“Yes.”
“Good. I won’t say this isn’t a mess you’re in—it is—but sometimes wrong things come from the right decisions.” He scowled for a moment, thinking. “There’s one thing this disease has taught me, and that’s life is like dementia. Anything can slip away at any time. You gotta hold on to the things that matter as long as you can.”
I sunk into my seat. “So what do we do now?”
“We eat.”
We ate.
An hour later when I crossed the street to home, I felt like I was backpacking in Nepal. Winding my way closer and closer to base camp with a hundred pounds on my back. I carried what Dad said and the fact Rachel’s phone had been left behind. I carried the glint of gunmetal in the dark and the smell of piss and blood. Most of all I carried guilt—the majority of my provisions. The heaviest.
In the laundry room, I fished out my clothes from the night before, retrieving the business card along with the spare key. One was potentially helpful, the other damning. What explanation could I give to the cops about having the key? None that didn’t land me in a cell for at least a short period of time, perhaps much longer if whoever had killed David and taken Rachel and the boys weren’t caught. In my head I sat in lockdown, out for a few hours a day, meals on plastic trays eaten with plastic cutlery. A walk around the exercise yard and maybe a shiv in between my ribs if I looked at someone wrong.
The key I put in a jar of dried black beans in the pantry beside the rice with the note in it. My pantry of secrets. Jesus Christ.
The business card I took to the kitchen table. Moisture from my pants had seeped into the paper and made the word and number run. They were still legible but had a weird, ghostly look to them I didn’t like.
Speranza. It meant hope, I learned from a quick internet search. Hope in Italian. For some reason knowing this didn’t give me any.
The guy in Rachel’s house had been looking for something. No other reason to be there, this coming from one breaker and enterer to another. I had maybe found something useful, but had he? Had he been looking for the business card and now realized it was missing?
All at once the card took on a new weight. If this somehow tied the murderer to David’s and Ryan’s deaths, it would be very valuable indeed.
Dad was right and so was Kel. I was in a mess, and this wasn’t one of my books. I couldn’t write the hero out of a tight corner; there was no deus ex machina to save me. All I had were choices.
I chose to go to the store.
13
The burner phone lay on my table, black and innocuous outside its packaging.
Of course, the manufacturers didn’t call it a burner phone. The label didn’t say BURNER in bold letters. There was no catchy ad copy on the package encouraging you to use this phone for any nefarious purpose since it couldn’t be traced back to you without some sort of court order or sophisticated triangulation system.
In any case it was a burner phone. I’d gotten it uptown, and now it sat ready and willing on the table.
I picked it up and set it down. Paced. Went to the windows. Came back. Sat out on the porch. Talked to myself. Paced some more. Picked the phone up again and dialed the number on the back of the business card.
It rang. Once. Twice. The line clicked.
“HerringBone,” a rough voice said. My throat closed to a pinhole. It was a struggle to swallow. “Hello?” the voice said.
“I’m looking for Speranza?” I finally managed, not able to disguise my voice like I’d planned. Nothing, it seemed, over the last few weeks was going like I thought it would.
“What?”
“Speranza,” I repeated, my gamble either paying off or crashing and burning in real time.
There was some static from the other end, like maybe the guy was covering the phone with his hand for a second, then he was back. “Hold on,” he said.
My heart went mustang. What the hell was I doing? My expertise in dealing with underworld types and mysterious figures in the dark with guns started and stopped in my manuscripts. I guess I was doing what Dad said, not letting go.
A minute later another voice came on. “Who is this?”
Imagine a smoke-filled room above a bar and grill in the middle of New York. The smoke is from good cigars, and there’s a big safe in one corner of the room. A desk fills up most of the space, and a guy overfills the chair behind it. He’s big, with heavy jowls, and he talks with a cigar clenched in his teeth. That’s what I saw from those three words spoken in my ear.
“Someone concerned about Rachel Barren and her boys,” I heard a reasonably steady voice say, then realized it was me speaking.