by C. S. Poe
It was harder than Sam thought to slam the door on all of it.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to say, tapping furiously at his phone. “I should have done this at the beginning. Could you confirm your full name and date of birth for the record?”
“Oh sure,” she said quickly, automatically, like she’d been questioned so much in the last week about Jake this was simply more routine. “Natalie Miller. May 23, 1989.”
Rufus, still in the hallway, shook his head and made that crossing motion again. He held up five fingers.
Five more attempts to unlock.
Damn it.
“And your Social Security number?”
Natalie looked surprised. “You really need that?”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, frowning. “I thought someone explained all of this to you when they set up the appointment.”
“Appointment? I was never—it’s been a very hectic week. I must have… missed the call or something.” Her cheeks grew red, her brows knitted together, and she clasped a hand over her mouth. She looked ready to take the blame for everything. For Sam’s inconvenience. For the failed appointment. For Jake’s death.
“Yes, well. I’m very sorry for your loss. The Army has begun doing these sorts of follow-ups after death by suicide. It’s all procedure, you understand. Trying to prevent future tragedies. The records are very thorough. We’re doing our best to understand what happened. So”—he offered a soft smile—“your Social?”
Natalie sniffled loudly and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. With her chin practically tucked to her chest, she rattled off a series of numbers.
Rufus had crept closer to the main room in order to overhear their conversation. After Natalie gave her social, he typed, shook his head, typed once more, then met Sam’s eyes and held up three fingers.
Three more attempts.
“And when was your anniversary with Mr. Brower?”
Natalie gave a watery chuckle and wiped at her pale cheeks. “Well, it’s funny. I always said it was July third. Jake insisted it was July second. But the clock had rolled over. So it was after midnight.”
Rufus rolled his eyes like a clock—one of those old flip-number alarms—as he tried the next series of numbers. He immediately held up the phone to show Sam the unlocked homepage before he retreated to the bathroom.
Sam didn’t grin, not on the outside. But he had to admit, the look of triumph on the redhead’s face had been… cute. Like the caricature of suspicion earlier. So many emotions, all of them worn so close to that very fair skin. It could distract a guy.
“Thank you,” Sam said. “You mentioned work. Did Mr. Brower talk about work with you? Was there anything he mentioned that stood out to you, or maybe something small that came up repeatedly?”
“Jake never talked about work with me,” Natalie said, finally her words bathed in a tone of negativity. Resentment, perhaps. “It was always confidential.”
“Of course,” Sam said. “What about his partner? Or other coworkers? Friends? Family? Did he have a good support system? Any recent conflicts? Or long-term strain on those relationships?”
Natalie rolled her little shoulders a few times. “He had me. My parents. He hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from the Army, but he had more recent friendships with people here in the city.”
Sam ran his hand over the cushion, smoothing the tight weave of the upholstery. No old friendships. He never kept in touch with anyone from the Army. Of course not, Sam thought. Not when he had a new life, a new job, a new girlfriend. Just those blackout e-mails. Just those invitations to come, for a week or a month, and stay on the couch. But always with a return ticket already booked, always with the exit door propped open. The way it had always been. We fucked around, that way. Which was what Sam had wanted too. Always. Exclusively.
God, Sam thought. Did a guy ever get used to the taste of his own bullshit?
“Anything unusual in Mr. Brower’s behavior over the last few weeks?”
Natalie considered the question, started to speak, but looked over her shoulder as Rufus made his presence known coming back into the room. “Everything ok?” she asked.
Rufus nodded, smiled, and stood at the couch but didn’t sit. “Too much coffee.”
She blushed a little. “Coffee is bad for you, Mr. Hiscock.” Natalie looked at Sam again. “Maybe it’s not unusual, but he’d been working late recently. Like, a lot. Sometimes he wouldn’t answer his phone. He always answered, or at least he’d text me and say he’d call back.”
“How long had that been going on?”
“The last two weeks. Maybe three.”
Sam couldn’t help it; three weeks was just the right window of time, and she’d been twisting a knife in him, not even knowing it. Now he wanted to twist back. “Did this happen on your anniversary?”
Her cheeks got red again. But a dark red this time. An angry red. “He wasn’t having an affair, if that’s what you’re suggesting, Mr. Auden.”
“Interesting that you should raise that possibility,” Sam said. “Did Mr. Brower have any prior incidents of infidelity? Were you concerned about his relationships with other friends or coworkers? Did he give you any reason to believe—”
Rufus leaned over, didn’t touch Sam, but swiped the phone from his hands to disrupt the moment. “Mr. Auden, I think we’ve got the basics,” he said a bit too loud. “We really shouldn’t keep Ms. Miller all afternoon.” He looked at Natalie. “I’m very sorry for your loss, ma’am. Mr. Brower was a respected officer.”
Natalie was still staring at Sam, like he was a bug she’d squash with a rolled-up newspaper. Hell, maybe she’d squash Rufus too, simply due to his proximity. “Yes. He was,” she clipped out.
Rufus nudged Sam’s foot with the toe of his Chuck. “Come on.”
Whatever had gotten into Sam’s head, it was gone. He drew a deep breath, nodded, and stood. Following Rufus to the door, with Natalie trailing them, Sam said, “Thank you for your time, Ms. Miller. If we have any more questions, we’ll be in touch.” Then they were at the door, moving out into the July heat, the dense, green smell of the trees mixing with the baking asphalt. After another deep breath, Sam managed to echo Rufus: “We’re sorry for your loss.”
Natalie didn’t respond; she watched them from the doorway as they moved down the steps. Halfway down the block, a spot in the middle of Sam’s back was still itching, but he resisted the urge to look. When they turned the corner, though, he risked a glance and saw her still framed by sandstone, her gaze locked on them.
“Well?” Sam asked as they left behind the brownstones and passed a bodega.
“You’ve got no fucking chill,” Rufus answered, finally offering Sam his phone back.
“Don’t worry about my fucking chill. What did you find?”
Rufus looked about to answer, but his expression changed and he pulled a vibrating cell from his jeans pocket. He swiped to accept and held it to his ear. “The fuck you calling me for? … Tell it to my mother. No, Jake never…. … Did I stutter? No, I don’t have anything. Sure, I’ll work on my attitude. Smooches.” Rufus hit End while a tinny voice was still talking and shoved the phone in his pocket. He put his sunglasses on and looked back at Sam. “Where were we?”
“Jake never what?”
Rufus raised both eyebrows. “Oh. That was Lampo. He was asking about the pickup that never happened.”
“Huh,” Sam said. “Well, if you don’t need to take any more personal calls, maybe you can tell me what you found inside.”
Rufus moved under the awning of the bodega and casually leaned against an outdoor stand. “I found a purple Michael Kors bag,” he began with a wicked smile. “And inside was an iPhone worth more than my monthly rent. Also, four different shades of lipstick, a fistful of tampons, some receipts, a hairbrush, one of those little battery-powered fans—”
Sam moved in on the redhead, using his size and build to pin Rufus against a stand of fresh produce: tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, mutant
jalapenos the size of carrots. “I know you found her purse. I know you found her phone. I don’t care how many tampons you found and stuffed up your chute. Where. Is. Jake’s. Phone.”
“If you ratcheted up that testosterone any higher, you’d burst right outta that shirt,” Rufus remarked, his smile unyielding. “Phone’s pinging from Tompkins Square Park. Or somewhere right nearby.”
“His phone is in a park?”
“Near the park,” Rufus said again. “There’s a handful of bars on the corners. Maybe Jake lost it at one last week? Or it was stolen?”
Sam swore. “Aren’t these things supposed to be GPS or something? Can’t they be a little more fucking specific?”
“Are you grouchy because you owe me a new pack of spearmint?”
There it was again: the way Rufus grinned, the way his eyes lit up, the way he was just so very fucking alive, and all of it right up at the top, where Sam could reach out and touch it.
“Let’s go,” Sam said. “And no subways.”
“It’s a bit of a trek. Hope you don’t mind getting sweaty.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The walk from Seventh Avenue to Avenue A took about twenty-eight minutes for the average pedestrian. Rufus could shave three to five minutes off that commute time when taking into account his long legs, determined pace, and tendency to jaywalk. But it was too hot to speed walk across the island, Rufus thought. Three to five minutes wouldn’t make a difference this time.
Jake would still be dead at the finish line.
Besides, Sam couldn’t keep up. Oh sure, he had the stamina to walk all over hell and back, it seemed, but he hadn’t perfected how to keep pace in an urban jungle. Rufus was liquid. Fluid in his movements, seamless in his ability to adjust to the flow of traffic.
Sam was… a tank.
And they didn’t need a body count in their wake.
So Rufus walked at a speed that would deliver them to the East Side in twenty-eight minutes.
This also provided Rufus with three to five additional minutes in which to deconstruct his current predicament, interpret the sudden deterioration of Sam’s dialogue with Natalie, and how he himself, a man who had a deeper interpersonal relationship with the cactus he’d rescued from the trash at a bodega in his neighborhood than he did with any actual humans, was going to console Sam.
Rufus stopped at the corner of Twelfth Street and waited as traffic shot down Fifth Avenue. A breeze cooled the sweat on the back of his neck, rustled the branches of trees in the church courtyard to their right, and pride flags, still hung up from June’s annual celebrations, flapped and waved from a nearby balcony. Rufus watched the rainbows with a sudden sense of dissociation from the rest of the world pressing down on him.
He’d been seven years old when he met Alvin. Alvin was in college. Studying dance. He wasn’t from New York, but he’d moved into the same shitty tenement Rufus lived in while taking courses. Alvin had been nice. Once, he’d given Rufus his carton of leftover lo mein for dinner, because he’d asked why the kid was sitting in the hallway at midnight and Rufus had told him he wasn’t allowed inside when his mother had friends over.
Alvin had had a rainbow flag. He’d flown it from his window that one summer they’d been neighbors. Rufus didn’t know what it meant, of course. It was just colorful. Pretty. And Alvin had always been so nice to the little punk brat no one else seemed to notice. Rufus told his mother he wanted a flag too. To put in his window like Alvin had done.
His mother had slapped him in the mouth until he bled.
Alvin had moved away after that one year.
The city made a sharp reinsertion into Rufus, and the memory was quickly packed away. Rufus led the way across the street. They passed an NYU building, parking garage, overhead scaffolding that briefly blocked out the intense rays of the late-afternoon sun, and then crossed another avenue heavy with rush hour traffic. Rufus slowed his pace momentarily when they came up on the Strand Book Store. Hands snug in his jean jacket pockets so as not to be tempted to abscond with something, Rufus lingered long enough to scan the spines of some of the one-dollar specials lining the sidewalk.
Analysis of Economics in Sub Saharan Africa.
DIY: Artisan Cheese Making.
Photographers Guide to Dry Plate Process.
The Agatha Christie Companion.
Rufus glanced over his shoulder. Sam was studying him, not the books. He moved away from the cheap paperbacks and started walking again, with Sam still in tow. Twelve minutes until they reached the edge of Tompkins Square, Rufus calculated. He took a deep breath of hot, humid air and cracked his neck to either side.
Focus.
First and foremost: Rufus was still involved with Sam’s investigation. And that was a problem. He’d sworn he’d go as far as Natalie’s apartment. He’d owed it to Jake to put Sam on the correct path. But then he’d been coaxed into going inside, showing his face to Natalie, snooping around (which he’d done brilliantly, but that wasn’t the point), and now here Rufus was, still tagging along.
Tagging along? Hell. He was quite literally leading the charge.
Which brought Rufus to his second concern: Sam’s unhinged line of questioning. Well, that had been obvious enough. Rufus might not have had a romantic relationship before, but his own emotions weren’t foreign. They hadn’t atrophied. Sam was hurting, more than he’d admitted at the studio or the diner. But Sam also didn’t seem the kind of guy who handled grief with tears. He was probably more like the anger, rage, punch-a-hole-through-a-wall sort of guy, if the tampons shoved up Rufus’s backside remark was any indication. But Rufus didn’t mind letting that one slide. Being face-to-face with Natalie had made the loss of Jake more real to Sam, and Rufus had had front row seats to that show.
The third point, maybe the genesis of all the current shit being flung: How to console Sam. Sam didn’t like being touched—his words—so Rufus sure wasn’t going to offer to hug it out. A few times already Rufus had noticed the peculiar shake Sam had when the city pressed too close. Rufus had been grateful when Sam hadn’t pointed out his obvious downward trajectory at the diner—that he needed food and couldn’t pay for it himself—so, likewise, Rufus wasn’t going to make Sam even more uncomfortable by pointing out those shakes that he was clearly very fucking aware of. That brief moment in Natalie’s living room, though, with Sam naked and exposed and coping with the nastier side of the human condition, it’d made Rufus feel not so alone. And if he were to part now, say fuck this and good luck, where would they both be?
Alone.
If he stayed until Tompkins Square and helped Sam find Jake’s phone, that’d certainly be enough. Whatever pickup job Rufus had been contacted to handle, the evidence would be on Jake’s missing cell. Sam would take it to the police and they’d piece together the clues like on television. And that way Rufus would have done right by Jake. He’d have done right by Sam too. Hell, Sam might even set aside his salty, grouchy attitude for thirty seconds and say something nice that wasn’t simultaneously laced with sexual overtones.
That’s not entirely fair, Rufus thought. He thinks you’re cute.
Granted, Sam had also said Rufus was suspicious and paranoid. Still. It’d been nice hearing that. Not many people thought a gangly redhead with a face smattered with just slightly too many freckles was cute.
Rufus turned down Avenue A, and a looming canopy of old trees came into view. Tompkins Square Park stood out in stark contrast against the surrounding brick and steel and stone, a reminder that for all the dirt and grime, New York City was still alive. Still breathing and still beating.
Rufus pulled his hands from the jacket pockets and pointed at a hole-in-the-wall joint to their left. The outside of the building was adorned in colorfully painted murals. “This place is Mama’s Cafe. And across the street is Queenie’s. I think there’s two more bars at the end of the block too. Avenue B is more residential—churches, schools, apartment buildings, shit like that. So I’m guessing the phone is on this side of
the park.”
“You’re guessing?”
Rufus tilted his head up briefly to stare at Sam through his sunglasses. “Do I look like a mind reader?” He motioned for Sam to follow as he walked toward Queenie’s.
“Mind reader?” Sam grumbled. “Wish you could read my fucking mind right now.”
Rufus spun suddenly on his heel, causing Sam to stop short of barreling right into him. “By the way—Hiscock?”
“I wasn’t thinking about your cock. Nice try on the mind reading, though.”
“Uh-huh. Is your last name really Auden?”
“It’s Auden.” It looked for a moment like Sam might say something, maybe ask for Rufus’s real last name. Then someone passing by jostled him, and Sam startled, took a deep breath, and looked around. A wild look. Almost a feral look. “Can we—” He made a vague gesture. “Can you just fucking get us off the street, please?”
Rufus pretended not to notice the expression that’d swept across Sam’s face. “Grouch.” He reached Queenie’s, yanked the door open, and stepped inside. Rufus held it long enough for Sam to grab, then drifted into the crowd of grisly patrons.
Queenie’s was old as sin. It smelled like cigarettes, despite the smoke-free legislation in the city that required bars to jump through loopholes in order to offer their patrons a Marlboro with their martini. It smelled like cheap booze too, which probably meant they didn’t serve martinis. It also smelled like someone had been jacking off in the corner for the last decade and had been leaving their load on the floor. All this, and folks were still crowded inside.
Rufus wove around a few haphazardly placed tables and mingling groups of men at least a decade older than himself before reaching the bar. He didn’t touch the countertop. Nope. It looked sticky. But he patiently waited for the bald guy serving beer in glasses with hard-water stains to notice him.
