strewn across the entire tabletop. I’d run my fingers across his papers, the highlighted lines, the notes in the margins. “Parlito case?” I’d asked. There was a phone trace he was trying to get thrown out. And if I was reading it right, there was a proposed plea bargain.
He had grinned and stacked the papers back up. Reached under the table, at my legs resting on the chair beside him, and squeezed my calf. I ask every time. It’s a game at this point. He never tells. Truth is, I love that he doesn’t. That he is both good at what he does and good down to the core.
“Call me when you’re ready,” I said, squinting from the glare through the windshield.
He grabbed my elbow before opening his car door. “Make an appointment to see a doctor, Nicolette.”
* * *
SOMETIMES, WHEN I’M NOT focused, I’ll end up someplace I had no intention of going. Like muscle memory. Head to the store but end up at school. Walk to the bank, end up at the subway. Drive to Daniel’s but find myself in front of Corinne’s old place. Which must’ve been what just happened, and how I ended up parked on the corner by Kelly’s Pub even though I had every intention of heading home.
My eyes drifted over the storefront, over the awning, to the window a floor up with the air-conditioning unit hanging over the edge. The blinds were open.
I needed to talk to him about that key, anyway. And he wasn’t answering my calls—not that I really blamed him.
I pushed through the entrance into the vestibule area of Kelly’s Pub and cringed as the bell chimed overhead. At least at night, there was too much noise to notice. I could smell smoke and grease and something stale underneath as I passed the open doorway inside on the way to the narrow stairwell. “He’s not here!” someone called, and the sound of laughter drifted out from the darkened room.
I took the steps two at a time to the alcove with a door on either side, facing the one on the right. I knocked rapidly three times, waited, and tried again, pressing my ear to the door. Then I called from my cell, my ear still pressed to the door, and heard the periodic vibration of his phone from somewhere inside, until the voicemail picked up: Hey, this is Tyler. Leave a message. Maybe he was in the shower. I tried to listen for the sound of water in pipes or any movement inside. I called again—the vibration, the voicemail, and nothing else.
Another round of laughter from downstairs. I checked the time on my phone: one P.M. on a Sunday. The new five P.M. I used to find my dad here during summer break. But not this early. Never this early.
I turned to go, but the creeping feeling that I was being watched started at the back of my neck, worked its way down my spine. The stairwell was empty. The door at the bottom was closed. I listened for movement somewhere nearby. A shuffling in the walls. A breath in the vents. There was a shadow in the tiny strip of light escaping from the apartment door across the hall, but it hadn’t moved. I stepped closer, keeping my movement as quiet as possible.
Could be the angle—sunlight and furniture—but . . . I stared at the peephole, leaning closer, my own face distorting in the reflection. Like a fun-house mirror, too-big eyes and too-small mouth and everything elongated and sickly.
I knocked once, softly, but the shadow didn’t move. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I closed my eyes, counted to ten. This was what happened during an investigation. You felt eyes everywhere. You became suspicious of everyone. Everything fell apart if you didn’t hold yourself together. Hold it together.
I jogged back downstairs, my footsteps echoing in the hollow underneath the steps, and walked through the bar entrance. A crowd of faces I vaguely recognized glanced in my direction, and one man leaned over to say something to another. I watched his lips move—That’s Patrick Farrell’s daughter—and the other man tilted a bottle of beer to his lips.
I tried to catch the bartender’s eye, but either he didn’t see me or he didn’t care. Probably the latter. I knocked on the bar top. “Jackson,” I said, trying to keep my voice low.
He came closer, the muscles and sinew of his forearm straining as he cleaned