by C. S. Poe
“Yeah,” Sam said with a smile so transparently happy that it came close to breaking Rufus’s heart. “I did.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
At breakfast, while Sam watched Rufus devour a platter of eggs, pancakes, bacon, and potatoes—and, to be fair, while Sam devoured his own platter of food—they decided to check out the address Juliana had given them in Queens. Rufus led them to a long-term spot in a parking garage where Jake had stashed his car. Cool and sporty weren’t exactly the words Sam would have used to describe it; the 1992 Impala was only slightly bigger than a Matchbox car, with an underbelly of rust that flaked when Rufus planted both hands on the trunk and rocked the vehicle on its suspension, as though concluding some sort of sales pitch.
“See?”
“Nobody likes a know-it-all.”
It wasn’t exactly easy to boost the car, but it wasn’t exactly difficult either. The not-difficult part included smashing in the back passenger window, reaching his arm through, and unlocking the door. The not-easy part consisted of squeezing his torso into the driver’s footwell, fumbling with panels and wires. Rufus skipped along the cement, seemingly with the sole intent of seeing how loud he could make his Chucks squeak while belting out show tunes. He seemed to know most of Chicago by heart.
But after some time lying in the mulch of old leaves and gum wrappers in the footwell, Sam got the right wires, and the Impala choked and wheezed to life, and a few minutes later, they were on the road, the Impala’s tiny engine purring like a kitten in a noose, until they were driving through Manhattan in the stop-and-go traffic that seemed endemic to a city this size.
“All the way east,” Rufus said. “You need to get on the FDR. We’ll take the tunnel into Queens.” He popped open the glove compartment like he knew what he was hunting for. “Three bucks,” he mumbled, grabbing the single bills from the stash of junk people often collected in their glove compartments. “Oh, and fifty cents.” He turned to Sam. “I need another five bucks. For the toll, not me,” he added with a grin.
Queens wasn’t exactly what Sam had expected. In his mind, it had existed as an extension of Manhattan, more glass and steel, everything crowded together until it shot up like saplings desperate for sunlight. A spillover, more or less. The same thing, just on the other side of the East River. But in reality, Queens wasn’t just more of Manhattan. Sam knew he was missing lots of little things, the nuances that someone more sophisticated and urban savvy like Rufus would immediately intuit. But he could still point out some of the differences.
Queens still felt like a city to him, but more the kind of city he was accustomed to: apartment buildings and dense commercial corridors, but also strip malls and parking lots, single-family residences, churches with lawns that needed mowing. Instead of the snake scale of brick and stone undulating through Manhattan, here clapboard, vinyl, and even old asbestos shingles sided framed buildings. Some of the signs were in multiple languages—English and Korean predominated, although up one street Sam spotted the gleaming white thumb of a minaret, and Arabic script on the front of the mosque burned where sun touched the brass.
The address from Juliana took them to a quiet residential street—well, quiet was relative now, Sam realized. On one side, two brick apartment buildings shouldered against each other. A woman in a hijab was jogging with a stroller, phone pressed to her ear. On the other side, single-family homes in weathered siding lined the block. Sam eased Jake’s car down the block, nodding at the house they were interested in: it had probably once been robin’s-egg blue, and it had bleached to a color that a yuppy home designer would probably call slate or river-stone or something like that. Two stories, a narrow driveway with an aluminum carport sticking out like a broken wing. In all of the windows, blackout curtains were drawn.
“It’d be nice if they could put bars on the windows and concertina wire around the place,” Sam said. “Just so I didn’t feel so fucking freaked out by it.”
“You’re thinking of Sing Sing,” Rufus replied, staring out the passenger window at the home. “For a place housing a dozen kids, at least, it seems kind of quiet. I mean, for a nine-to-fiver, it’s normal, but this home shouldn’t feel like all the others.” He turned to Sam. “Right?”
“Definitely. No van in the driveway either.” He turned at the end of the block; catty-corner at the intersection stood a bodega with a frayed banner announcing it Park’s No. 3 Flushing, and Sam marked it on the mental map he was making. He drove around the block—more houses, more apartments, an Assembly of God church slanting hard like it had had a little too much to drink. All of it went on the mental map. “Park on the same street as the house? Or should we ditch the car before we get there?”
“Ditch it. If someone is there, if they maybe knew Jake, they might know this piece of shit as well,” Rufus said, tapping the dashboard.
Sam found a spot on the cross street, jiggled the wires, and let the Impala shudder and die.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Sam said, staring at the broken window. “Maybe somebody’ll steal it before we get back.”
Rufus opened the passenger door and said while climbing out, “You won’t like the 7, so don’t jinx us.” He looked at Sam over the rooftop. “Although, lots of trains in Queens are above ground. If that helps.”
“The only thing that’s going to help is that this time, I wouldn’t mind having a certain redhead grind up on me on purpose and pretend it was all the train’s fault.”
Rufus’s cheeks got red and blotchy, causing his freckles to stand out in contrast. “It was the train’s fault.”
Unable to help the little scoff in his throat—or, for that matter, the little grin—Sam took off on the sidewalk. He noted the buildings around him, trying to catch a feel for this place the way Rufus had. One of the apartment buildings had a small playground, the old-fashioned kind with everything made out of steel that got screaming hot on a July day like this. A couple of kids, both under five, sat unattended on the gravel fill, both of them seemingly content, looking around seriously. But otherwise, the street was empty for the moment. As Rufus had said, it was a work day, and people had to work. It made sense; it just didn’t make Sam feel any better.
“Shit,” Sam said, his heartbeat rising, pressing his hands against his jeans. They had maybe twenty yards of sidewalk before they reached the house. Curtains drawn. No van. Nothing, in fact, that made it seem like anybody was actually in there. “Shit, do you really think it’s empty?”
Rufus removed two small lock-picking tools from his inner jacket pocket. “Only one way to find out.”
“Ok,” Sam said. “Go for the carport. Heckler’s the only one who’s seen me so far; nobody else knows me from Jesus. I’ll knock on the front door. If anybody answers, you get your ass out of there. Got a clipboard? I’m going to play the Jesus card.”
“I called you God last night—you don’t need a clipboard,” Rufus said, dead serious and without missing a beat. He kept moving forward and vanished into the carport.
Even if Sam had known how to respond, he didn’t have a chance. He kept going until he got to the walk that led to the front porch, and then he took it at a brisk pace, shoulders squared. What did people who went to church talk about? What did they want? What did they wear? Probably not white tees, inside out, bought extra-large to cover a holstered Beretta. Well, fuck, he’d seen the Assembly of God building, and he was going for it.
When he got to the door, he knocked. Then he counted down by threes from ninety-nine. Then he knocked again, harder, the door rattling in the frame. He started his count again, this time by fours from a hundred and twenty. As he raised his hand to knock a third time, though, the door swung open.
Rufus grinned up at him and waggled his eyebrows. “Whatcha sellin’, hunk?”
Something snarky flitted through Sam’s head, but then he smiled as he walked past him into the house. “That’s a good look on you, so you know.”
“What is?” Rufus asked, his voice just above a whisper. H
e gently shut the door and turned to Sam.
“When you’re really proud of yourself like that and trying to hide it, but you’re such a punk, you can’t keep it all inside.” Sam tried to keep a straight face, pretending to study the empty entry hall as he added, offhand, “It’s cute.”
Rufus bit his lower lip. “Ah, well, thanks. Anyway, I think the house is empty.”
“It looks empty. There’s a difference.” Sam unholstered the Beretta from under the tee and held it low, pointed at the ground. “Please don’t tell me you want to split up.”
“Against the odds, I’ve made it to thirty-three.”
Sam hemmed. “So, if I tell you, just hypothetically, that you and your freckled ass are staying behind me until I’m one-hundred percent satisfied that the house is clear, because I’m not very useful but I do have a small skillset that might apply in this situation, let me guess…. You’d tell me to… fuck off?”
“Hypothetically speaking? There is a distinct possibility of that, yes.”
“Did you at least bring a gun?”
Rufus held both hands up. “I don’t own a gun.”
“How about this, then? You at least try not to step right in my way when I’m shooting. Deal?”
Rufus saluted Sam. “Oui, mon capitaine.”
“If I die with a smartass,” Sam said as he moved toward the archway on the left, “do I have to spend eternity with a smartass?” Without looking back, he added, “Don’t answer that.”
They moved through the main floor room by room. Without furniture or rugs to muffle any of the sound, the wood floors made every movement louder, and no matter how hard Sam tried, he couldn’t keep their progress through the house completely silent. Ancient joists creaked and groaned. Hinges protested. In the kitchen, Sam’s foot caught a plastic bowl that was the exact same color as the tile underfoot, and it clattered away explosively, the noise making Sam’s breath hitch. Rufus smirked about it for two more rooms until the redhead started hissing and batting at the air and stumbled into a French door.
“Jesus Christ,” Sam growled. “We might as well have brought your whole fucking tap-dance studio with us.”
Rufus at least had the decency to look chagrined as he whispered, “It was a big spider.”
They found nothing on the main floor that corroborated Juliana’s story. As they completed the circuit, Sam caught Rufus’s eye and pointed a finger up, then down.
A visible shiver shook Rufus’s body. He worked the material of his beanie with one hand, like he wanted to yank it off and tug at his hair in a nervous method. He eventually pointed up.
The stairs, which didn’t look structurally sound, creaked under their weight. Carpet strips, probably intended to prevent slips and falls, had been glued on at some point, but many had been ripped away, leaving only trails of resin or, in a few cases, a few patches of carpet fiber. At least one of the risers was missing, and Sam pointed it out so Rufus wouldn’t accidentally put a foot through the empty space. Halfway up, Sam caught a whiff of something foul, and he pulled his tee up over his nose. It wasn’t rot, not exactly. But it made him think of death, and cold sweat broke out on his back, his shoulders, his forehead.
The first two rooms upstairs were just like the downstairs: completely empty. But the bathroom was another story. Someone had ripped out one side of the shower curtain rod, and it now hung across the tub at an angle. Another wounded wing, Sam thought, picturing the aluminum slant of the carport. Whatever had caused it had happened recently; plaster dust lay fresh on top of the toilet tank. As Sam got closer, he could see the rust-colored stains on the shower curtain, and more of the stains on the aging grout. Balancing himself, Sam leaned over the fallen curtain rod for a closer look and grunted. A tiny web of cracks worked through the ceramic. Something had hit the tile hard.
Stepping back, he glanced at Rufus and jerked a thumb at the destruction, eyebrows raised in a question.
Rufus first inspected the side of the bathroom door. He ran his knuckles lightly against wood around the locks, freshly splintered. He slipped around Sam next to study the tub stains and then the tiny window that’d been left open a sliver. It was like watching a man take apart the world around him, piece by piece, Sam thought. Rufus deconstructed a situation, studied each portion of the whole, then put it together again to see how it functioned as a singular moment. The problem with that: Sam was becoming more certain that Rufus’s understanding of these studies in brutality came from a place of practical experience.
And that was shattering.
“Someone was hiding in here,” Rufus said, voice still low. “Put up a fight, but couldn’t make it out the window in time.”
With a nod, Sam motioned out of the bathroom. They followed a hallway toward the back of the house; like the floors below, this one creaked, and so Sam kept his steps close to the wall, where he was least likely to put stress on the protesting boards and joists. He glanced back and saw that Rufus was already doing the same.
Two doors waited at the end of the hall. Sam opened one and found only darkness and the smell of mold. It was a linen closet, empty except for green-black speckles that marred the ancient cabbage-rose wallpaper that had been laid down on the shelves. Shutting the door, Sam moved to the next room.
At some point, this had probably been intended as the master bedroom, although the house had obviously been built long before anyone had started doing en suite bathrooms with Jacuzzi tubs and whatever the hell else suburban wives dreamed of. It was bigger than the other bedrooms, though, with a closet that, not quite walk-in, might be described as shuffle-in. Two mismatched windows, one large and one small, looked out the back, their glass thin and old.
What held Sam’s attention, though, were the unmistakable smells of piss and shit, of something else he could only describe as fear. It was a miasma, polluting the room. Pushing the door open as far as he could, he rucked up his shirt again to cover his nose and mouth, and then he paced the perimeter of the room. On the wall with the door, he found what he was looking for, beckoned to Rufus, and pointed.
The work had obviously been done quickly, without any care for the damage to the walls, and some effort had been made to remove the most incriminating pieces. All that remained was a series of thick bolts anchored in the studs. Plaster crumbs flecked the floorboards, and although someone must have swept, the effort had been sloppy—maybe, Sam thought, even hurried. Not even enough time to remove the bolts, which told the most important part of the story.
Rufus tilted his head to the side as he studied the wall. He put his wrist against the bolts, frowned, then moved into a crouch—which was where his body needed to be for everything to line up.
“These kids were chained,” he said, but the statement inflected upward into a question, almost like Rufus needed confirmation because it was too fucking gross to believe on his own.
Nodding, Sam held out a hand. “Some of them, at least. Stand up; it’s bad enough knowing without having to see it too.”
Rufus grabbed Sam’s hand and got to his feet. “Disgusting….”
“Have you seen anything that might tell us where they went? They left in a hurry, I think.” Rufus hadn’t let go of Sam’s hand, and Sam didn’t let go either. Walking through a nightmare like this was bad, really bad, and having Rufus helped. “Maybe because of Jake? He got too close? Christ, I don’t know.”
“That’s a distinct possibility.” Rufus moved to the doorway, tugging Sam with him. “I want to check the fridge.” He shot a look over his shoulder and clarified with “To see if anything is spoiled. It’ll give us a timetable, at least.”
“And then we have to check the basement.”
Rufus grunted. He went back down the hall, slow and careful steps all the way to the death-trap staircase, then to the first floor. He let go of Sam’s hand once they entered the kitchen, walking more confidently across the room to the fridge. Rufus leaned in to examine the sparse contents, grabbed a gallon jug of whole milk, popped the top, and to
ok a sniff.
“Not spoiled,” he said before putting it back. He shut the door and studied a dated toaster surrounded by crumbs on the countertop. His gaze roamed over dirty dishes in the sink, and then he began to open the lower cupboards before finding a garbage bin. Rufus crouched and dug through the trash—almost exclusively fast food wrappers. “There’s dozens of burger wrappers in here.” He looked at Sam. “No Happy Meals, but I don’t think I need that kind of evidence to conclude they were feeding a lot of people—kids—the cheapest shit they could buy.”
“When you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything,” Sam said. “And it’s one more mechanism to ensure good behavior.”
Rufus frowned and shoved the bin back under the cupboard. He rose to his feet and pointed at a closed door on the other side of the fridge. “Basement, I’m guessing.”
“If you want,” Sam said, “you can check the main floor and upstairs once more. Make sure we didn’t miss anything.”
“I’m not afraid of basements,” Rufus protested, squaring his shoulders. He stepped over the bowl from earlier and opened the door. He reached into the dark and felt around the wall before finding a light and switching it on. It was barely bright enough to illuminate the staircase. “Just spiders,” he concluded.
Sam hooked a finger in one of Rufus’s belt loops, hoisting him up an inch with an improvised wedgie, and said, “This is one of those times when I’m going to gently remind you that I prefer you stay behind me until you have your own gun.”
Rufus squirmed out of Sam’s hold and tugged at his underwear through his jeans. “That was not gentle.”
Raising an eyebrow, Sam slipped past him and started down the stairs, adding quietly over his shoulder, “Later, I’ll kiss it and make it better.”
The stairs were wood, open on both sides, with a single wobbly rail that probably was supposed to offer some kind of support. Sam took his hand off it after the second step; it was loose in the wall, and the tremors in his hand made the handrail rattle.
