"There's always a charge. I work nights. I know precisely what free ends up costing."
"Then consider it paid in advance. I told you. The account stands open in your favor, not mine." I drew a card from my coat, plain, a single number printed on it, and held it across the space between us. "You are not required to like me. You are not required to trust me. You are only required to stay alive, which I am told you do for a living. Call the number, or drop it down a drain. Either way you are less alone tonight than you believe."
She looked at the card. She left it hanging in the air between my fingers.
"Are you going to hurt me if I say no?"
"If I meant you harm, you would not have heard me come up the stairs."
"That is a genuinely horrible thing to say to a person."
"It is also true. You asked a direct question and I gave you a direct answer. I find it saves everyone a great deal of time."
"You told me you wouldn't forget me." She said it almost to herself, somewhere far back in the memory. "On the gurney. I decided it was the drugs talking."
"It was not the drugs."
"No," she said. "I'm starting to get that."
For a long moment she only looked at me, and something moved behind her eyes that was neither fear nor trust but a third thing, the look a clever person wears when two bad explanations are wrestling and neither one fits the floor. Then she decided, the way I suspect she decides everything, all at once and with no committee.
"Goodnight, Mr. Petrov." She still had not taken the card. "Thank you for the house call, or the warning, or whatever this was meant to be. Don't pay me another."
She climbed the steps, past the last bored officer folding himself into his car, and let herself into the building. Through the glass of the door I watched her go up, and at her own door she stopped and tried the handle twice before she believed it, and then she stepped inside and the door swung shut, and a second later I heard the new deadbolt she had carried home that night drive home into the frame.
She shut the door on the most dangerous man in Brooklyn. I have never respected anyone more.
I did not leave at once. I stood on the emptied stoop and let my eyes do the slow work they are trained for, alongthe rooflines, over the parked cars, into the black mouths of the alleys between the buildings opposite. Nothing moved that should not have moved. That was the part I disliked most. An amateur betrays himself with his own stillness. He holds too long, leans too far, forgets that a street has a rhythm and that he is breaking it. I found nothing because there was nothing clumsy to find, and a careful enemy is the only kind worth losing sleep over.
Petya arrived at my shoulder the way he does, having left the car somewhere that would become a problem by morning and run the rest of the distance.
"She said no," he reported.
"She did."
"So we go home, and you let her have it her way?"
I looked up. A light had come on behind a thin curtain on the fourth floor, the small yellow square of a woman who already knew sleep was not coming and had stopped pretending otherwise. Somewhere out in the dark, on a rooftop or in a parked car or behind a window I had not yet found, another man was looking at that same light, and he was not looking at it the way I was.
"Boss?" Petya said.
"She gave me my life back," I said. "I will not repay her by letting some coward take hers." I turned my collar up against the cold coming off the water. "We watch. She does not see us. Until she changes her mind." I held the lit window a moment longer. "She will."
5
RUBY
Ihad not slept properly in almost a week, not since the flowers. I'd dragged my bed a foot and a half off the window and spent every night listening to my new locks the way other people listen for their own pulse, getting up twice, sometimes three times, to test a bolt I already knew was thrown. Sleep, as it happens, is a trust exercise. I had run clean out of trust.
So the shift was a mercy and a sentence at the same time. Twelve hours of other people's catastrophes is a wonderful way to stop rehearsing your own. We lost a sixteen-year-old just before eleven, a kid whose only crime had been climbing into the wrong car, and after that the whole floor went quiet in the way it does when the entire staff is privately deciding whether they can keep doing this for a living. I charted with hands that were not quite steady and told myself it was the coffee.
Aaron caught me at the lockers on my way out. He was one of the paramedics, the kind who actually learns your coffee order and remembers your grandmother's name, which in our line of work makes a man very nearly a unicorn.
"You look like I feel," he said, and held out a granola bar like a small offering. "Heard about the sixteen-year-old. Those ones don't wash off."
"No. They just get in line behind the others."
"Yeah." He let that sit instead of arguing with it, which I appreciated. "You driving tonight? Want company down to the garage? That place gives me the creeps after midnight."
