Chapter 20 #2
He is sunk into a torn couch, one arm hanging over the side, his feet twisted awkwardly on the floor. I recognize him instantly. The face from the police mugshot has gone slack and gray. His eyes are half open, but they don't seem to register me.
Nearby, two men sit on the floor with their backs to the wall. A woman is curled in an armchair with her chin on her chest. Nobody looks up for long. Everyone here is chasing something or coming down from it.
I crouch in front of him, careful not to touch the foil or dirty needle near his shoe.
"Hey," I say softly.
His eyes shift again.
"I'm the woman from Hunts Point," I say. "The house on the water. You were there five nights ago."
His eyes drift toward me, then away.
"I'm not the police. I just need to know who sent you."
For a while there is nothing but his breath, shallow and too slow. Then, from a long way down, he says, "Wasn't s'posed to go like that."
I go very still.
"We got told," he says. “Husband's gone. Woman's alone. Easy money. In and out. Scare her. Steal a few things. Half up front, rest after." His head rolls.
For a second I want it to be a mistake. Maybe they were meant to go to the Ericksons' place next door and came to mine instead.
But that isn't what he just said. The job was a woman on her own, and the only woman on her own was me. The Ericksons' place was empty by then.
“You were told by who?" I ask. I lean in. "Who sent you?"
His mouth works. “A middleman set it up.” The words come apart. “Never met him. We got an address, a night. Half up front. Then we went.” His eyes almost find mine. “Scare her. Take some valuables. That was the job. Nobody was s'posed to die. Not him.”
And then he's gone under again. I could shake him, but I don't. I’ve interviewed enough people under the influence to know when I’m not getting anything more.
I bring up the photo of Henry before I've decided to, the one I took without quite meaning to, him on my terrace the day the cameras went in. He’s half-turned, not ready for the lens.
"Have you ever seen this man?" I ask.
His eyes open.
They move to the screen.
Something changes in his face.
I want it to be recognition so badly that for one second I almost make it recognition. I lean toward him, holding the phone between us, trying to read whatever has surfaced through the drugs and the pain.
Is it fear or confusion?
Or only the animal panic of waking to a stranger's face and a light held too close to his eyes.
I can't tell. I'm right over him and I still can't tell.
He makes a sound that isn't a word.
His head falls back against the couch, and his eyes roll up white. For one second I think he's looking at the ceiling. Then his breathing changes.
It turns shallow and wet.
It’s wrong.
I grab his shoulder and shake him.
"Hey, buddy.”
Nothing.
"Hey."
His mouth opens, but no sound comes out.
"Shit."
Has he overdosed?
I look toward the front room, toward the people slumped in the brown light, but nobody is moving. Nobody is looking. Nobody here is going to help him.
I’m not a nurse.
I am a liar with a photograph on my phone, and the fear that goes through me is entirely for him.
"Shit," I whisper again.
I should leave. I should call someone. I should do almost anything except what I do next.
I put two fingers into the pocket of his jacket.
The fabric is greasy and damp. I try not to think about what I'm touching as I search him, quick and clumsy. My heart is beating so hard it makes my hands stupid. The first pocket gives me lint and an old receipt. The second has loose change, a lighter, and something sticky I don't look at.
Then my fingers close around a phone.
I pull it free.
It's cheap. Black. Cracked at one corner.
I press the power button. Nothing happens. I hold it down longer. Still nothing. It's dead. Or locked. Or both.
I turn it over in my hand, as if the back of it might tell me anything. It doesn’t.
I take it anyway.
I put it in my pocket like it's worth something. Like a dead, locked phone taken from a dying man is evidence. Like it can answer the question he no longer can.
Who sent him?
Then I stand and walk out of the room before I can change my mind.
Outside, the daylight hits me hard.
I make it three streets before I have to stop. I lean against the side of a building, one hand on the brick, the other in my pocket.
The smell of the apartment is still in my nose. Garbage. Piss. Something sour I can't name. I gag hard enough to double over, but nothing comes up.
For a minute I only breathe.
Then I think about the phone in my pocket. His phone is dead. Mine will lead straight back to me.
I press on. I pass one convenience store with a camera over the door and keep walking. The next is smaller, older, with no camera that I can see.
I go in.
“Can I use your phone?” I ask the man behind the counter. “It’s an emergency.”
He studies me for a second, then slides it across.
I move toward the rear of the store, out of earshot, and call 911.
When someone answers, I give the cross streets as clearly as I can, then the building and apartment number. “Third floor. Three-oh-seven. There’s a man in a bad way at the back,” I say. “I think he’s overdosing. He needs help now.”
They ask for my name.
I hang up.
I tell myself I did the useful thing. I called. I sent help. But the shame comes anyway, because I know why I called from three streets away and gave no name.
By the time I make myself move again, the words he gave me have started to change in my head. A middleman. Scare her. Never met him. They aren't proof, and I know it.
But I can't stop setting his words beside the things I already know.
Someone sent two men to my house knowing exactly when David would be gone and I would be there alone.
Then this morning Henry came through a gate I know I locked, along the side of the house, beneath a camera he installed himself, and my phone never made a sound.
I don't want to put his name to it. Certainty has started to feel dangerous, and I have been wrong before. But the thought is there now, and I can't get rid of it.
Henry knew the house.
By the time a car takes me back across the lake, the dead phone is heavy in my pocket and Julia's warning won't leave me alone.
I call her before I can talk myself out of it. She answers on the first ring.
“Hey, that thing you said," I say. "About Henry."
"Which thing?"
"The stupid thing." I make myself finish it. "You might be right. Not about all of it. I don't know. But something about him isn't adding up."
Julia goes quiet.
"What happened?"
"First tell me something. You haven't gone into his house, have you?"
The silence on the other end is just long enough.
"Julia."
"No."
"You haven't gone near it?”
"No. Why?”
I think of the locked gate, the silent app, the man on the couch saying a middleman through a mouth that barely worked.
"I can't explain it yet," I say. "Not cleanly. But I need you to promise me something."
"Mal."
"Don't go into his house."
The quiet changes.
"I mean it, Julia. I know you're thinking about it."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it."
She doesn't answer fast enough.
"Promise me," I say.
A breath.
"Okay," she says. "I promise."
And I let myself believe her, because I need to. Because believing her lets me put the phone down and pretend I've kept one person out of this.