The woman ignored my question and began exploring the room. “Who’s your girlfriend?” she asked, as she ran her finger along a row of books on one of my three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
“I’m Chloe,” Chloe replied. “Who the fuck are you?”
Although we were confronted by all kinds of threatening weirdness, I couldn’t help but smile a little when Chloe didn’t flinch at this strange woman referring to her as my girlfriend.
The mystery woman smiled. “I’m a brand-new friend. You can call me Swan, if you like.”
“Okay, Swan, what’s with the suicide girls over there?” Chloe nodded toward the twins leaning against the wall near the kitchen. They looked alert, but there was an air of boredom as well, as if they’d seen this conversation play out a million times before.
“They’re with me,” Swan said. Clearly that was all we were going to get by way of explanation.
“Scarpio?” I asked again.
“I haven’t heard from Alan,” she said as she went through a stack of vinyl sitting next to my turntable. “But we do need to find out what happened to him. It’s important.”
“We?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You and me.” She slipped Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home back where she’d found it and sat down between Chloe and me on the couch. “I need you to tell me what you found on his phone.”
“We didn’t find anything,” Chloe said—probably a bit too quickly.
“Is that right?” Swan asked, as she picked up my Patti （from The Leftovers） Funko toy from the coffee table and looked it over. “Which one of you has Scarpio’s phone?”
I looked at Chloe, then back over at Swan. I was torn. Part of me wanted to tell her about the rhubarb, the weird video, Tabitha Henry, and Jeff Goldblum, but there was another part of me—the suspicious part currently watching the two oddly dangerous-looking identical twins leaning against the wall outside my kitchen—that won out.
I handed Swan Scarpio’s phone, but didn’t tell her anything. I was pretty sure they’d eventually find the video, but, whoever Swan was, I didn’t think she was police, which meant we didn’t legally have to give her anything.
“Thank you,” Swan said as she stood up and tossed the phone to one of the twins. Then she just stood there, staring at me for a long time before finally shaking her head and smiling.
“What?” I asked.
“Are you two playing the game?”
Chloe and I did our best to keep our expressions neutral.
“Well then,” Swan said, “you’d better hurry.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because you’re running out of time.” Swan followed the twins out into the hallway and shut the door behind her.
As soon as I heard the door click into place, I ran over and locked it.
I turned around to find Chloe standing in the hallway behind me.
“What the fuck, K?” Chloe asked.
“Yeah.” What the fuck was right.
Chloe pulled out her phone. “Come on, come on,” she said, urging whatever app she had activated to hurry up and load as she sat down and started putting on her shoes.
“What are you doing?”
She looked up with a grin. “Putting on my shoes.”
“I can see that, but why? Where are you going?”
“We are going to follow them.”
“They could be anywhere by now.”
“They’re right here,” she said, and held up her phone to reveal a blinking green dot on a map.
“You’re tracking them?”
“Yep.”
“How?”
“We’re living in the twenty-first century, K. It’s a free tracking app. I connected Scarpio’s phone.”
She finished putting on her shoes, grabbed her coat, and stepped out of my apartment. I heard her yell out “You drive” as she hurried down the hallway toward the elevator.
I grabbed my coat and followed her, even though I was pretty sure the whole thing was a terrible idea.
18
NOW ONWARD GOES
We followed the blinking green dot on the map as it moved away from my apartment in Capitol Hill and down toward the water. We had no idea what kind of vehicle they were driving, so I did my best to stay a couple of blocks behind the dot on the map as it blinked its way through the city.
They eventually stopped moving, right in the middle of a parking garage off Union Street.
I guided Chloe’s car into in the parking garage and waited. It didn’t take long before the dot started moving again, much slower this time.