A female officer said, “We got a disturbance call to this address. A trespasser?”
Across the street Mrs. Alizadeh stood plaintively in her kitchen window, arms crossed as if to shiver, one arthritic hand clutching the telephone.
“I am not trespasser,” Yuri said. “Tell them, Nate. Tell them I am your buddy pal.” His smile was genuine. He was enjoying himself.
Nate glowered at him.
The officer nodded to the others, and they moved in another few steps on Yuri, a tightening noose. Their black gloves rested on holstered guns. Yuri’s lips gathered above that lantern jaw, an expression of sheer menace pointed at Nate.
From the porch Janie called out sharply, “He’s a friend.”
The cops halted. Janie stepped down and walked over to Nate, threading an arm around his side. “I forgot to tell you, honey. I invited Yuri over.”
Yuri said, “I was just haffing a smoke outside. They don’t like me to smoke in house. They haff child.”
The female officer peered across at Nate from beneath perfect curled bangs. “So he’s a friend.”
“
Nate’s smile felt like a baring of his teeth. “Neighbors around here get a bit jumpy.”
The cops withdrew quickly and with annoyance, doors slamming, engines coughing. The patrol cars splashed off through puddles, on to the next complaint. The quiet reasserted itself. A slight movement across the street as Mrs. Alizadeh drifted from view.
Yuri tilted his large head to Janie, breaking the calm standoff. “Smart lady.”
“Why are you here?” Nate said. “Just to fuck things up?”
A key fob hung over the edge of Yuri’s breast pocket. “You went to bank today.”
Between Abara and Pavlo’s thugs, Nate wondered how many people were following him at any given time.
“You retrieve item?” Yuri asked.
Nate pictured Cielle inside at the table, clutching the envelope. Her fierce words earlier:
“No.” He had to force out the word. “Not yet. I’m maneuvering into position.”
Yuri mulled this over. “Today is Friday. Bank closed tomorrow. You must deliver Sunday night.”
“As you boys pointed out, I’m a VIP at that bank now. Special rules for the hero.”
“How do you plan to get?”
“This isn’t a joint effort. You’ll have it by the deadline. If you can manage not to get arrested between now and then.”
Yuri nodded once, severely, and lumbered away, vanishing past the Kerners’ hedge.
Janie’s arm fell from around Nate’s side. “We could have just handed him that list.” Her voice, heavy with dread.
They walked back inside in silence.
The door had no sooner swung shut behind them than Nate caught the scent. “You smell something burning?”
“Cielle?” Janie jogged into the house. “Cielle?”
Nate ran after her, a wisp of smoke coming clear in the kitchen. Cielle was leaning over the sink, her face flushed with emotion. A steady stream ran from the faucet.
“What’d you do?” Janie yelled. “What did you-”
Cielle opened one plump fist, and her boyfriend’s skull-and-crossbones Zippo fell to the tile. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let them get killed.”
With horror Nate noted the empty envelope on the counter. A fleck of paper flew up from the sink, alight, orange turning to black. On weightless legs he moved forward.
The sheet of paper was no more than a delta of wet ash around the drain.
Chapter 28
Exhausted, Cielle shuffled toward her bed and sat. She was fully dressed-sweatpants and a black hoodie she wore low across her shoulder blades, like a shawl. She hugged her midsection, her eyes glazed.
Nate grasped her arms gently and lowered her to the pillow. She let him. He tugged the sheets up over her. Janie sat at Cielle’s desk, fist propping up her chin, equally catatonic.
“What did I do?” Cielle asked hoarsely.
Nate could feel his fingernails digging into the flesh of his forearm. “Something brave,” he said.
“Did I just kill myself?”
“No,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”
“How will it be all right?”
“Because I’ll make it all right.”
Her blinks grew longer. “I screwed everything up. It was my choice. So I get it if you want to leave now.”
“I’m never leaving you again.”
Her face shifted, a softening. “What do you want?” she asked, not unkindly. “From me?”
“The honest truth?”
“Is there any other kind?”
“So many.” He wanted to pet her shiny dark hair to soothe her to sleep as he used to when she was young, but he restrained himself. Instead he kneaded his palm, working the tiny bones, chasing the burn from the muscle. He was also, he realized, working up the courage to respond. He cleared his throat quietly. “I want the chance to mean something to you again.”
But she was asleep.
He stared across at her doorway, all those pen marks notching off her height, Janie’s scrawl recording a progression of key dates. First day of preschool. Fifth birthday. Elementary-school graduation. Would there be more? College, a wedding? He pictured the bulge of Yuri’s muscles as he’d hefted the rescue saw, tendons shifting beneath pale skin and swaths of arm hair. An obscenity.
Janie’s words were muffled by her hand. “Are you scared to death?”
“No,” he lied.
He rose and walked down the hall into the master bathroom. Shut the door and sat on the floor. He pressed both hands over his mouth and set the back of his head against the full-length mirror behind the door. Pain radiated from his forearm into the crook of his elbow, tendrils of fire. His left hand had gone stiff and dead against his lips, and he squeezed his eyes shut and pictured those marks again in Cielle’s doorway, how they stopped about waist- high. Panic unfolded inside his chest, a poisonous flower blooming. His ribcage heaved, and he pressed his hands tighter against his mouth.
When he dared, he opened his eyes and was not surprised to see Charles sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. His entrails were exposed, his hands charred and smoking, and for once he was not smiling. A feeling of overwhelming helplessness gripped Nate, the same as he’d felt in the car outside Charles’s childhood house, watching Grace Brightbill bustle over the dishes, knowing he was supposed to walk to the front door to serve her son’s death notification. The same he’d felt in this very bathroom, sitting where Charles now sat, unable to move his stubborn body into the next room to comfort his sobbing wife.
“What do I do now?” he asked his old friend.
“You know what you need to do,” Charles said. “You need to keep going.”
“My fucking hand hurts, Charles. I’m losing my
“You can do this.”
“No. I can’t. I’m the guy who froze on the helicopter-”
