by Lisa Henry
“Val.” He didn’t know what to say. If Val was right, then hallelujah—he had been framed by a dirty OPR agent and might not have to answer for some of the not-exactly-baseless accusations. Like that he was sleeping with his witness. But if Val was wrong, what a waste of time—and a risky situation for her, if the higher-ups found out.
“OPR’s always been incompetent. But what Bixler’s doing goes beyond incompetence. You were obviously set up, and for her to ignore that—well, ‘ignore’ that—”
“It looks that way to you because you know me.”
“Are you defending her?”
Was he? No way did he want to defend that bitch, but he didn’t want Val risking her job on a theory she couldn’t prove. “I don’t— Going after OPR is riskier than looking into Lonny Harris.”
“Oh really?” Val raised her eyebrows. “Lonny ended up with two bullet holes in him. And you want to tell me—”
“I’m just saying—”
“No, you know what? It’s just like you to think that the situation where I could be fired is more dangerous than the situation where I could end up shot.”
They glared at each other.
Finally, he had to laugh. It was true enough.
After a moment, Val snorted too.
“I guess we ought to be working together, huh?” She sipped her coffee.
“Just like old times.”
“Please. You’ve been AWOL for a day. Your career is hardly ‘old times.’” She set her mug down. “And just so you know, I’m not making any accusations against OPR. But the way Bixler’s straining at her leash to get at you just because of what some junkie said—it’s not normal. So I’m running a background check.”
What he wanted to say wasn’t going to go over well. But he had to say it. “I just need to know something. And I’m not trying to offend you. But . . . is this about Jeff?”
“Jeff?” Val repeated coldly.
“You feel like you missed the signs with Jeff, so now you don’t trust . . .”
She leaned forward, both hands on the table. “Do you want me to clear your name or don’t you?”
He swallowed. “Of course I do. But how much time are we looking at if you want to launch a secret investigation into OPR? I don’t think I can stay holed up with Henry for another day, let alone however long it would take to prove Bixler’s crooked.”
Val actually slapped the table, jolting their mugs. A couple of people turned. “Who do you want me to look at instead, Mac? You tell me: where should I start?”
Mac rubbed his head. “I was gonna try to track down Frank Newman.”
“Frank. Ugh.”
“I know you’re no fan. But we couldn’t have nailed Rasnick without him. And far as I know he still meets some of Jimmy’s alleged buddies for cards.”
Val swirled her coffee. “How are you gonna find Frank?”
“Well, it’s Tuesday. And where’s Frank every Tuesday at two?”
“Oh.” She stopped stirring. “Ohhh. The ducks. Krannert Park.”
“Exactly. So there’s Frank. And then I’m going to meet with a friend of Henry’s.”
“Who?”
“Remy Greig. One of the guys on the list of Lonny Harris’s associates. Says he might know who paid Lonny to spread those rumors about me.”
“Okay. Then I should meet with him. Not you.”
“Nuh-uh. Noooo, no. He’s already spooked. Said he wouldn’t meet with me unless Henry was there.”
Val looked dangerously close to another table slap. “And what are you gonna do with the information? It’s not safe for us to stay in touch. If we’re gonna use what Remy tells you as admissible evidence, it can’t just be you meeting with him and then being like, ‘Listen to what he told me . . .’”
“Just let me meet with him. Please?” He held up his thumb and forefinger. “He’s this close to not talking at all. I can’t risk scaring him off.”
Val’s stare was . . . intense. He looked away. Then looked back again. She was still staring. Fuck.
“So,” she said calmly, “you’re gonna bring the witness you’re fucking into the city, conference with a criminal you don’t know, and then somehow let me in on whatever you learn from him. That’s the plan?”
“Uh . . . for now.”
“All without getting caught?”
He tried for a winning smile. Since meeting Henry, he’d become aware that smiling felt an awful lot like grimacing, and wondered if he might be doing it wrong. “I’ll have Henry Page with me. We won’t get caught.”
“Henry stole a car from a dealership and then got pulled over for speeding.”
“That was one time. Look at how long he’s been a criminal. And look how many times he’s been caught. Once.” Twice, if you counted Henry getting picked up for prostitution at sixteen. But as far as Mac was concerned, the johns who paid for sex with a minor were the criminals there, not Henry.
“Okay.” She drummed the table lightly. Rolled her eyes ceiling-ward for a moment before turning her gaze once again on Mac. “Just be careful, Mac. Let me be a walking cliché and tell you to be careful out there.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“We’re going through the security tapes, Lina and I. We want to find out who besides you has been in your office over the last week.”
“And you’re gonna look into Janice Bixler.”
“We’re gonna look into Bixler.”
“All right, then.” He drained the last of his coffee and slammed his mug down. “I’ve got ducks to feed. With the formerly notorious Frank Newman.”
“And I’ve got a manhunt to not cooperate with.”
“You know I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” Mac said. “Right?”
“There was no dragging. I’ve been in it from the start.”
“I guess I just mean thanks.”
“You can buy me a drink at O’Reilly’s. Later. When all this is over.”
“Just one drink?”
“And pub fries.”
“Deal.”
“And one of those brownie sundaes.”
“Is it that time of the month?”
“Agent McGuinness.” Her voice was so low and so deadly that all his childhood memories of his mother calling him by his full name—“Ryan Robert McGuinness, get over here!”—suddenly seemed fond and unthreatening.
“Yes?” he said innocently.
“You might want to tread carefully, or whoever’s trying to destroy you? I will do their job for them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But since you bring it up, yes, it is that time of the month, and yes, you owe me a motherfucking brownie sundae. Now get the hell out of here.”
He got up, saluted, and turned to go.
“Mac?”
He turned back.
“Buy a burner phone. And call me tonight.”
He nodded. “I will.”
“We’re tracing your phone too. So if I get a signal from it, I’m gonna assume something’s wrong. Okay?”
“Got it. And Val, seriously. Thanks.”
He left.
Viola loved Cory’s room. It had posters on the walls of dinosaurs and volcanoes. Curtains with different kinds of snakes on them. A wooden model of a pterodactyl skeleton hung from the ceiling, and there was a miniature greenhouse in one corner, where Cory was growing lichen and ferns.
“This isn’t my real house,” Cory had told her earlier. “This is just where Nana and Papa live. I get to stay here when my mom and dad go on vacation.”
Cory had gone to go do her chores, so Viola was alone in Cory’s room, looking at the covers of Cory’s Club Werewolf books.
She scowled. Werewolves weren’t real.
Onstage, anything could become real. That was what Viola’s mother had always said. Magic, demons, true love, the end of the world. Viola had liked that idea. But it didn’t seem like enough, to just draw a picture of something that wasn’t real, or write a story about it. The unreal thing had t
o breathe, it had to move, it had to speak to you somewhere inside your soul, in order to be alive.
She walked out of the room to look for Sebastian. He was leaning against the back of the sofa, talking to Cory’s nana as she worked on putting a lot of metal pieces together. Sebastian looked—not nervous, but definitely not happy. She stayed in the hallway and peered around the wall.
“Since before Libby was born,” Cory’s nana was saying. Her name was Ana. Ana the Nana. “Ryan always seemed . . . Well, I think he liked it out here okay. But he’s more of a city boy.”
“Well, it’s nice.” Sebastian studied the room. “You have a nice place, and it seems like you raised M—Ryan really well.”
She ducked behind the wall again as Sebby nearly spotted her. He had taught her never to listen to people’s conversations unless you really had to and were sure you wouldn’t get caught. She probably didn’t have to listen to this one. But she wanted to.
Sebastian didn’t look like he normally did when he said nice things to people. Usually he smiled, and he kept talking, and then the people he was talking to smiled too, and if he asked them for some kind of favor they said yes. But now he sounded serious and tired. Maybe even mad. She didn’t like when Sebastian got mad. She made him promise once when they were kids that they would never get mad at each other. They’d shaken hands on it.
But Sebastian had yelled at her in the car about Remy. Said Remy wasn’t their friend, which was very stupid, because Remy was nice. If he did bad things, it was because drugs hurt his decisions, just like what had happened to their mom.
Before he had left the hotel room, Remy had told Viola he was sorry. He’d said he wanted to stay with her, but that he would get in trouble if he did. She had asked if she would get in trouble if she stayed there too, and Remy said no. He’d said she should stay right where she was and be safe until Henry got back.
She hadn’t understood at first why people from the Court called Sebby “Henry.” Then Sebastian had explained it was like he was playing a character onstage, except in real life. Viola still didn’t really understand that. She thought it made more sense to say that Sebastian was like Remy—that he had to lie to a lot of people in order to get money and stay out of trouble.
Ana glanced at Sebastian. “Thank you,” she said, and went back to working with the metal pieces. Viola wasn’t sure what she was making with them. She thought that maybe it was art, like Viola had made back at St. Albinus, except they’d mostly used macaroni and string instead of metal.
“I think he’s lucky to have such a good family.” Sebby didn’t even seem like he was talking to Ana. His voice was too quiet, and he was staring out the window.
Ana straightened and wiped her hands on her pants. “How is your mother?”
Sebby looked surprised, then confused. “My mother?”
“You’re Louise Hanes’s boy, right?”
Viola’s chest ached a little, the way it always did when she thought about their mom. Their mom had been so beautiful. And so funny. And so clever. Until one day she wasn’t any of those things anymore.
“She died.” Sebby’s tone was light, but Viola could hear how brittle the words were.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Ana reached out and touched Sebby’s arm. “She must have been very young.”
There was something magic about touching. If someone was scared or hurt or sad and you touched them, it made the bad feelings shrink away like shadows from the light. That was why sometimes when Mr. Crowley had studied his wife’s photograph and tears slid down the deep wrinkles in his face, Viola had held his hand.
“She was.” Sebby stepped back so Ana wasn’t touching him anymore.
He was out of sorts. Viola remembered that Mr. Crowley used that phrase a lot. She liked it, because it was one of those phrases that she understood until she looked at all the words, and then it didn’t make sense anymore. A lot of conversations were like that. Meaning hung off phrases because people had agreed on it before. If you were from outer space, you wouldn’t know what “out of sorts” meant. Even if you had a dictionary, you wouldn’t know.
Sebby was out of sorts because Mac was in Indianapolis, where he could get arrested at any time. Sebby pretended not to care, but he wasn’t always as good an actor as he thought.
At least, she had always been able to see right through him, and that had never changed.
“Was she very ill?” Ana asked.
Sebby’s mouth curled into a smile that wasn’t very nice. “Yes. She was a drug addict. She died of an overdose. Choked on her own vomit, like a rock star.”
Viola’s heart hurt a little.
“Oh! Well, I’m very sorry to hear that.”
His smile grew. “Well, she always wanted the celebrity lifestyle.”
He said these sorts of things sometimes, to punish people for asking.
Sebastian hated their mother. Sometimes she thought that there was something lacking inside her, something stolen by the accident, because she didn’t. But then she thought there was nothing wrong with still loving their mom.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no; It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken.
Sometimes she thought Sebastian couldn’t find his ever-fixed mark because he was always busy changing, hiding, and lying. And sometimes she thought she was that mark, and Sebastian would never search for another one as long as she was here, and something about that seemed very, very sad.
Frank Newman looked out of place feeding the ducks in Krannert Park. He was short, balding, always had a betting guide sticking out of the back pocket of his polyester pants, and was strangely aggressive when it came to the ducks.
“Yeah? You want some bread, you greedy little fucker? You want some? I’ll give you some goddamn bread.”
It was no wonder that all the mothers with toddlers had gathered around the other side of the large pond.
“Frank, you’re scaring the taxpayers,” Mac said as he approached.
“Well, shit.” Frank shoved his bread back into his plastic bag and held out a crumb-covered hand for him to shake. Drew it back suddenly. Tentatively put it forward again. Frank had gotten wind a while back that Mac was gay. Didn’t give him any real grief about it, but had shied from physical contact ever since. Mac mostly thought it was funny.
He shook Frank’s hand.
“Agent McGuinness. I heard you got shot.”
“That’s old news, Frank.”
“That so? I only heard it last week. I must be slipping.”
A duck pecked at Mac’s shoe. “I hope you’re not.”
Frank chuckled. “What do you need, McGuinness?”
“Someone’s setting me up. Maybe someone who blames me for Jimmy Rasnick.”
“That piece of shit.” Frank spat on the ground, then chuckled as the ducks rushed up to the spot and milled around in confusion. “Waste of a goddamn coffin. Shoulda just left him out for the fucking dogs.”
Frank had hated Jimmy Rasnick for a long time. Something about money. Whatever it was, it had been enough for Frank to feed information about Rasnick’s operation to the FBI. He’d been more than happy to help send Rasnick to prison for thirty to life. Honor amongst thieves? Hardly.
“I need some information, Frank.” Mac urged a duck away with the toe of his shoe. It flapped at him, outraged, and for a moment he wondered if he really did look anything like that when he ran. Stupid Henry. “I need whatever you can find on Lonny Harris.”
“Who?” Frank reached into his bag for a slice of bread and tore it between his stubby fingers. He threw a piece down for the nearest duck. “Never heard of the guy.”
“He’s small-time. A fence. A user. And he’s also dead. He’s the guy who was setting me up.”
“And you want me to find out how he connects to Rasnick.” Frank wiped his hand on his jacket and a
shower of crumbs fell from his fingers.
“Yeah.” Mac stared at the surface of the pond. Ducks raced to snatch up soggy bits of bread, flapping and pecking at each other.
“You sure?”
“What?”
Frank squinted at the water. “You sure it’s anything to do with Rasnick?”
“I think so.”
Frank nodded slowly. “Sure. I’ll ask around, see what I can turn up. You want me to call your office when I get anything?”
“Kind of working freelance on this one, Frank.”
“Shit.” Frank upended his plastic bag. Bits of bread rained down. Ducks swarmed them. “You on the lam, McGuinness?”
“You could say that.”
“You got any way for me to contact you?”
“I’ll be back in the city in a few days,” Mac said. “You got a number I can reach you at?”
Frank gave it to him.
“Okay.” Frank looked at him sideways. “I guess we’ll talk when we talk. You take care, McGuinness.”
“You too, Frank,” Mac said, wading out of the crowd of ducks. “You too.”
God, Mac’s parents were nice. Ana was such a mom, helping Cory with a vacation project she was working on, and making sure Henry and Vi had food, drinks. He had tried to excuse himself to go back to the old house, but Ana insisted he stay here until Mac returned. Henry, not keen to be alone, didn’t protest. He helped Ana with some yard work, keeping to the back of the house so he couldn’t be spotted by anyone coming up the road.
He did eventually slip down to the old house, where he grabbed the toothbrushes from the bathroom, folded errant pajamas, and packed everything away, then stuffed his bag and Mac’s into the very back of the bedroom closet. He pulled the sheets taut over the mattress, and smoothed the musty quilt until there wasn’t a wrinkle in it.
He wasn’t sure why was doing this—if the bad guys got close enough to examine the toothpaste smears in the sink, or the cell phone–shaped dustless spot on the nightstand, Henry and Mac were screwed. But this disappearing act was too deeply ingrained in Henry for him not to attempt it.
Henry shook his head. The bad guys.
So what did that make Henry?
When he returned to the main yard, Ana was still mulching. She didn’t ask where he’d been. He was relieved not to feel pressured to charm her. She seemed to like him—but she was also slightly guarded around him, which he respected, even if it hurt a little.
