CHAPTER SIX

The call came nine days later, at a quarter past one in the morning. I was awake, and I was close. I'd parked on the cross-street from Ray's building every night that week, in the spot I picked the day I met him, because frightened people move at night, and a frightened family three weeks from a fortune moves fastest of all.

"They're here." Ray's whisper barely held together. "Two of them. Car across the street since dark. One just got out and walked the building. He tried the side door."

I could see the car from where I sat, half a block down with my engine off. A gray sedan, lights dead, two shapes inside it gone still in the way men go still when they're working.

"Listen to me, Ray. Don't turn on a light. Take the drive, put it inside your coat, and go down the back stairs. Don't run. Walk like a man carrying out his trash. Three blocks east there's a diner with a blue sign. Back booth. Stay on the phone. Don't call anyone but me."

"They'll see me."

"They're watching the front and the side. The back's dark. Go. Now."

I heard the door. I heard his breathing on the stairs, too quick, lungs trying to be quiet and failing. Then he stopped.

"There's somebody in the lot," he breathed. "By the dumpsters."

"Is he looking at the back stairs, or the side door?"

A silence I could have died in.

"...the side."

"Then he can't see you. Keep going. Left at the bottom, away from the lot, toward the blue sign. Don't look at him. You're a man who couldn't sleep."

The longest ninety seconds of my life weren't mine. They belonged to a sixty-year-old man walking past the men sent to make sure he never walked anywhere again, while I sat in my car a block away with both hands useless on the wheel and did the only thing I could, which was talk. Low. Steady. Left here. Slow. Good. Cross now. Then traffic swelled on his end, and a door chimed, and a waitress said honey, what'll it be, and I let out a breath I'd been holding since the phone rang.

I didn't drive to him. Not yet. I watched the building.

Eleven minutes later the two men came out the front, unhurried but wrong-footed, the body language of professionals who'd gone in for a thing and found an empty bed. They stopped at the gray sedan and stood under the corner streetlight, the one light on that whole block, and they argued, close and quiet, about who would make the call no one wants to make.

I knew that posture. I'd worn a version of it myself, three years back, standing at their glass doors with a weight in my coat, deciding whether to do a thing I could never take back. The difference was that these two would make their call, and a cleaner would be assigned, and the dark would close over Ray Doyle the way it had closed over my daughter. Unless I made that impossible first.

I lifted my phone off the dash and gave them all the time they were giving me. Two faces, lit clean. The plate, steady, for as long as I wanted it.

Only then did I drive the three blocks to the diner.

Ray was in the back booth, the drive on the table between his two flat hands like it might bolt. He was still shaking.

"You knew," he said. "You knew it'd be tonight."

"I knew it'd be soon. They moved because something spooked them this week." I pushed a menu at him so his hands had something to do. "I don't want the drive tonight. Keep it. You'll know when. Tonight I wanted you alive, and you're alive." He cried then, the silent ugly way old men do, and I bought him eggs he wouldn't touch and waited until his hands were his own.

In the lot afterward, with Ray asleep against the window and the heater ticking, I looked at the two faces on my phone.

I'd braced for rage. What came instead was flatter and far more useful: certainty, with a date on it. I knew now exactly what kind of people I was living inside of. Not careless rich kids who'd let a girl drink and slip. People who, three years later, six weeks from making themselves rich and admired in front of the entire world, would send two professionals up a dark staircase to make a problem permanent.

They were still killing to keep her a number.

And now I had their faces.