thirty-three
We had dinner with injustice sitting between us. It drank a glass of wine and ate heartily while we pushed pasta around our plates and picked at salad. We had been crushed by fear and it sat with us fat and victorious, untouchable.
We barely talked through the meal. As Jake cleared the plates I sat on the couch and looked out onto First Avenue, thought about where I would move. I couldn’t even stand to go into my apartment. Jake had promised to go down for me and retrieve some clean clothes, shoes, and toiletries after we’d finished eating. I turned the television on and pressed the mute button and zoned out on the silent images flashing on the screen.
After a while, Jake came to the futon and sat beside me. I leaned into him and we sat in silence for a while, listening to the street noise outside. There was so much hanging between us that the silence was not comfortable. I could hear the wheels in his mind turning and I’m sure he could hear mine.
“Can you walk away from this?” I asked him finally. “Can you settle for what we know and move on from here?”
He was quiet for a minute. “Can you?”
“I think I have to,” I said, even as uncertainty tugged at me. “You said it yourself. There’s no proof. No trail to follow.”
“Unless we can get someone to talk; someone to admit what happened. Unless we can get someone to take responsibility for Project Rescue.”
“Like who?”
“I’ve been thinking. Your father is adamant that he had no knowledge of the other side of Project Rescue. But someone was flagging those kids. Someone who worked with him, maybe?”
I turned to look at him. He had his eyes down as if he didn’t want to see the expression on my face.
“Hasn’t your ex’s mother worked with your father for years?”
“Esme?”
“I saw her name on every one of those files.”
I thought of Esme, that night in Zack’s apartment, the conversation we’d had about Max.
“Maybe, Ridley, maybe she’d talk to us. Maybe because of her love for you, she’d tell us what she knows about Project Rescue.”
I remembered how she acted at Zack’s. Not like a woman prepared to talk about the past, that’s for sure.
“You want to risk all our lives for this, Jake?” I asked.
He shook his head but kept his eyes on the floor. “You have a life, Ridley,” he said softly. “I don’t.”
I felt inexplicably hurt at that statement. I guess part of me thought we had a life together, a possible future, and that would have been enough for me to move forward and leave all of this behind. But I guess the difference was I knew the answers to my questions. I knew what happened to Jessie and Teresa Stone. I knew what happened to Christian Luna. I knew who I was then and who I had become. Jake was still an orphan, still quidam. His place with me was not enough.
I saw the choice I had to make. If I chose Jake, I had to choose the truth no matter how painful, no matter how ugly, no matter the risk involved. If I chose to keep silent and protect my family, I chose the beautiful, familiar lie, where everything was a false front. I would have to choose a place where my past would, over the years, become like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, a creature that someone claimed to have seen once, but one in which no one quite believed.
You don’t have much faith in me, I’m sure. I haven’t exactly made the noblest choices up to now. It’s been Jake pushing me along the path, coaxing me to ask the questions that led us here. I felt his eyes on me then, and when I met them, I knew. We had already allied ourselves in this world. The day I stood here and held his hand, we began our trek to the edge of my reality. And at the precipice, there was nothing to do but jump.
“She was there that night, at Zack’s. She knows what happened, I think. She told me that I was dredging up things that wouldn’t be good for anyone.”
Jake leaned forward. “How much do you think she knows?”
“I really don’t know. She didn’t say much. But she was clearly in the loop. I think Zack knows something, too. She stopped him from telling me everything he knew about Project Rescue.”
“If she was the one doing the flagging, she’d at least know who she flagged for Project Rescue,” said Jake. “And she might know how Max found out about you.”
“You mean she might know if Max was responsible for Teresa Stone’s murder.”
Jake was looking at me intently. Then suddenly he got up quickly and moved past me. I realized then that he hadn’t been looking at me but at the television that was on behind me.
“Notorious mob attorney Alexander Harriman and an unidentified associate were found murdered execution style in his Central Park West office today,” said the grim-faced newscaster when Jake turned up the volume. In the background, I could see the entrance to Harriman’s brownstone office, where we’d just been twenty-four hours earlier. Someone was being rolled out on a stretcher, in a body bag. “So far the police have no information on any suspects.”
“Mr. Harriman had no shortage of enemies,” said a homicide detective at the scene to the reporter. “We have our work cut out for us.”
Jake turned to look at me. His face was a mirror of my own heart, stunned, afraid.
“Our deal was with Harriman,” I said slowly.
“I have a bad feeling the deal is off.”
We wouldn’t have gone back to my apartment at all except for the small problem of my not having any shoes, remember. I’d gone from the hospital to the cab to our building in socks and couldn’t stand to enter my apartment on my way up to Jake’s. So I changed into a clean pair of Jake’s socks at his place and left it at that. I was regretting it as Jake pulled on his jacket and handed me mine.
“We are most definitely not safe here. We have to go.”
“Where?”
“Someplace we’ve never been before.”
I looked down at my feet.
“Shit,” he said, moving toward the door. “Okay. Wait here.”
“No way. We go together or we leave like this.”
He sighed and disappeared into his bedroom. He came back with the gun I’d seen before. He shoved it in his waistband and zipped his jacket up over it.
“Okay, let’s go.”
We moved quickly and quietly down the stairs and onto the landing that led to my apartment. At the door, Jake motioned for me to be quiet as I handed him my keys.
“Ridley!” A sharp whisper startled us both. I turned and saw Victoria’s one eye peering out from the darkness of her apartment. I put my finger to my lips and moved toward her. I couldn’t help but think, She does know my name!
“Victoria, it’s not safe. Go back to your apartment and close the door.”
She huddled in the crack, staring at me with fear. Her wig was forgotten and a few gray strands on her bald head were caught by a breeze and stood nearly on end.
“There’s someone in there. In your apartment.”
“How many?” asked Jake, coming up behind me.
“Just one,” she said, and closed the door. I heard the turning of three locks in quick succession.
I was ready to make a run for it without my shoes, but Jake was moving toward the door. He gave it a push and realized there was no need for a key. It was open. He walked in slowly, gun drawn, staying close to the wall. He motioned for me to stay back but I followed behind.
The desk light behind the screen that separated my “office” from my bedroom was on and we could hear the sound of someone shuffling through papers. A bulky shadow moved there. We didn’t enter the room but stayed behind the cover of the wall.
“Put your hands where I can see them and step out from behind the screen,” said Jake. His voice boomed; he was downright terrifying. Something clattered hard to the floor and I hoped it wasn’t my laptop. The shadow stood
