Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  She reached into her bag and felt the cool metal of the Beretta she carried. She saw the skinny Arab guy at the counter look at the man on the street and then look at her uneasily. He quickly got down on the floor and she heard a cell phone dialing, then some rapid-fire Arabic or some other language she didn’t understand at all.

  By now she’d wrapped her fingers around the grip of her gun, her breathing came faster, her lungs felt like they couldn’t get enough air. He started to move. She drew her gun from the bag and heard the clerk issue a little scream. He must have been watching her on a surveillance camera somewhere. She took cover, her body pressed against the metal end cap of the shelves, and watched the door from the mirror mounted near the ceiling at the far corner of the small shop. She saw his large form darken the doorway. She waited for the jingle of the bell announcing that he was coming in but there was silence. And more silence. Then a little whimper, a sniffle. The clerk behind the counter was crying. Then she heard sirens off in the distance. She saw the man in the door turn his head and then run off.

  She moved out after him. On the street, she watched him run up Ninety-Fifth toward Broadway and then disappear around the corner. She turned and ran in the opposite direction toward her car.

  Eleven

  You’re looking a little frayed, Lydia,” said Dax over the speaker at the end of his drive. “And you’re late. And your phone is off.”

  She gave the finger to the camera near the speaker box.

  “That’s a vulgar gesture, quite unladylike,” Dax said.

  “Dax, will you just open the gate?” she heard Jeffrey say in the background.

  The tall wrought-iron gate hanging between two huge stone ballasts opened slowly and Lydia drove up the circular drive. She was glad to hear the heavy metal clang behind her, not looking over her shoulder for the first time since she left the city. She was still shaky with the residual effects of adrenaline; she felt exhausted.

  Jeffrey walked out the front door and approached, opened the door of her car for her.

  “What’s up?” he said, as she sank into his arms.

  “I’ve had a really bad night,” she said.

  Was it the same guy?” Dax wanted to know, when they were all gathered in his kitchen after she told them what had happened. She ate a peanut butter and raspberry jelly sandwich Dax provided, an offer that represented the pinnacle of his culinary skills. But Lydia was starving and it tasted fantastic.

  “I’m not sure,” she said between gooey bites. “It could have been.”

  “Sounds like it,” said Jeff.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But it could have been any bald-headed guy wearing a black leather coat. I mean this is New York after all.”

  “But how many of them would be following you around?”

  She shrugged. “No shortage of freaks in this city.”

  “But it wasn’t random,” said Jeffrey, looking at her seriously. She could see that his shoulders were tense. “That wasn’t your vibe.”

  “No, that wasn’t my vibe,” she said, shaking her head. “He shook his finger at me, like a warning.” She shuddered a little, remembering his smile, the empty, flat look in his eyes.

  “Anybody who knows anything about you knows that a warning has the same effect as a dare,” said Dax. The only indication that he was worried or concerned at all was the slight thickening of his accent. He drew out dare to about three syllables: de-a-ear. Lydia had noticed that excitement, anger, and alcohol often caused him to become nearly unintelligible.

  “Okay, so what were they warning you about?” asked Jeffrey.

  “Maybe someone doesn’t want you looking into Lily’s disappearance,” offered Dax.

  “Or Mickey’s suicide,” said Lydia.

  “Or The New Day,” said Jeffrey, eating the crust of the sandwich Lydia had left on her plate.

  “Well, you know my philosophy,” said Lydia. “The more people don’t want you looking into something, the more reason there generally is to look.”

  “That philosophy has not worked well for us in the past,” said Jeffrey.

  “True,” said Lydia, nodding and meeting his eyes. “Let’s go home then.”

  They were all quiet for a second. Dax was the first to laugh.

  “So how do we get in there?” asked Lydia after a minute.

  “Well, there’s good news and bad news,” said Dax. “The bad news is that there is no way into The New Day once it has been locked down. Not without setting off alarms. If I had six weeks for recon to gain passwords and a trained team, maybe. But since all I had was six hours and the two of you, we’ll need to get in while the place is still open.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “There’s a door in the kitchen that supposedly opens only from the inside and is not attached to any alarm system before the place locks down at night. The plan is for one of you to get to that door and let the other one in. You use the same door to exit. It’s the only door in the building that doesn’t have a security shutter coming down over it at night. You should be able to push it open from the inside, no problem. Just remember, if you’re in there after the place locks down an alarm will sound. I’ll be on the street waiting in the Rover. But you’ll have to run. Fast.”

  Lydia sighed, rubbed her head that was starting to ache. “So what? We’re just going to walk in the front door?”

  “There’s a meeting tonight,” said Jeffrey, looking at his watch. “In forty-five minutes.”

  “Okay,” said Lydia, standing. “I’ll go in and meet you at the door, Jeffrey.”

  He shook his head. “No way. I go in and meet you at the door.”

  “I want to see Trevor Rhames,” she said, pulling her coat back on.

  He looked at her. “You’ve been followed. They know who you are.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said weakly, regretting having said anything. “It could have been a coincidence. Some random freak.”

  “Give me a break,” he said. She could tell he was getting mad because she saw the small vein on his temple pop out.

  “Look. If they know who I am, then they know who you are and we both have an equal chance of being made. I’ll wear a hat and some glasses. I’ll be inconspicuous.”

  “We’ll talk about it in the car,” said Dax, moving toward the door.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” said Jeffrey, following him.

  “You’re right about that,” said Lydia, closing the door behind them.

  Matt thought, not for the first time, that Missing Persons might not be the right place for him. He pulled into the driveway of his house and looked over at his parents’ bedroom window. It was dark, but he knew his mother had heard his car pull up, seen the lights in the drive. He took the extra-large pizza, six-pack of Coronas and Lily Samuels’ file off the passenger seat and went into his house.

  When he’d stopped back by the precinct, he’d seen Rosa there at her cube, poring over the Mendez file. She had a desperate, angry look to her that he recognized from the mirror. He knew what she was thinking. How can a flesh and blood person just disappear? It’s not right.

  He had walked over toward her and leaned on a desk nearby.

  “Any developments?” he’d asked pointlessly.

  She shook her head and looked up at him. Evelyn Rosa was a café au lait-skinned woman, with fifteen years on her and a bad attitude. She would have been beautiful but she was hard as granite, tough from growing up on the streets of the Bronx, tougher still from her years on the street as a cop. For all that steel in her, every once in a while, she’d come in with a bruise on her arm or the shadow of a shiner. Rumor was her live-in boyfriend of over ten years sometimes had too much to drink and they went at it. Apparently she gave as good as she got-most of the time.

  “I hear you gave Alonzo a hard time today,” she said.

  “Yeah, sorry. He got to me,” said Matt. “He really got to me.”

  “He has that effect on people. I really hate that motherfuck
er.”

  “You think he killed her?”

  She nodded. “I think he killed her and doesn’t give a shit about it. But I’ve got no evidence. Nothing. And he’s all lawyered up now.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “He went home. He figures we’re looking for a corpse. No rush.”

  She shrugged and couldn’t meet his eyes. He felt for her.

  In his living room, he saw Rosa’s face again. Haunted, she’d looked haunted. He imagined that they were all getting that look about them, all of them that were carrying around the ultimate unanswered question. Where have they gone?

  How are you supposed to live with this job? he wondered, as he flipped open the lid of the pizza box and scrolled through the channel guide on his digital cable with his other hand. He had the sound down and flashed through the images quickly: a guy pulling a huge marlin from crystal green waters, a woman crying by a fireplace looking beautiful and sad; a couple kissing.

  Homicide, okay. The deed was done; your job was to find the perpetrator and bring justice. But Missing Persons, you had to find people who have dropped away from their lives. There was a terrible urgency at first and then when those intense thirty-six hours passed, slowly people moved away from it. When people started to get the sense that a person has fallen through one of the cracks in the universe, that when news does come, it will be bad, they start to distance themselves. Even cops did this, the good ones anyway, the effective ones. The sane ones. It probably helped if you had kids or something else important going on in your life. Those guys were able to keep the ones that never got found off the list of things that they thought about in bed at night. He hadn’t been able to do that. Not with Lily. He thought about her all the time, even when he was thinking about Rosario Mendez.

  He flipped off the television and walked to the kitchen where he popped the lid off a Corona. There were two plates of dinner in the refrigerator for him and a note on the Formica table in the kitchen. “Eat!” it read. “Love, Mom!” He felt guilty for bringing home the pizza. She’d see the box when she came in to clean and her feelings would be hurt. He’d have to remember to take it out to the garbage can on the side of the house before he left in the morning.

  He walked through his house and upstairs without turning on the lights. His row house was spotlessly clean, not a speck of dust on the used furniture collected from his brother, his parents, his cousins. The only things he’d bought himself were the big-screen television in the living room that sat in front of a blue velour couch that had once belonged to one of his aunts, and the new desktop computer that sat on the old wood desk in the spare room upstairs, the desk on which, as a kid, he’d done his math homework. Up in his bedroom, he knew he’d find his laundry in neat piles on his bed, his shirts pressed and hanging in the closet.

  Upstairs, he set the Corona on the desk, booted up the computer, and opened Lily’s file again. Maybe it was the fiftieth or the one-hundredth time he’d been through it. But he had new information now, information about The New Day, thanks to Lydia Strong. Maybe there was something he’d missed before. Maybe.

  It took Jesamyn exactly one evening with Dylan to remember why they weren’t married anymore.

  The three of them had shared a pepperoni pizza and then piled into Jesamyn’s Explorer, heading up to her apartment. They were all light, laughing, joking around like a normal, happy family. Once strapped into the backseat, Benjamin was asleep in under ten, emitting a funny little snore that had Dylan and Jesamyn giggling quietly.

  “You wore him out,” she said with a smile, pulling onto the West Side Highway. There was a lot of traffic for the time of night and it was slow going as the river of traffic tried to squeeze past the construction she would swear had been going on for about fifteen years.

  “He wore me out,” Dylan said with a light laugh. “The kid just has this boundless energy, a million questions.” He was quiet for a second, smiling to himself. Then, “I don’t know how you do it, Jez. On your own, full time. I know it’s hard.”

  There was a heavy silence between them, populated by their regrets and all that had passed between them.

  “I’m sorry it turned out like this,” he said finally.

  She glanced over at him and quickly put her eyes back on the road. He was staring down at his fingernails, looking sad. A little too sad, something inside her whispered. He’s playing you. She didn’t say anything, just stared ahead of her. In their marriage together, she had always rushed to fill the silences. There was always too much talking, not enough listening. She sensed that he hadn’t said what he really wanted to say so she just kept quiet.

  “Do you ever think about us? About if we could make it right again?” he asked her softly, putting a hand on her knee. She cursed her mutinous heart for fluttering.

  “Don’t, Dylan,” she said. “Not now. Not with him in the car.”

  Dylan’s cell phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket. She saw him glance at the caller ID and stuff it back in his pocket without answering.

  “I’m sorry,” he said with a sigh. “You’re right. I just wanted you to know that I’ve been thinking about it.”

  She couldn’t even look at him. Her heart was thumping and tears threatened but she held them back. She didn’t know what to think of him or how he was acting. He was kind, mature, thoughtful-all the things she’d wanted from him when they were together, all the things that had seemed so impossible for him. It just felt too good to be true. On the other hand, maybe the scare he’d had was a wake-up call for him.

  She thought about this and they rode in silence the rest of the way back to the Upper West Side. Miraculously, she found a spot on the street and didn’t have to spring for a night in the garage. While she grabbed her bags and Ben’s from the trunk, Dylan was able to extract Ben from the backseat without waking him and carried him up the street.

  “Did you talk to your PBA rep today?” she said quietly.

  “Yeah, I did,” said Dylan, shifting Ben up a little. “He thinks it’s going to be okay. The shooting was good. I know it and everyone who was there that night knows it. I just have to go in and answer questions, so do the other guys. It’s still going to be a week without my weapon, at least.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “It’s going to be fine,” she said. They both knew there weren’t any guarantees. If there was unrest in the community over the incident, or if there was some unspoken agenda to come down on white cops that shot black kids, or if he just got an unsympathetic investigator, things could go badly for him.

  “It’s good to be with you, Jez. Thanks for being here for me.”

  In the elevator, the cell phone rang again but he made no move for it. Benjamin stirred at the noise but didn’t quite wake up.

  “Don’t you need to get that?” she asked.

  “Nah. It’s probably just Barnes again. The guys are getting together tonight but I told him I needed to spend some time with my family.”

  I would have been crazy to divorce this guy, thought Jesamyn. But who the hell is he?

  Ben woke up long enough to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas. She knelt down on the floor beside him as she tucked him into bed and kissed him on the head.

  “Mom?” he said as she turned off his big light and flipped on the aquarium night-light. “Do you like Dad again?”

  She quashed the rise of guilt and smiled. “I’ve always liked your dad. He gave me you. And I love you more than anything.”

  He looked into her eyes and gave her that smile, a carbon copy of his father’s. Irresistible.

  “I love you, too,” he said, turning over.

  She closed the door mostly, leaving it slightly ajar the way Ben liked it, and moved quietly down the hall. She heard the tone in his voice before she saw him leaning in the doorjamb to the kitchen, talking into his cell phone like he was making out with it. That tone, that sweet, coaxing tone she knew so well.

  “Not tonight, baby,” he said, his voice low. “I’m wo
rking. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. Hey, and honey, don’t call anymore tonight. You’ll get me in trouble with my boss.”

  She felt her stomach bottom out and she remembered… a dozen other overheard phone calls, the nights he said he’d made a collar but there was no overtime in his paycheck, once an earring in her couch. Each time it had hit like a blow to the solar plexus. Tonight was no different. She put a hand against the wall. She couldn’t believe he could still do it to her, run her through a gamut of emotions in just a few hours. Was she really this weak, this stupid?

  In a way she was relieved, because it meant she was right about him all along. She had come to believe that he was pathologically unfaithful, that it wasn’t part of his makeup to be present for her and Ben. He wanted to play; he wanted to party. He didn’t really want to be a husband and a father, not full time anyway. This was why she’d decided to end their marriage. She hadn’t been wrong. Small comfort, but she’d take it.

  She picked up his coat off the couch and stood behind him, waiting for him to feel her there. After another sickening few seconds of him cooing on the phone to whomever it was he was cooing to, he flipped the phone shut and turned around.

  “Uh-” he said. He looked stricken. “That was Barnes. We were just fooling around.”

  “Oh, spare me, Dylan,” she said, handing him his coat. “Just go.”

  “Jez, please,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “I really need you guys right now.”

  “Key,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Give me that goddamn key before I take it from you. And you know I can.”

  He looked at her and his eyes went from pleading to angry.

  “This is why we’re not married anymore, Jesamyn,” he said, reaching into his pocket and fishing out the keys. “No understanding, no compromise.”

  She let go of a little laugh. “There are some points on which people are not expected to compromise,” she said.