Chapter 6: Billionaire Batman and the Case of the Cracked Rib
HARPER / 9:03 PM / Corner of Fifth Avenue & 60th Street
"Dude," I said, "I'm literally going ten feet away."
He looked at my jeans. He looked at me. He did not let go.
I stood there for a second, doing the internal calculus of someone who has been in genuinely life-threatening situations and is currently being outmaneuvered by a two-year-old, and then I made a decision that Felix would absolutely use against me later. "Fine. You can come. But stay next to me, and if a pigeon comes at you, you are on your own."
He picked up his bear, tucked it under his arm, and fell into step beside me with the gravity of a small person who had just been granted a significant concession. We made it approximately four feet before I heard movement behind us—fast, heavy footsteps, the sound of someone who'd been running and was now trying to switch gears into something that looked less like panic.
I turned.
The guy coming toward us was maybe twenty-two, wearing a Sterling Shadows esports hoodie and a baseball cap pulled backward, AirPods half-falling out of one ear, and he was reaching for the kid with both hands in the careless, urgent way of someone who wanted to get hold of something before it got away. The kid made a startled sound and stumbled back into my legs. My assessment took less than a second: adult male, moving fast, no visible backup, target is the child, no hesitation window.
My body moved before my brain finished the sentence.
The kick connected with his left side, a clean driving impact just below the ribs, exactly where the intercostal muscles had no protection from anything.
He folded sideways and hit the pavement with a sound that was less a cry and more the kind of involuntary noise a body makes when it no longer has a choice about it.
The kid flew sideways out of his reach—I caught him one-handed, arm across his chest, his back against my sternum, bear and all—and held him there while I put myself between him and the man on the ground.
The man on the ground was not getting up fast. He was curled on his side with one arm wrapped around his midsection and his face doing something complicated, somewhere between agony and surprise, and Duchess had her head all the way out of my jacket now, her ears flattened and her eyes fixed on him with the focused, unblinking attention of something that had decided it needed to monitor a situation.
The kid, pressed against my chest, had gone completely still. Not the stillness of fear—something different, his weight settling against me with the practiced comfort of someone who was used to being held there, his small fingers finding the edge of my jacket and holding on.
"Jesus Christ," the man on the ground finally managed, through what was clearly significant effort. "I'm his uncle."
I looked at the kid. The kid looked at the man on the ground. Something passed between them that was not consistent with a kidnapping.
"Noah," the man said, getting one arm under himself with visible difficulty, "dude, you can't just wander off like that."
Noah—apparently that was his name—tucked his chin down and looked at his shoes and drew a small circle on the pavement with the toe of one tiny oxford. The picture of a kid who knew he was in trouble and had decided that not making eye contact was a reasonable strategy.
I set him down, slowly, but I kept a hand on his shoulder and stayed where I was. "If you're his uncle," I said, "why is he alone on the street?"
"I was buying him a slushie." He got himself to sitting, winced, pressed his arm more firmly against his side. "Turned around for two seconds and he was gone." He looked at Noah with the expression of someone who had experienced the worst ten minutes of their life and was now processing the aftermath in real time. "I have been looking for you for twenty minutes, man. Twenty minutes."
Noah's circle got smaller. His foot pressed harder into the pavement.
I kept my hand on his shoulder. "He doesn't talk?"
The uncle—Tyler, I would learn; all information came out in stages over the next four minutes—looked up at me with the face of someone experiencing several things simultaneously. "Selective mutism. He hasn't spoken since—" He stopped. Made a small, complicated gesture with his free hand. "It's a long story."
The way he said long story carried something that wasn't a deflection—it was a weight, small and specific, the kind of weight people put on things they don't discuss with strangers. I filed it and left it there.
"Okay." I looked at Noah, who had transferred his gaze from his shoe to my jacket pocket, where Duchess had retreated to a strategic position of observation. "Okay," I said again, mostly to myself, because I was recalibrating and that sometimes required saying the word twice.
Tyler tried to stand and made it about a third of the way before his face went several colors that faces shouldn't go, and he dropped back to the sidewalk with a controlled fall that meant he'd been here before—not pavement specifically, but the general category of impact and consequence. He sat there and breathed carefully for a moment. "Pretty sure you cracked a rib," he said finally, with what I recognized as genuine admiration trying to find a polite way to fit inside an accusation. "What are you, a UFC fighter?"
"Self-defense classes." I looked down at him. "You should probably get that looked at."
"Ya think?" He picked up his baseball cap from where it had fallen and put it back on, backward again, by reflex. "And maybe you should invest in a child leash."
"That's not funny," I said.
"I'm—ow—I'm genuinely not sure which of us that comment was for." He squinted up at me. "Can you at least help me up? Given that you're the reason I'm down here?"
I considered this for a moment, then reached down and gave him a hand. He got to his feet with the careful movements of someone conducting an ongoing damage assessment, one arm still wrapped around his left side, and he stood there breathing shallowly and looking at Noah with the expression of a person composing a very long apology speech in his head.
Noah looked back at him. Then, with tremendous deliberateness, he walked over and pressed his face into Tyler's hoodie.
Tyler made a sound that was not about the rib. His free arm came around Noah's shoulders, and he stood there holding him and breathing carefully and not saying anything, and I looked at the two of them and felt something in my chest do the thing it occasionally did when the world turned out to be more human than I'd expected it to be.
I was about to suggest we find somewhere to sit down and also maybe an urgent care clinic, when I heard the car.
