later, or press on without?
She passed the cart by. She’d been a lot hungrier than this before. She could stay hungry.
She put Arthur’s encrypted treasure aside for the moment, stuffing it in a snug pocket, and got her own phone out. The sun had started its slide, angling toward the jagged skyscraper horizon. She could go without food, but spending another night sleepless and wandering wasn’t an option. If she didn’t want to end up in a doorway somewhere, using her backpack for a pillow, she needed to line up a place to crash.
“Hey, Seelie,” said the first friendly voice she could get on the line. “Yeah, sorry, we lost the apartment.”
“Lost it? Lost-lost it?”
“I mean, we know where it is. It’s more of an unpaid-rent kinda thing.”
Her next call was to a friend of a friend with a sofa he usually didn’t mind sharing. Usually.
“Marguerite’s being weird,” he said.
“She’s always weird, what else is new?”
“She did a tarot reading this morning and freaked out. She’s very not cool with letting anyone come over right now. She’s worried somebody’s gonna bring the shadow of death to our doorstep.”
“The shadow of death,” Seelie echoed, voice flat.
“You know how she gets. Call me in a couple of days if you still need a place. She’ll probably chill out by then.”
Her wanderings pulled her past a construction site, another old brownstone halfway between being battered down and built up again, its torn-open face draped in great bandages of nightingale-blue tarp. A jackhammer rattled the streets, making the pavement thrum under the soles of her sneakers.
A car idled at the curb just ahead, illegally snug alongside a stripe-marked loading zone. It was a boat of a Pontiac, front grille thick with dead bugs and road dust. A curly-haired woman sat slouched behind the wheel, big cheap sunglasses shrouding her eyes. She looked familiar, and Seelie was just starting to register why when a man stepped out to block her path.
He had a football player’s build and a sickly-pale complexion, like a fish belly rotting in the sun. His hair was a razor-cut shock of canary-yellow dye. Now Seelie knew who the woman was and why she was waiting; these two were never far apart.
“Get in the car, kid.”
“Hackett,” Seelie said, then nodded to the Pontiac. “And Barr. Or was it the other way around? I was never really clear on that.”
“Your dad’s tired of your shit. Get in the car. You’re going home. There’s a change of clothes in the back seat.”
She thought she could bluff her way past, show a little bravado and saunter on by, but all it took was a word. Dad. Seelie fought to keep the nonchalant look on her face while her shoulder muscles went tight enough to make her eyes water.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Hackett sighed. In the car, his partner was on her cell phone, her eyes a pair of empty-pit blurs behind her sunglasses.
“Look,” Hackett said, “tell you the truth, I don’t care if you live or die. But your father’s paying us to haul your ass home to Buffalo, so we’re hauling your ass home to Buffalo.”
“And if I say no, you’re going to do…what, exactly?”
He gave her a dismissive snort. “You really want to make it worse for yourself? Fine. One call to the cops and you’re going back the hard way. Those are your two options: you get cuffed and delivered home anyway, or you can ride with us, smooth and easy. I’ll tell you what, we’ll even stop and grab dinner on the way. What do you want, McDonald’s? KFC? You name it.”
Hackett was half-right. He could call the police and make things a lot worse for Seelie, just not the way he thought. If they’d found her prints at Arthur’s condo, if anyone had seen her fleeing from the scene of the crime, she might not be going home at all.
Not an option. Getting in the car wasn’t an option either. She would choose a prison cell over her father’s roof. She’d choose worse fates than that if it came down to it. Seelie thought fast, hunting for another way out. Then she risked everything on a roll of the dice.
“Do it,” she said.
Hackett squinted at her.
“Huh?”
“Do it. Call the cops. Tell them I’m a runaway.”
“You don’t think I will?”
“I know you won’t,” she said, wishing she could be that certain.
He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “How’s that?”
“Because he didn’t call the police. He sent you two looking