Never Go Alone

by Denison Hatch

  “You want to know why I was afraid of heights?

  “Sure.”

  “I usually just tell people that my dad’s dead. He’s not. They all live up in Albany . . . Him and my mum. They’re normal. Enough. He drank way too much and made my life miserable, but that wasn’t the real problem. I was just never what my dad wanted me to be. I didn’t like regular stuff. I was like this punk kid who listened to AFI and Rise Against. So he doesn’t get me and I don’t like him. Nothing makes a drunk madder than someone walking around their house who’s judging them. So he sends me to boarding school . . .”

  “Rough,” Mona said.

  “Guess he thought it would make me a man. But I didn’t fit in there, either,” Jake reminisced, the memories—the truth—flooding through his brain like some long-forgotten horror movie. “Kids would beat me up. But my roommate and I were tight. For the first few weeks. Then I realized he was just like them all. He started stealing from me. Pickin’ on me. One night he didn’t say anything mean when I went to bed. That’s how I knew something was up. The second I fell asleep, he and his buddies pulled me out of the room, start punching me in the face. The stuffed my head in a pillowcase. They dragged me down this hallway, and . . . they held me out the window. First years were at the top of the building. So we’re six stories up. I’m hanging. They’re holding my feet, but one of them? His hand slips. They lose the foot . . . Now we’re all screaming. And I’m starin’ down at a brick patio . . . And nothing’s going through my brain. Not my dad. Not my mom. I don’t miss them. I just hate them. And I hate everything. All I feel is nothing, and for a second the only thing that crosses my mind is that they should just drop me.”

  “I’m so sorry . . .” Mona put her hand to Jake’s neck.

  “But then as I’m swinging through the air, I start to think about what I’m going to do if I don’t die. And I know exactly what it is. I’m going to do everything in my power to get bigger than those guys, get badder, get cooler than them, so one day I can fight back against the assholes of the world.”

  “Come here,” Mona asked.

  Jake didn’t move. She pulled him towards her.

  “You’re good now. You’re with me,” she said.

  She started to kiss him. This time it was deep, romantic.

  “And you know something? Now you are that guy. You are cooler. You are the baddest guy in the room.”

  “I know,” Jake said. “But it didn’t make me happier.”

  “That’s ’cause you were missing something else.”

  “What?”

  “Me.”

  Their hands were all over each other now, right there on the top of the bridge. They were two small dark specs, somewhere between lust and love, invisible to the rest of the world but very aware of each other. Their interior world was changing dramatically, but to the outside they were completely indistinguishable from the top of the large brick towers that held up the Brooklyn Bridge. The world moved on without them. The cars and trucks whipped across the span, enabling the commerce of a city. But Jake and Mona didn’t care. They weren’t part of the hustle and bustle. They were stuck in slow motion—only focused on one another. All that mattered to them in this moment were the tiniest slivers of what was in front of them. The flick of her eye, the crease of her lips. The curl of his mouth, the strength of his shoulders. Her lips on his neck. His hands on the small of her back. It wasn’t about what they saw. It was about what they felt.

  TWENTY

  THE SUN BURNED HIS FACE. Jake cracked one eye open, then the next. Morning light sliced through the open window shades of the room and intersected his eyes. He sat up and took in a view of water tanks and air conditioners lurking over rooftops. He shook his head. Yesterday had been a long blur, but now it was coming back full steam. He expected to find someone else in the bed. But there was no one there.

  And it wasn’t his bed.

  Jake found his clothes from the prior evening in a pile on the floor. He padded down the tiny hallway, following the sound of clacking plates and the smell of bacon. He entered the kitchen to alt-domestic chaos. Mona was manning the stove, frying eggs. Her older sister, Adriana, tended to two little girls struggling to put their backpacks on. One of the little ones, a five-year-old named Mari, stared up at Jake in shock.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “He’s my friend, Mari. Now why don’t you go with your mommy?” Mona said.

  Adriana scooped up Mari and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

  Mona turned to Jake. “This is my sister, Adriana. And little Vicki and Mari. My nieces . . .”

  Jake shook Mari’s hand. “I’m Jake,” he said. “What’s your favorite subject in school?”

  Mari was suddenly shy, not wanting to answer.

  “Mine was music. What about you?”

  “Lunch!” Mari blurted out. Vicki and Mari started squealing in laughter.

  “Nice to meet you, Jake,” their mom, Adriana, said. “You must be a good one.”

  Adriana was finally able to corral the two girls out of the apartment. The door closed.

  “That’s my morning,” Mona exhaled. “And my evenings.”

  Jake took a seat next to the stove. “What did your sister mean?”

  “I’m not so easy to trust people.”

  “Me either.”

  “Want some food?”

  “I’m starving.”

  Mona grinned. She headed back to tending the stove, finishing off the eggs with a dash of cheese. She tossed a few pieces of bacon on the plate and placed it in front of Jake.

  “So domestic,” he said.

  “I do my best. Don’t tell me you don’t like it.”

  “That wouldn’t be true,” Jake replied. “I enjoy it.” He began to scarf down the food. “So what are you doing today?”

  “There’s a Friends meeting down by Whale Square. Then our protest before the demolition. Then work.”

  “Protest. Like, with signs?”

  “That’s how you do it,” she replied.

  “Think that’s going to work?”

  “It’s not about the signs. It’s the optics. It’s all planned out. We’ll have the press show up at the right time, and for that hour we’ll give ’em our all.”

  “Impressive,” Jake said. “Engineered protest.”

  “It’s very intentional. I live here,” Mona put her hands on her hips. “You don’t know what we’ve been going through . . .”

  Jake craned his neck to the left. He could make out tops of Whale Square a few blocks down the street.

  “He’s gonna start there, and then you know where he’s coming?”

  “Metropolis?” Jake asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Where?”

  “Right up this street. He already owns five of the buildings, all except for ours.”

  “Really?” Jake asked.

  “And once he has this one? Whole street’s getting the wrecking ball, you can guarantee it. That is . . . before it gets filled up again with a bunch of clones that work in finance and couldn’t find culture if it spray-painted them in the face.”

  All of a sudden, a loud, blaring noise ricocheted through the room—like a headache accelerating to migraine level. Jake glanced at Mona, but she didn’t seem panicked. She pointed to a carbon monoxide detector in the apartment.

  “So that’s been happening too,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We should go outside. Get your stuff,” she said.

  ▪

  As they stood outside of Mona’s building, the entire building seemed to empty onto the street. About thirty residents of Mona’s tower and another twenty-five from next door stood in the chilly morning air, clutching all manner of blankets and jackets to stay warm.

  “It’ll take about an hour for the city to show up,” Mona said. “And by then, there won’t be a gas leak anymore.”

  “This has happened before?”

  “A few times a week,” she said. />
  “Weird.”

  “It’s not weird. It’s obvious. Metropolis. He wants to make our life difficult, so we start breaking leases so he can buy up the property. Trust me. He’s that type of guy.”

  “I know,” Jake said.

  Mona chuckled. “You have no idea.”

  “I . . . Sure. You’re right,” Jake replied.

  They wandered down the street, towards Whale Square. As they passed by wall-wrapped advertisements for new developments, Jake noticed multiple parking lots were filled with all manner of massive construction cranes and vehicles.

  “He’s getting ready to go.”

  “Yep,” Mona replied glumly. She pointed across the street, towards an under-construction café, one of the lone storefronts in the neighborhood.

  “He’s building that too. Organic, artisanal breakfast. Who wants their breakfast to look like art? How about just being good? I looked up the menu online. Scrambled eggs are seventeen dollars.”

  “That’s the future,” Jake said.

  “Then we’re the past.”

  They stopped when they hit the water, holding onto a temporary chain-link fence that separated them from the bay. Everything in this part of the city was old in its bones and bracing itself for the awaiting upheaval. The district had seen the tsunami coming, and the wave wasn’t going to arrive lightly like a slow tide. It was going to strike suddenly. And then it would drown everything around it—including Mona.

  “I just wish I could keep it with me,” she said.

  “You’ll always have the city,” Jake replied.

  “How so?”

  “The riches? They’re done for and don’t even know it. While they spend their thousand dollars a day for the right to live here, it’s still yours.”

  “There’s a lot less space . . .”

  “You’re right. But that’s why I love what you do.” Jake restated, “What we do. We get to have this place all to ourselves, ’cause we’re willing to look at it differently. That’s what I’ve learned. Look at something from another angle, and maybe you’ll see a whole different world.”

  “Pretty good,” Mona grinned.

  “What?”

  “You sound just like Rory now.”

  ▪

  Jake and Mona stepped past the retired creatures of Whale Square. They eventually turned into a tiny speck in the distance. That is—to the man watching them. Crouching inside the fourth story of a brick warehouse and gazing through broken window shards, Emanuel Vipa tracked them both.

  ▪

  Stian Ziros sat on the toilet in the opulent bathroom of Arthur’s penthouse at the SoHo Modern. He stood and reached the mirror. He slowly rubbed his face with a plush washcloth before staring at his own eyes. He didn’t see himself. He only processed his reflection as an image framed by negative space. Ziros viewed the world not as a set of histories, or relationships, but instead as an aesthetic. It was easier that way, and thus better. And he was proud of what he saw. I mean, just look at the guy.

  Ziros exited the bathroom and padded into the master.

  “You’re up,” a voice whistled over. This was Zazsy. Zazsy was a pure terror of beauty, the type of femme fatale who always figures it out—and ends up convalescing in a twenty-million-dollar mansion later in life. But she was completely naked now as he strode back into the room.

  “Work,” Ziros replied.

  “Yeah. Whatever,” Zazsy said. “You got some time?”

  “No.”

  She turned and stared at Stian, smiling with cunning. She turned away from him and slowly sat down on her knees on the carpet in front of him. She leaned forward, her hands riding along the floor. His mouth was agape at the sight in front of him. Zazsy began laughing.

  “Still no?” she said.

  And—the phone rang. It was Emanuel.

  “What do you have?” Ziros asked.

  “I got ’em. He’s tight with Rory and his crew. But definitely the girl. Her name’s Mona Rosas . . .” Emanuel said over the phone.

  “So where are they?”

  “Uh, they rolled. But I know where she lives now.”

  Ziros stared at Zazsy ahead of him. He wanted what he saw, and he wasn’t going to let anything stop him. The world was at his beck and call. Actually, the world was emptying his balls over and over again—and Arthur Metropolis was paying.

  “Good,” Ziros said. “Let’s meet up.”

  “When?”

  “The second I’m done with this thing.”

  ▪

  Jake skirted his Ducati up through Park Slope on the way to I-27, then along the highway. A multitude of thoughts was cascading through his mind, not the least of which was the fast-developing situation with Mona. But Rory was in there as well. Now he had the PIN code for Rory’s garage. He was on the inside, so close to cracking this whole thing wide open that he could taste it on his tongue. It was in the middle of this thought that he thought his eyes were flashing. Red? Maybe he was tired. He blinked and refocused. But there it was again, red and blue lights lurking around the periphery of his motorcycle helmet. Jake turned his head towards the side mirror that extended from the handlebars—to catch an unmarked police car on his tail. He glanced down towards his feet as if to fire the accelerator.

  “Don’t even consider it, Rivett,” Tony Villalon’s voice blasted over a loudspeaker.

  Jake’s shoulders slumped. He veered the motorcycle onto the side of the highway as if he’d been pulled over for a traffic stop.

  Tony stepped out of the car with his hand on his hip, near his gun. That was unnecessary—but just like Tony. He reached for the back door and swung it open.

  “Your presence has been requested,” Tony said.

  ▪

  Rivett wasn’t particularly surprised to see Susan Herlihy sitting in the back, her thin legs politely folded one over the other. It wasn’t just the fact that her outward appearance was such a polar opposite to her interior self; it was that she made no attempt to hide it. Susan didn’t even try to become one of the guys—like many of the female cops on the force did for their careers. She had just pranced above them from day one, getting her way with the fierce power of policy.

  “Did I ever tell you that the summer before I met my first husband, I dated a cowboy in Galveston, Texas?” Susan asked.

  “No. No, Susan, you didn’t . . .”

  “He was this pompous bastard. Attractive. Good bone structure. But pompous. He pushed too hard to try to be a cowboy when really he was the son of a fat oilman from River Oaks. I knew something was wrong with him. I just couldn’t put my finger on it for a while—until the time he took me out for an ATV ride at his ranch. We got stuck two miles into the woods when the sun set. He started crying right then and there and wanted to sleep next to the ATV for the night. Just us, and the mosquitos, and a whole jungle full of predators. I ran back to the house in an hour and seventeen minutes and never spoke to him again. It was my gut that made that decision and my gut was right,” she said.

  Jake wasn’t sure whether to be bemused or frightened.

  “He later died. Got eaten by his own crocodile—that he’d imported,” Susan said as she beamed a brilliant smile full of dark-red-lipstick and perfect teeth at Jake. “How was your night?”

  “Investigation’s good.”

  “Don’t even bother,” she waved her hand in the air, as if she couldn’t be less interested in Jake’s response. Jake realized that she was holding a tablet in her hand. She pressed play on a video and turned the iPad so that Jake could observe.

  Jake began to watch infrared surveillance footage shot from the point of view of a helicopter across the bay from the Statue of Liberty. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what he was going to see next. Two small figures—their heat signatures glowing in the footage like video game characters—lowered themselves from the torch of the statue and disappeared into a small door aside Lady Liberty’s shoulder.

  There was nothing to say.

  �
�Investigation’s good. Right?” Susan said. “I put up with you when I knew your head was in the game, Rivett.” She manipulated the tablet’s feeds, finding one that had been digitally enhanced and zoomed in. One of the two figures turned toward the camera and became unmistakable.

  He stared at the slightly blurry but still discernable version of himself.

  “Now you’re just gallivanting. In my book, that’s worse than anything you’ve ever done to me. That means you and I are breaking up.”

  “What?”

  “The hell do you think?” Susan stared at Jake in order to impart her dead seriousness. But only for about four seconds—as long as she was willing to waste time gazing at him. There were more interesting and pertinent things going on in the world. She pulled her phone out and started to browse emails as she continued to speak under her breath in Jake’s direction.

  “While you were out with your girlfriend, they hit a yacht across the water. Know anything about that?”

  “A yacht?” Jake thought for a moment.

  “Do I need to repeat myself?”

  “No . . . Wait . . . They picked us up on a boat. I didn’t think all the guys would be there. Had a bag full of stuff. Some laptop that they stole.”

  “A laptop?” Tony said. “Now you’re confusing me. First of all, take one guess who owned the boat.”

  “Arthur Metropolis,” Jake said.

  “Ding.”

  “He reported jewelry. Again,” Tony said.

  “You know that Arthur Metropolis is a complete and utter liar, right?”

  “Well, I’m sorry that our victim has failed your morality tests,” Susan said.

  “It’s not that. I—”

  “Doesn’t matter what you think. Upstairs is pissed. The city bloggers just got hooked into the Metropolis connection to the robberies—which means that about ten hours later everyone’s going to have it. And you? You’re not working out. I’m not going to shed one fucking tear thinking about it.” Susan shook her pointer finger around Jake’s general vicinity.

  “What are you going to do without me?”