A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe
CHAPTER ONE
At 2:45 p.m. Rufus O’Callaghan stood outside the freight entrance of 619 West Thirty-Eighth with nothing but a burner phone, a lifted pack of spearmint bubblegum, and a certain sense of dread in his gut.
At 2:46 p.m. it started to rain.
Rufus grabbed the handle of the heavy door, yanked it open, and stepped into a long, narrow hallway. The pseudoalley was like a hotbox. Dumpsters lined the right-hand side, the stink of uncollected garbage overwhelming in the late-July heat that’d been cooking New York City. To the left was an elevator, likely utilized by building staff and delivery services. The doors were caked in enough dirt and grease to leave a tag on. Water drip, drip, dripped from somewhere overhead, writing an urban symphony as it echoed against asphalt and bare brick.
Rufus pulled his phone from the pocket of his jean jacket, entered the passcode, and scrolled through a short list of text conversations. He stored no names in the address book, just memorized the necessary 212s and 917s.
619 W. 38, 7 Fl
3:00
Pickup job JB
Pocketing the burner again, Rufus approached the elevator and used his knuckle to jab the Up button.
The rain picked up, pinging off the tin roof overhead. Thunder cracked and muffled the sounds of Midtown like a television heard through the other side of a motel wall. Taxis honking, jackhammers and shouts from the construction crew across the street, dogs barking, startled pedestrians caught in the storm—they all clotted together and formed a throbbing headache at the base of Rufus’s skull.
The elevator door slid open, metal grating against metal. The fluorescent light in the car flickered wildly, which didn’t instill much confidence in routine maintenance being performed. Rufus stepped inside, once again used his knuckle to press the button for the seventh floor, then leaned back against the wall as the door groaned shut. Someone had taken a key to the metal interior at some point in the past. The word vaguely resembled FUCK. Rufus hoped the little shit hadn’t dropped out of art school to pursue a street career, because he was no Banksy, that was for certain.
Through the scratchwork and tacky residue, which was as prominent on the inside of the car as the outside, Rufus’s reflection stared back behind cheap plastic sunglasses. He was a tall kid. A skinny kid. But most importantly—not a kid. Rufus was thirty-three, but the carrottop red hair he hid under the frayed and worn slouch beanie still got him carded. At least, he figured the hair had something to do with being asked—more times than he could remember—if he was old enough to hold that bottle of gin. There had been a study published by Erasmus University in Rotterdam that suggested the mutation of the MC1R gene—responsible for his hair and self-evident nickname, Freckles—did also contribute to the younger appearance of gingers.
The elevator lurched to a sudden stop.
Rufus straightened. He took the sunglasses off and hung them from his T-shirt collar while shifting from foot-to-foot as he waited for something to happen.
His gut was dropping the same way it had when Alex Mitchell, the thirteen-year-old bully who’d been held back a year, had called Rufus an ugly little pussy and pushed him down the stairs of PS14, causing him to break his arm. It was that same sick lurch of being airborne, of gravity taking hold, of the pop and snap of bone. But Alex had been shipped off to his grandmother’s somewhere upstate after seventh grade when Children’s Services intervened. Rufus never saw him again. So he took a deep breath and reminded himself that it was Jake who had texted him, not the ghost of a bully long since passed, and when Jake texted, Rufus came.
No matter what.
Because in this city of nearly nine million, Jake had been the only one to give Rufus the time of day in over a decade. Had been the only one who talked to Rufus like he had half a brain. And Jake had been the only one to notice that the mouthy redhead ate Maruchan ramen for dinner and that 190 calories didn’t go very far for a six-foot adult male.
The elevator door noisily opened onto the unlit seventh floor.
So if it was only Jake, and Jake was safety and security, why did Rufus feel like he was about to upchuck?
Rufus took a step forward, angled his body to be shielded by the call button panel, and peered into the dim expanse. There was a scattering of abandoned furniture—outdated