About 5 minutes ago.
Where are you now?
Down at the end of the street. There are several parked cars and one large tree blocking their view of us but we can still see anyone who comes or goes from your front door.
Excellent. Keep me posted.
We will. It’s nice here. Peaceful. Reminds me of where I grew up.
Where is that, exactly? I still can’t peg your accent.
That’s because I don’t want you to. 😉
They say it’s bad to keep secrets in a relationship.
Good thing you and I are just business partners, then. Poker rules. You want me to show my cards? Kick in an extra $10k.
Is it Poland?
No.
Hungary.
No.
Cleveland?
Goodbye, Rick.
I set the phone down on the desk across from the bed and connected it to its charger, which I plugged into a strip of electrical sockets running horizontal along the wall. I had a cheesesteak, fries, and Diet Coke delivered from the nearby pizza place and remembered that I owed Erica her first real Philly cheesesteak after all this was over. A good one from the city, not that the one from the pizza joint was bad. South Jersey is essentially East Philly, and they’ve managed to copy some of the best parts of the culture fairly well.
I ate, brushed my teeth and used the bathroom. By 8:00 I was lying on the bed (above the sheets) and watching a Friends re-run on Nickelodeon. It felt strange hearing the actors’ real voices, rather than the dubbed over Dutch ones I’d become accustomed to. A new episode began as the credits for the previous one were still playing, but I was asleep before The Rembrandts finished promising they’d be there for me.
My cell phone alarm started beeping and buzzing simultaneously at six a.m. At some point overnight, I’d slid down so my neck was bent at an awkward angle on the pillows I’d propped against the headboard, but other than that I hadn’t moved much. The top blanket was barely ruffled and the TV was still on, only now Friends had given way to SpongeBob SquarePants.
Both kids used to love that show, I thought. Ethan was too young to get most of the jokes, but he liked the colors and the goofy animation. And he laughed every time his big sister laughed.
Did they still watch SpongeBob, more for the nostalgia-cool of it now? Did they still do anything together, or had they grown apart as brothers and sisters sometimes do? Social media stalking let me watch them grow up, but it was all surface-level, like watching a photo montage of a celebrity you recognize but don’t really know. Truth was, the two most important people in my life were strangers to me.
Based on some of Denise’s Facebook posts, Maggie had gotten over her fear of sleepovers, but did she still stay up way too late, like she used to? It looked like she still played basketball, so that was good. Hopefully she was as fiery in her teens as she was at seven, hating it whenever she thought I let her win at a game of HORSE.
There were more than a few posts of drawings Ethan had done, which was entirely new. He could barely color inside the lines when I’d left, but even at two he could throw his blue, squishy baseball further than I thought was normal for a toddler. I’d had him pegged for sports, too, but apparently he got his dad’s creative genes. I always loved making up bedtime stories for them, rather than reading from a book.
Christ, what I wouldn’t give to hang one of those pictures on the wall of my old cubicle. Like a normal dad would.
Squidward was busy saying something snarky to Mr. Krabs and suddenly all I wanted to do was throw up. Ordinarily, I’d wash down that urge with whatever alcohol was nearby, but since there was none around, I closed my eyes, pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth and swallowed until the bile retreated.
I sat up, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and rolled my neck from side to side, working out the kinks. I showered, brushed my teeth again, and was out the door by 7:00, with a quick stop at the rental office to renew the room for another night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Across the bridge in South Philly, I spent my day moving from parking meter to parking meter within a one block radius of Robert’s precinct house, like a fly buzzing between dishes at a barbecue. He made two trips outside the station. One to the Navy Yard, the other to a pizza joint for lunch with an older detective, whom I assumed was his partner.
I was invisible during lunch, but they almost made me at the Navy Yard. I’d pushed my luck and tried to follow them past the security booth, but I didn’t have an appointment and the fake name I gave the guard didn’t impress him. I tried to smooth-talk my way in, but the guard was an old pro and wasn’t having it. Robert’s unmarked car circled back around to see what was going on, but there was no one behind me so I apologized to the guard for the confusion, threw it into reverse and drove off before Robert got a good look at my face. Or so I hoped.
Once back outside the station house, I checked in with Erica at the high school where Maggie was a senior and Denise worked in the front office. Robert had a squad car stationed outside. She watched as they parked out front, only occasionally doing a circle around the school’s perimeter. Lazy protection, but it allowed her to remain unnoticed from her spot in front of a house across the street. Joey gave a similar report from the middle school where Ethan attended.
After school let out, one patrol car followed Denise’s old Ford Escape—which had apparently been handed down to Mags as her first car—and the other tailed Ethan’s yellow school bus. Both cars remained outside the house until 6:00 p.m., when another squad car showed up to relieve them. This black-and-white with its two occupants would stand watch until 6:00 the next morning, when the first car came back to do it all over again.
That night, I ate a bland, rubber, fast-food burger with soft, lukewarm French fries and a six dollar bottle of Bud Light, while Erica and Joey had hoagies from a nearby Wawa. We talked again after dinner and I joked about how we’d spend the next week sitting in our cars, getting fat, and nothing interesting would happen. They laughed out of courtesy, but no one believed it was true. We all knew it was only a matter of time before our boring routine became far more interesting.
After dinner, I took a drive to a nearby laundromat to wash my only other clothes, the white button-down and much less expensive blue jeans I had on the night Ian was killed. A block away from the laundromat was a tiny liquor store. It was on the main drag through town, a line of small businesses that had been there long before Denise and I moved in, but which we routinely bypassed in favor of the cheaper prices and convenience of the various superstores in the area.
While I waited for my clothes to dry, I wandered down to that little liquor store and perused the shelves. It had been over a week since I’d really gotten to know the bottom of a bottle of scotch, and while I hadn’t quite yet achieved the level of alcoholism where such a hiatus caused any physical withdrawal symptoms, I was definitely feeling the break.
Fortunately, they had Macallan, although it was a few bucks more expensive on this side of the Atlantic. I plunked down eighty dollars for the 12 Year Old Sherry Oak Cask single malt, and was both comforted and repulsed by the familiar feel of the bottle nestled into the crook of my arm.
There was twenty minutes left on my dryer when I returned to the laundromat and I badly wanted a taste, but again, I wasn’t that kind of alcoholic. So instead I bided my time, watching my shirt and jeans tumble around, fantasizing about the first notes of peat and charred wood on my tongue.
Back in the hotel room, I tossed my Downy-fresh clothes on the bed, uncorked the bottle, and removed one of the two glasses on the desk from its protective shrink-wrap. I preferred my scotch over rocks, but there was no ice in the bucket and I didn’t feel like making the trip to the vending area. Half a glass neat would do just fine.
The glass was at my lips, its rim still smudged with residue from the lips of whoever stayed in the room before me, but I didn’t care. The sweet, smoky aroma was just drifting into my nose, promising me everything was about to be okay.
That’s when I stopped.
We got lucky today, I thought. We might get lucky again tomorrow, too. But one day, very soon, either Ghost or The Persian is going to make an appearance.
