four different shades of lipstick, a fistful of tampons, some receipts, a hairbrush, one of those little battery-powered fans—”
Sam moved in on the redhead, using his size and build to pin Rufus against a stand of fresh produce: tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, mutant jalapenos the size of carrots. “I know you found her purse. I know you found her phone. I don’t care how many tampons you found and stuffed up your chute. Where. Is. Jake’s. Phone.”
“If you ratcheted up that testosterone any higher, you’d burst right outta that shirt,” Rufus remarked, his smile unyielding. “Phone’s pinging from Tompkins Square Park. Or somewhere right nearby.”
“His phone is in a park?”
“Near the park,” Rufus said again. “There’s a handful of bars on the corners. Maybe Jake lost it at one last week? Or it was stolen?”
Sam swore. “Aren’t these things supposed to be GPS or something? Can’t they be a little more fucking specific?”
“Are you grouchy because you owe me a new pack of spearmint?”
There it was again: the way Rufus grinned, the way his eyes lit up, the way he was just so very fucking alive, and all of it right up at the top, where Sam could reach out and touch it.
“Let’s go,” Sam said. “And no subways.”
“It’s a bit of a trek. Hope you don’t mind getting sweaty.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The walk from Seventh Avenue to Avenue A took about twenty-eight minutes for the average pedestrian. Rufus could shave three to five minutes off that commute time when taking into account his long legs, determined pace, and tendency to jaywalk. But it was too hot to speed walk across the island, Rufus thought. Three to five minutes wouldn’t make a difference this time.
Jake would still be dead at the finish line.
Besides, Sam couldn’t keep up. Oh sure, he had the stamina to walk all over hell and back, it seemed, but he hadn’t perfected how to keep pace in an urban jungle. Rufus was liquid. Fluid in his movements, seamless in his ability to adjust to the flow of traffic.
Sam was… a tank.
And they didn’t need a body count in their wake.
So Rufus walked at a speed that would deliver them to the East Side in twenty-eight minutes.
This also provided Rufus with three to five additional minutes in which to deconstruct his current predicament, interpret the sudden deterioration of Sam’s dialogue with Natalie, and how he himself, a man who had a deeper interpersonal relationship with the cactus he’d rescued from the trash at a bodega in his neighborhood than he did with any actual humans, was going to console Sam.
Rufus stopped at the corner of Twelfth Street and waited as traffic shot down Fifth Avenue. A breeze cooled the sweat on the back of his neck, rustled the branches of trees in the church courtyard to their right, and pride flags, still hung up from June’s annual celebrations, flapped and waved from a nearby balcony. Rufus watched the rainbows with a sudden sense of dissociation from the rest of the world pressing down on him.
He’d been seven years old when he met Alvin. Alvin was in college. Studying dance. He wasn’t from New York, but he’d moved into the same shitty tenement Rufus lived in while taking courses. Alvin had been nice. Once, he’d given Rufus his carton of leftover lo mein for dinner, because he’d asked why the kid was sitting in the hallway at midnight and Rufus had told him he wasn’t allowed inside when his mother had friends over.
Alvin had had a rainbow flag. He’d flown it from his window that one summer they’d been neighbors. Rufus didn’t know what it meant, of course. It was just colorful. Pretty. And Alvin had always been so nice to the little punk brat no one else seemed to notice. Rufus told his mother he wanted a flag too. To put in his window like Alvin had done.
His mother had slapped him in the mouth until he bled.
Alvin had moved away after that one year.
The city made a sharp reinsertion into Rufus, and the memory was quickly packed away. Rufus led the way across the street. They passed an NYU building, parking garage, overhead scaffolding that briefly blocked out the intense rays of the late-afternoon sun, and then crossed another avenue heavy with rush hour traffic. Rufus slowed his pace momentarily when they came up on the Strand Book Store. Hands snug in his jean jacket pockets so as not to be tempted to abscond with something, Rufus lingered long