“Yes. Freaked out for sure. It’s not his fault, though. You know that, right? Whatever those people did to him, it wasn’t Robbie’s fault.”
“I know. I feel bad for him.”
“I do too, but . . . when we find him, we have to be really careful about how we talk to him. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“It might be very hard for him to think about, let alone talk about. So we’ll be really careful.” He paused. “And maybe it’s best if you don’t bring up what happened, even after Robbie seems okay. Does that make sense? Let him mention it, if he wants to, but it’s best not to bring it up. No teasing or anything. It’s too serious for that.”
“I understand.”
“Okay.” He patted Joe on the back, and they began walking up Forty-Third toward Ricky’s.
“Were you in a war?” Joe asked. He was thinking of how Nate had created obstacles behind them as they ran into the shadows.
“I was in the Vietnam War, yes.”
“Is that where you learned that stuff?”
“Stuff?”
“Yeah, like throwing things behind us to stop that guy from chasing us. And how you carried the gun and stuff.”
“Maybe. I don’t really know.” He sighed. “Let’s look around a little more. We still have the flashlight. We’ll walk by Ricky’s also. Hopefully, he went back there. If not, we’ll wait for him. We’ll be there until morning.”
Robbie didn’t come back, though, not the entire night long, even after Joe had fallen asleep in a booth at Ricky’s coffee shop. Nate stirred him as the first light was visible in the sky, and the two caught a city bus going downtown.
On the first ferry to Staten Island, as dawn painted the harbor a smoky rose color, Joe gazed back at the twin towers, looking chalky and stiff like chimneys. He wondered where Robbie was, and where his mother was. He would never see his mother alive again. He wouldn’t see Robbie until a day later. And although he followed Nate’s advice and never said anything to Robbie about what happened in the courtyard, it didn’t matter.
Robbie never, ever looked at him the same again.
CHAPTER 71
Midland Beach
Staten Island
7:15 a.m.
Robbie never learned Evan Bolds’s name. That hadn’t been given to him, so Robbie made up a name for him, Wally, because for whatever reason, Robbie felt it suited him. He had expected to hear from Wally by midnight. Maybe 1:00 a.m. It was now after seven, and Robbie had heard nothing. The blinds were drawn. His single-room apartment was dim. And the AC unit was droning its numbing wah-wah sound.
His palms were sweaty. A knob at the back of his neck ached from the tension through his shoulders. He was lying on his couch a few feet away from the computer desk, trying not to reach for the burner phone every few seconds. Wally had given him both that phone and the laptop with the creepy old-school messaging application. Just as Robbie only used the laptop to communicate with one person, he only used the cell phone to message Wally. No one else was ever involved with either device.
Wally was very good about getting back to him when he was supposed to, but now he was totally AWOL, and Robbie was freaking out. For a while during the night, he had turned off the notifications because he couldn’t bear the wait, but that only pushed him to grab for the phone more. Eventually, he tossed it to the dirty carpet and stared at the ceiling.
At 7:14 a.m., he reached for it again, clutched it in his fist, and pounded it against his chest. Where the fuck is he, where the fuck is he, where the fuck is he? He fell into an uneasy half sleep. A minute later it went off, sliding from his chest onto the floor. He scrambled for it and swiped it open.
Computer
He stared at the word. Wally never used the term “computer.” Wally didn’t write anything other than simple words, often misspelled, or addresses and times.
His hands shook as he wrote back. What? Where are you? He hit send and waited.
Computer
A coldness slid through him. The computer was not how he communicated with Wally. It was how he communicated with the Other One.
The Other One was the only name Robbie had come up with. He had never seen the Other One, like he had seen Wally, so no nickname or descriptor occurred to him. The Other One was the guy with the payoff, the reason he had been doing all this strange shit. There had been some money already, but much more was promised. All Robbie had to do was torment his brother Joe. Well, that wasn’t all of it. He knew he was part of making some other terrible stuff happen, like what happened to their mother, Lois, and Joe’s ex-girlfriend. Those things weren’t Robbie’s problems, though. He had been given simple tasks to perform, and he had done so.