“Oh, right, I—” He sits back down. They both know who he was thinking of: Ashley, one of the other Black junior associates. From Atlanta.
“Thank you,” she says, trying to keep her voice kind. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Take the weekend, Nikki,” he says.
“Maybe.” She throws her jacket on and heads for the elevator.
She maps the route in Incognito Mode and boards the 5 train headed to Brooklyn.
The train is crowded with tourists, families, lots of small children.
She tries to go over what Brandon said. Someone Jon—the guy he hooked up with, whose phone he still has—was talking to was shot.
While they were talking? Could it have been Jon?
Brandon said he had been around the corner.
Ollie had been watching. Everything is coming to her secondhand.
She needs to talk to Ollie. Look in his eyes to see how stoned he is.
See the condition of the body. Then she can call the cops, maybe anonymously.
She’ll buy a burner phone if she needs to.
It’s a nice dog park, sandy with a little fort in the middle for the dogs to hide inside and play on.
There are two picnic tables to one side.
A bunch of people are at one, packed around it like sardines and glaring at the other table, where Ollie and Brandon sit alone, Brandon with his face in his hands, weeping loudly.
Ollie is watching the dogs with a vacant expression.
She wonders if she just got dragged out of work because one friend is having a bad trip from an edible laced with something and convinced her other friend that a hallucination happened.
“Nicole!” Ollie says, waving.
She sighs to herself, then goes and sits next to him. “Let’s avoid saying names aloud right now.”
“Um…” Ollie says.
“Okay,” Brandon says, looking up, then hugging her tightly. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Sit up,” she says, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Speak quietly.” She focuses on Ollie. “What happened?”
“We were going to see Jon—” Brandon starts.
“I need to hear it from him,” Nicole says, nodding at Ollie. “He saw it happen, you didn’t, right?”
“Okay,” Ollie says, whispering with shaky breath.
“Yeah, we were going to the address from the phone, and there were two guys talking. Brandon said the hot one was Jon. Brandon was behind a wall, told me to pet the dogs until…” He pauses, swallows.
“You think the puppies are traumatized? Will their owners notice? I know pet psychiatrists are a thing, and I always thought they were a joke, but…” He stares off vacantly at the dogs, who are bounding around the fort, tongues long, tails wagging, playing some version of hide-and-seek.
“What happened next?” Nicole asks.
He keeps his eyes on the dogs as he speaks.
“I was watching them. They were talking, quietly. But with their hands. I guess maybe they looked a little angry before…” He swallows.
“And then Jon turned to go, and the other guy, he was going to go, too, the other way, but he changed his mind and walked back toward Jon, and then there was this soft crackle and…” He swallows. “His head just broke.”
“Broke?”
“Part of it just flew off. But I couldn’t…
I didn’t understand it because the dogs started freaking out.
And Jon started running, and the dogs pulled in all directions and two of them got loose, so I had to run after them.
” He turns back to her. His eyes are bloodshot, watery.
“Is Pete limping, you think? I feel like he’s lifting his back leg a little. ”
“Focus.” Nicole snaps her fingers in front of Ollie’s face. “You chased the dogs. You didn’t see anything else? Hear anything?”
“There was a sort of hum,” Brandon says. “That’s when the dogs went nuts.”
“Ollie?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”
“Okay,” she says. “Did Jon see you?”
“Yeah,” Ollie says. “But he doesn’t know me. He smiled at the dogs.”
She turns to Brandon. “Did he see you?”
He shakes his head.
“And you have the phone?”
He nods. “I crushed the SIM card on the sidewalk like you told me.” He takes it out of his pocket, offering it to her, but she leans back quickly, hands far away.
“You keep it for now. I think I need to see where this happened. Then we can figure out how to tell the cops.”
“But Jon—”
“I don’t give a fuck about Jon,” she says, loudly enough some folks at the other picnic table glance over.
She takes a breath. Brandon starts to cry again.
“Brandon, you don’t know this guy. I don’t care how good the dick was, if everything you say is true, he’s mixed up in something shady and dangerous.
Best to get as far away from it as possible. Okay?”
He nods, looking at the ground. “I’m sorry. I know. I know it’s crazy, I just feel bad.” He takes a long breath that cracks halfway through, an aftershock from crying.
She puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “I know. But none of this is your fault, okay?” She doesn’t mention how he should never have taken the phone, how fucking stupid that was. “Let’s go.”
She stands, Ollie gathers up the dogs, and they lead her back to the alley. She keeps an eye out for cops, police cars, but the ones she spots are just patrolling, nothing extreme. And in a nice neighborhood like this, they’d send out a squadron for a mugging.
“How strong are those edibles?” she asks Ollie.
“Pretty strong,” he says. “You want one?”
“Laced with anything?”
He’s quiet for a moment, watching the dogs. “Maybe. The guy I bought them from said they were special. I didn’t think that meant laced though. He’s usually up-front about what’s in stuff, but it’s definitely a special kind of high.”
“Not worn off yet?”
“Almost.”
She nods. Unreliable witness. Tampering with evidence.
Theft. Failure to notify police of a crime.
Ollie’s drugs probably don’t come from a reputable dispensary if they’re laced.
She ticks off the crimes and problems in her mind.
These are her friends. She’ll protect them.
She’ll do what she needs to. It’s not the kind of lawyering she wanted to do.
But that’s changed before; it can change again.
She told herself she wanted to go to movie premieres and wear nice dresses.
Well, Ellen Kang wears nice dresses. At the holiday party, she wore something bloodred.
She looked amazing in it. Maybe Nicole could be more like Ellen.
Maybe that’s the kind of lawyer she really is, even if it’s not what she wanted to do.
“Here,” Ollie says, leading them down a side street that’s mostly the backs of stores and a few apartment buildings. There’s a skybridge overhead, casting a thick line of shadow, like someone is censoring the alley. There’s no police tape, no crowd of bystanders. There’s nothing.
“Where?” Nicole asks, not seeing anything on the street. “Where’s the body?”
“Huh,” Ollie says.
Then one of his dogs—the Afghan—lifts a fringed leg and starts peeing on the wall. Perfect.