I sat up and snaked my arms over the seat, wrapping them around his neck and putting my face to his. I could just see the outline of him, feel the stubble on his jaw, smell the scent of his skin mingling with the polished leather of the seat. He raised his hands and held on to my forearms.
“Just start at the beginning,” I said softly into his ear. “Tell me everything.”
“I really wish I could.”
There was something dark in his voice, something almost angry. I didn’t have a chance to ask him what he meant by that because we both saw the figure of a man making his way up the sidewalk. We’d seen a lot of people tonight, but somehow both of us knew that this was the man we’d been waiting for.
We watched him move quickly, shoulders hunched, a baseball cap pulled down, hiding his face. He had his hands in the pockets of a thin black jacket, which couldn’t have been enough to protect him from the cold. There was nothing about him that would cause anyone to look twice: average height, about five-ten; average size, maybe 185. But we both followed him with our eyes, forgetting our conversation as he turned and jogged up the flight of stairs that led to 6061? Broadway.
We waited another ten minutes in a loaded silence. The house stayed dark.
“Is that him? Is that the man who sent me the letter?” I’d imagined him bigger, more menacing, this person who’d moved through my life like a wrecking ball.
“It could be.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“You stay here, watch the front door. I’m going to go take a look around back.”
Before I could answer, he slipped quietly from the car and walked up the street away from the house. I saw him in the rearview mirror cross Broadway and then approach the house from the opposite direction, then disappear into an alley. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might be having a panic attack. I waited with nothing but the sound of my own breathing for what seemed like an hour but might have been ten minutes. I didn’t have a watch, so I had no way of knowing. Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore, so I slipped from the car myself and followed the path Jake had taken.
The dark silence of the park yawned to my right and unlike earlier there was no one around. The lamplights cast an orange glow as I crossed the street. But the west side had no street lamps. Between the convenience store and the first row house was an area of trees. It was a spooky little stretch, the ground slick with wet leaves. Darkness and silence leaked out of the woods like an odor.
I came to the alleyway where Jake had disappeared and peered into its narrow darkness. A light glowed at the end and I made my way toward it, past reeking garbage cans and menacing shadowy spaces where anyone or anything could be hiding, waiting.
I knocked into one of the garbage cans hard with my knee and the metal lid went clanging to the ground. Somewhere close a dog started barking, startling a little burst of adrenaline into my blood. I ran the rest of the way through the alley, which let out into—take a guess—another alleyway that ran along the back of the row houses.
Some of the houses had lights lit in the back, and up above me I could see the glow of interior lamps and the blue flicker of television screens through the windows. I could hear the lightest strains of Pink Floyd’s “Money.” Someone was cooking pot roast or something meaty, the scent making my stomach grumble (yes, again). It was still dark back here, but at least if I screamed someone might hear me.
I was pretty sure the dark house in the middle was 6061?. But I didn’t see Jake. I managed to continue my way through with a little more stealth and without banging into anything else. I saw a narrow metal staircase that led up to a landing that ran the length of the back of the house. From one of the back windows I thought I caught the movement of light. I climbed the staircase and peered in the window.
He was sitting there on the floor, the man from the street, beside one of those battery-operated lanterns that you can get at Kmart. Leaning against the wall with his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, he’d taken off his baseball cap but left his jacket on. I couldn’t see his face clearly, couldn’t tell for sure if it was the man in the photograph. The light was dim and he was washed in shadows. Beside him sat an old green rotary phone.
He ate slowly from a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli with a plastic fork. Looking intently at the can, he seemed to hold each bite of food in his mouth for a long time before swallowing. I could see the outline of his mouth, full lips pulled down hard at the corners. Sadness, anger, disgust…it was hard to tell. But he struck me as the very image of loneliness. Whoever this was, however it was that our lives had come to intersect in this strange way, his loneliness was a contagion and I felt it fill me. Tears welled in my eyes. I don’t know why. I had peered into this window of desolation and somehow in doing that I had let what I’d seen into my own heart.
I suddenly felt warm arms around me and a hand over my mouth. I didn’t struggle because I knew it was Jake somehow, maybe by his scent.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” he hissed into my ear.
He released me and took me by the hand. Together we left and went back to the car.
“Why did we do this?” I said when we were back in the Firebird.
“Because I wanted to see what we were dealing with.”
“And what are we dealing with?”
“From what I can see? One lone guy sitting by a phone in an empty house with no electricity.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means that whatever threat he might pose, I can handle it.”
My expression must have been blank with my lack of understanding.
“Look,” he said patiently, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You asked me to help you find out what’s going on, right? I got some information, found out some background, figured out the address for that telephone number. Before you called, I wanted to know what we were walking into, who exactly we were calling.”
“And who are we calling?”
“My bet? That guy is Christian Luna. What he wants, why he thinks you’re his daughter, where he’s been all these years? I don’t think we can find that out without talking to him. So that’s the next logical step.”
“Call?”
He handed me a cellular phone from his pocket and the telephone number.
“Call.”
I paused with the phone in my hand.
“Only if you want to, Ridley. Otherwise, I bust in there, scare the shit out of the guy, and he goes away. I guarantee you never hear from him again. The guy’s on the run. He’s scared and he’s hiding from something or someone, probably the police. He’ll slink right back under whatever rock he came out from. And you pretend none of this ever happened.”
But it was too late for that now and we both knew it. It took a few minutes of us sitting there in the dark before I turned the phone on and punched in the number. My hands were shaking and I felt sweat on my brow, though it was so cold in the car I could see my own breath.
He picked up the phone on the first ring. His voice was deep and had a slight accent I couldn’t make out.
He said, “Jessie?”
I could picture him there on the floor. I heard the naked mixture of a deep sadness mitigated by a tentative hope.
“This is Ridley,” I said, my voice sounding a little wobbly even to my own ears. “I’m
“Ridley,” he repeated. “Of course. Ridley.”
“I’d like to meet you.”
“Yes,” he said, and it sounded like a plea.
“You’ll come alone?” he asked. And I agreed, though I was not comfortable lying, even to this stranger who was ruining my life.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
