"I'm good. Go home to your cat."
"He's a dog now. I upgraded." His smile was easy, the uncomplicated kind you don't see much in our building. "Text me when you're home, though? Humor me."
I told him I would. I didn't.
My phone buzzed on the way down the hall. Deysi. Both locks tonight? she'd written, because she had appointed herself warden of my deadbolts. Then, a second later: And check in when you're home. Proof of life. I sent back a thumbs up I did not feel. Everyone wanted proof I was still breathing lately, and I was running low on it to hand out.
I took the stairs to the garage, partly because the elevator had been making a noise all week that I'd diagnosed as terminal, and partly because the stairwell bought me thirty seconds to be angry instead of scared, which is my favorite substitution. Anger I can carry. Anger has somewhere to go.
Because here is the thing nobody tells you about being watched. After a while, you start watching back. For most of a week I had been quietly collecting him. A black car too clean for my block, parked on a different corner every evening. A man at the bodega who bought nothing and left when I did. The same wide shoulders in the same beautiful coat across the street from the hospital, two nights running, not hiding exactly, just declining to go anywhere. Kolya Petrov ran surveillance the way other men wear cologne. You were not meant to miss it.
I had told him to leave. Twice. The first time I crossed the street and rapped on his window, and it slid down without a sound, and he looked up at me with that flat, unhurried calm, as if he had penciled me into his evening.
"You can't just sit outside my job," I said.
"I can, actually. It is a public street."
"It's creepy."
"It is also keeping you alive. The two are not mutually exclusive."
I said I would call the police. He reminded me, very politely, that I had already met the police and seen exactly what they were worth, and I hated that he had a point, and I hated more that arguing with him quieted something in my chest that nothing else had touched all week. The second time I skipped the words altogether and only raised my middle finger as I walked past, and I would have sworn something shifted at the edge of his mouth. He did not leave. He did not push, either. He simply stayed, a fixed point in a city that refused to hold still, and the genuinely humiliating part, the part I would have died before admitting, was that on the worst nights the sight of that ugly black car was the only thing that let me close my eyes.
He was nowhere I could find tonight, though I looked, the way I'd started looking for him on every corner like a habit I couldn't kick. I told myself that was a relief, and I got about halfway to believing it.
My car is a Civic the color of dishwater with a check-engine light I've started to think of as company. I keep it for the overnight shifts, for the nights when the platform feels too long and too empty. I had driven in that night for exactly that reason. I had wanted four doors that locked and a thing that could move.
I thumbed it open. I dropped into the seat. And I knew, before I could have told you how, that someone else had been sitting where I was sitting.
The seat was wrong. Eased back two notches, set for a taller body, so my feet reached for the pedals and came up short. The mirror, when my eyes went to it out of pure habit, did not show me the ramp behind me. It showed me my own face, tipped down and angled in, framed like a portrait, like something arranged to be admired. And the radio, when I turned the key, came up low and certain on a station I have never once chosen in my life, some old crooning thing, a man swearing to a woman that he would wait for her as long as it took.
I hit the button to kill it, and the silence that rushed in behind was worse, because silence is only a sound waiting to be filled, and I knew now precisely who had been filling mine.
There was no note. That was how I knew. The man who left flowers wanted me to read him. This was a different language. This was a man telling me he was finished with words, that he could fold himself into the one small box I climbed inside to feel safe and leave nothing behind but the shape of him in my seat. The violation was the entire message. He had been in my car. He could be anywhere. He wanted me to do the arithmetic myself.
I don't remember getting out. I remember standing beside the open door under that jaundiced garage light with my heart slamming like a code I couldn't run, my keys gripped so the points jutted out between my knuckles the way a girl is taught in a parking lot when she's young enough to think it will be enough. And I remember thinking, with a flatness that scared me more than screaming would have, that I could not keep living like this. That the locks were a stage set. That I had built an entire life out of being the steady one, the one whose hands never shook, and I had left nothing in the account for the night the steady one needed steadying.
I've spent my whole life keeping other people alive. Somewhere along the way I forgot to budget for myself.
That was when I heard the footsteps. Not Kolya's. I would learn, later, that you never hear Kolya's. These were wrong, scuffing and fast and out of time, and when I turned, a man was coming at me from between the parked cars, thin and gray and lit from inside by something that was not him, his eyes going everywhere at once, his hand already reaching.
"Hey." It wasn't a word so much as a lunge. "Hey, give me the"
He got a fistful of my jacket and hauled, and the keys jumped out of my hand and skated off under the next car, and every clever thing I had ever promised myself I'd do in this exact moment evaporated, and I did the one thing I had sworn I never would. I froze.
I did not see where Kolya came from. One second it was me and the gray man and the sour heat of him, and the next the man was simply no longer attached to my jacket. He was folding toward the concrete with a sound like a dropped coat, and the garage had rearranged itself around the man in the dark coat, the light and the angles and the body on the ground all suddenly oriented to wherever he chose to stand.
He took the man down so fast it looked less like violence and more like punctuation. A hard period at the end of a sentence I hadn't known I was trapped inside.
The stranger stayed down. He curled around himself on the oil-black concrete and made small animal sounds and did not try to rise, and Kolya considered him the way you consider a problem you have already finished solving. Then he turned to me. There was blood on his knuckles and not one drop of effort on his face.
"Are you hurt?"
I couldn't make the words come. He took my silence for the answer it was and crouched, careful not to touch me, putting his body between mine and the man on the ground, and wentthrough the stranger's pockets with quick, clinical hands. A baggie. A folding knife he opened, shut, and pocketed in one motion. A wallet that was neither mine nor his.
"This is not your man," he said, almost gently, which from him was its own kind of alarm. "This one wanted a purse and a fix. He does not know your name. He has never heard of your tea." He rose, and wiped his knuckles once against the stranger's own jacket, an insult so unbothered it was nearly elegant. "Your man does not use his hands. Your man uses your locks."
He was right, and that was the worst part. A stranger in a garage was bad luck, the kind that finds anybody with a night shift and an old car. But the patient one was still out there, untouched by any of this, and the last ninety seconds had spelled out in very plain language exactly how little stood between me and whatever came for me next. My nerve, which had hauled me through a dead teenager and a ransacked home and a man in my own front seat, chose that moment to walk off the job entirely.
