Her only other addition to the outdoor area had been a few strings of white Christmas lights around the perimeter, giving off just enough light to illuminate the space with a warm glow. Wally left the lights off for now, though, content to sit in the cool, quiet darkness of the early evening, watching the last traces of sunlight fade away behind the Manhattan skyline.
She enjoyed the peace for all of two minutes before there was a knock at her door.
“NYPD. Open up.”
Damn it, Wally thought, spilling her cocoa a little as she jumped up from her chair, pissed off. Again with this shit.
Wally tended to inspire protective instincts in older men—except for her actual father, ironically—and one of those men was Detective Atley Greer of the 20th Precinct in Manhattan, the neighborhood where she had grown up. Greer was friends with the local precinct captain in Greenpoint, and he’d arranged for the foot patrols to keep an eye on Wally. At least once a week they came up with excuses to sniff around her apartment, and tonight she was in no mood.
Wally opened the door to find two very young cops whom she hadn’t seen before. She knew the minimum age for a probie cop in the NYPD was twenty-one, but these two looked barely out of high school. One was tallish and thin and maybe of Indian descent and the other was white and a little stockier, with curly blond hair that was kind of cute but would definitely not help him intimidate perps on the street. Wally thought that if she ever saw these two in civilian clothes, she would figure them for chess-club dweebs.
“I don’t even want to hear it,” Wally began before either officer could speak. “Leave me alone. Now and forever.”
The cops were obviously thrown a little by her attitude, but eventually the curly cop spoke. His nametag read GARTH.
“We, uh . . . we got a call about a domestic disturbance—”
“No you didn’t, Garth,” Wally snapped. “I know your captain told you to check up on me.”
“Uh, that’s absolutely not true, ma’am,” said the taller cop, a terrible liar. His tag read SHAHI. “When we receive a call on a domestic, we’re obligated to—”
“You’re calling me ma’am?” Wally objected. “Really? I’m at least four years younger than you, and you guys barely look old enough to shave.”
The situation was interrupted, thankfully, by January and Bea—Wally’s neighbors from downstairs—who arrived at her door, looming behind the cops. The appearance of Wally’s “protection detail” had become so routine that the girls were completely unconcerned.
“Uh oh,” January said, checking out the cops. “Are you headed for the slammer, Wally, or can you come out with us tonight?”
“These Eagle Scouts were just leaving,” Wally said.
The rookie cops gave each other looks and turned on their heels, both eager to move on.
“Don’t be strangers,” January called after them in a flirty tone.
January was a very tall, curvy redhead, nineteen years old with the cockiness of a strong, competitive athlete. She played volleyball for a local junior college in the hopes of landing a scholarship for a Division 1 school and worked at the coffeehouse on the corner, with Bea, to pay her way. Bea was a first-generation Cuban-American, smaller and not as aggressively outgoing as January. She still got plenty of attention because of her fine, sensuous features—her long dark hair and huge brown eyes were guy magnets.
These college girls were different kinds of friends for Wally—they seemed completely carefree, blessed with an optimism about the world that she had never felt. They were also rule breakers, in a way that Wally appreciated—she’d first met them when they had scaled the fire escape up to her apartment, unannounced, and offered her free cable TV. Apparently, Bea was good with mechanical things, and she’d pirated the feed for the entire building.
For Wally, hanging out with January and Bea was always like a little vacation from her life, and in the few months she’d known them Wally had come to appreciate their influence.
“We’re going dancing later,” said Bea. “At Cielo, in the city. That DJ Louise is spinning Latin electronica tonight.”
“Thanks, but I’m not really in the mood.”
“We reject your antisocial funk, Stoneman,” January said. “Dance or die.”
“No, seriously—”
“We’ll be back for you at eleven,” said Bea.
Once the girls were gone, Wally retreated into her apartment and picked up her cell phone. She dialed Detective Atley Greer.
“Make them stop, Greer,” she told him as soon as she heard him pick up the line.
“Who are we talking about?”
“Your junior narc squad. It’s too much.”
“Speaking hypothetically,” he answered, “if I had arranged for a low-profile police presence at your location, what would be the harm?”
“I’m trying to fit in around here. That’s gonna be tough with your uniformed probies busting in on me every other day.”
“Wallis—”
“I’m doing fine, Greer. Really.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“It’s okay to acknowledge that the world can be a difficult and frightening place,” Greer said. “Don’t forget, kid . . . I was there, too.”
“I remember.”
Shelter Island. Wally’s father, Alexei Klesko, had shot Greer in the shoulder, and the cop had endured months of rehab just to get back on the job. The role he’d played in her survival that day had cultivated in him a sort of fatherly preoccupation with her well-being. Wally owed him something for what he had done, but the interference in her daily life was unacceptable.
“You go through something like that,” Greer said, “you come away with scars. No one is immune. It’s too much to carry by yourself. Let me help.”
“I’m dealing,” Wally insisted.
“If you say so. But when friends offer help, think about accepting it.”
“I will, Greer, if you start thinking about boundaries.”
Greer was pathologically annoying, but Wally also knew that he wasn’t necessarily wrong. She was glad when January and Bea showed up at her door at eleven—right on schedule—both dressed in black skinny jeans and loose, layered tank tops, their beautiful faces made up just enough to give them an edgy club vibe. Wally was dressed down a little—in a fitted black T-shirt with jeans and flats—but the girls were excited just to find her ready and waiting.
“Nice,” said January, giving Wally the once-over.
They took the subway to the Lower East Side, reaching the club before midnight. They joined up with a group of January and Bea’s other friends from the city—six party girls, all fired up and ready for the night. Wally did her best to relax and avoid thinking about how different she felt from the carefree, uncomplicated party girls.
The massive bouncer had bulging arms and an intimidating scowl on his face, but he raised the rope for the girls without hesitation, not even bothering to check their fake IDs. Being young and pretty in Manhattan definitely had its advantages.
The inside of Cielo felt a little claustrophobic, totally packed with dancing twentysomethings and teenagers with fake IDs. A DJ named Louise something was spinning some really loud Latin electronica, the synth percussion mixed so heavily that Wally could feel each electronic drumbeat like a little punch in the chest, right at her heart. She had an immediate and primal reaction to the music, and she felt it pulling her—irresistibly—onto the dance floor.
January, Bea, and most of their friends peeled off toward the ladies’ room to score drugs—they were mostly into coke these days. Wally was about to object, but she figured there was no point—they had already heard her argument against dope and shrugged it off. Wally remembered Lewis’s words—you can’t save another person, not really—and instead she went on ahead and joined the
swirling, throbbing ocean of young people already dancing.
The massed bodies were packed in close, their motions in sync with the synthesized Latin drumbeats. The air was thick with the heat and moisture of the sweating bodies, and Wally closed her eyes as she began to move with them. Almost no one was dancing in couples—they all moved in a collective mob—and Wally released herself into it, eager for the moment when she wouldn’t feel like a separate person at all but just one element of the whole, throbbing tribe.
As she heated up, other bodies touched hers, their skin hot and wet. January and Bea suddenly appeared in front of her, euphoric smiles on their faces. Their drugs were already kicking in, and Wally realized that she must have lost track of time, which felt good. Her friends wrapped her up in sloppy, doped-up hugs and hung for a moment around her neck.
“We love you, Wally,” Bea said.
Wally knew it was the drugs talking—X-induced affection—but she didn’t mind. It was a nice thing to hear, so what was the harm? The three of them danced facing each other for a long time, the continuous music track never letting up but veering off on different paths, momentary explorations into parallel universes of tweaked, frenetic sound. After a while, January moved in close to Wally and held up a small pill between her fingers, pale green with a little question mark on it, offering to place it on Wally’s tongue. But Wally shook her off with a smile and kept dancing.
Wally and the girls gave their bodies over to the music, venturing wherever the DJ led them. Before long Wally was working her body as hard as she did at Orson Dojo, her shirt soaked with sweat and clinging to her. She felt warm on the inside too, and thought she could stay there dancing all night. She closed her eyes and imagined it, the dance floor teeming for hours with those like herself who had surrendered to the mesmerizing sound, January and Bea close by through all of it.
Before long, though, something interrupted the feeling—something barely perceptible. Wally felt a shiver travel down her back, as if a door had opened somewhere and let a draft of cool, uninvited fresh air into the room. She opened her eyes and caught a glimpse of a single, unidentifiable face—was it a man or a woman?—staring at her through the crowd of dancers. The mass of bodies shifted, blocking her view, and when a gap opened up again the person was gone.
Or was never there at all. Wally stopped dancing, but her heart kept beating fast. Her sweat-soaked T-shirt felt tight and sticky, clinging to her and restricting her range of motion like a straightjacket. The bodies that pressed up against her didn’t feel good anymore, and she wiped her arms with the bottom of her shirt, trying to shed the sweat that strangers had rubbed off onto her.
The spell was broken. January and Bea wrapped her up in hugs again as if they could pull her back into the music. Wally felt bad that she was about to disappoint them, but then she remembered that they were completely high and by the next morning would have only a vague sense memory of it all.
Which was one of the reasons Wally hated dope.
“I’m gonna bounce,” she yelled over the music.
“NO!” the girls objected. But Wally gave them each a reassuring kiss on the cheek and bolted from the dance floor. Once she was clear of the crowd, she took one last look around to see if there really had been someone watching her, but all she saw was a sea of enchanted, anesthetized faces, lost in the music.
4.
WALLY GRABBED THE SUBWAY HOME—OTHER YOUNG women might feel intimidated by a late-night subway ride into Brooklyn, but Wally carried herself with such an air of physical confidence that she rarely felt threatened in situations like that. She felt an aching sense of loneliness, though, as she sat by herself in the nearly empty train. It’s too much to carry by yourself, Greer had said, and he was right. Of the people she loved, who was left? Claire was gone. Her best friend, Tevin, was gone. Jake and Ella were living far upstate at the Neversink Farm, earning a fresh start for themselves. Wally’s adoptive father, Jason, had made repeated attempts to be part of her life again, but she wasn’t ready yet to make peace with him after he had abandoned her and her mom to start a new family.
That left only Tiger—the sole, undeniable connection between her past and present—but Wally had no idea where Tiger was, or even if he was still alive.
When she got home, Wally opened her laptop and logged into the Ursula Society site. Since working at the Society, Wally had been using every possible resource to find her brother, but so far she’d come up empty. The first thing she checked was a running database labeled TIGER TRAP—a set of self-running searches she’d set up that ran twenty-four hours a day. The program continuously scanned dozens of resources, including law-enforcement systems all over the country, using a logarithm to sniff out Internet activity with a combination of keywords, including Klesko, Tigr, Wally’s own name, plus references to the thirty or so ongoing criminal cases—in the United States and abroad—in which Tiger and her Russian father were named.
Some mentions came up, of course, but they were all several months old and useless by now.
Wally had become used to the disappointment. In nearly four months, the scan had come up with only one interesting lead: eight weeks earlier, there had been a series of untraceable searches using the terms Wally Stoneman and Shelter Island—even though Wally’s name had never appeared in media stories about the shoot-out because she was a minor. Wally had hoped the searches were an attempt by Tiger to contact her, but the lead had gone nowhere.
Wally took a quick shower—it felt good to rinse off the sweat and body glitter that other dancers at the club had rubbed off on her, the glitter forming sparkling rainbow patterns on the white tile before swirling down the drain. She changed into the oversized pajama bottoms and tank top that she wore to bed and had begun towel drying her hair in front of the bathroom mirror when she heard a short, high-pitched beep from the main room.
She headed out and first checked her cell phone—assuming that the beep was an app—but when she swiped the activity bar on the screen it showed that no new messages had come in. The beep sounded once more and Wally realized that it had come from her open laptop.
Wally sat down in front of the computer and found that the screen was on now, awakened from its sleep mode. The TIGER TRAP window had popped up and now listed one item in the “new activity” box. It described a current “visitor”—using an anonymous host—to the page Wally had set up on Facebook. This was a surprising event for several reasons, mainly because she had set up the page using her Russian birth name, Valentina Mayakova (her mother’s Russian surname—Wally would never use her father’s), which only a handful of people in the world were aware of.
Wally herself wasn’t really into social media, but she had set up the page as a way of doing research on Society clients. For that reason, she hadn’t entered any information on her profile—personal details, friends, schools, tagged pictures, hobbies—that would bring casual visitors to the page. This anonymous visitor had either landed on the site at random or had come there on purpose, running a search using the name Valentina Mayakova.
The only real content on Wally’s page was a series of photos she had uploaded to the site from her cell phone. The images were of memorable places from her past—a sheltered spot under a midtown overpass, the line outside a soup kitchen near Morningside Park, a skate park just off Riverside Drive—particular spots that reminded her of the months she spent living on the street with Tevin, Jake, Ella, and, of course, Sophie. Those times had been difficult in lots of ways—and dangerous—but Wally had never felt as strong and confident as she had while roughing it on the streets of Manhattan with her crew.
Now the TRAP program was cloning the movements of the anonymous visitor, showing that he—or she—was scanning Wally’s street photographs. She felt a twinge of annoyance, like her privacy was being violated, and then realized how ridiculous it was to expect any level of privacy online, especia
lly on a site that she had left public.
Something popped up on the left sidebar, and Wally saw that the Facebook software now listed the visitor—labeled “Anonymous”—as a temporary contact. Beside the listing was a drop-down menu of options. One of them was an icon of a video camera. Without hesitating, Wally clicked the icon and watched as a small window popped up on her screen. An animated clock icon appeared, its hands spinning around as the video signals engaged.
Within seconds, the link was established and a video image appeared on her screen: a young man, handsome, with prominent features, fair skin, and long black hair. His eyes—like Wally’s—were a dark gray. The sight of him took Wally’s breath away.
Tiger.
He wore a look of complete surprise, as if he’d been ambushed. The two of them stared mutely at each other for what seemed like a very long time. Beyond his obvious shock, Wally picked up traces of other emotions in Tiger’s expression: embarrassment, maybe even some resentment. Why?
Wally broke the silence.
“Tiger . . . ”
The sound of his name snapped Tiger into action. Tiger glanced over his shoulder with a look of concern, as if to make sure that Wally’s voice hadn’t been heard by anyone else. When he finally turned back to the camera, his eyes met Wally’s for only a moment before his hand shot forward, reaching for a mouse or touchpad.
The video image on Wally’s screen suddenly went black.
“No!” Wally tried desperately to reestablish the video feed, but now all signs of her “Anonymous” contact were gone, as if they had never been there at all.
Shit.
Wally jumped onto her feet and paced around the loft, trying to settle herself down. She was mad and frustrated, and she couldn’t help directing some of those feelings at Tiger himself. He’d cut off the feed on purpose, obviously, even though he had made the effort to search her out in the first place.
Tiger Page 3
