“Let’s get you cleaned up before your flight home, shall we? Edward, fetch some bandages from the first aid kit, please.”
The male agent—Edward, apparently—clapped me hard on the back and left the room.
“I’ll be going as well,” Trish said, standing up. She extended her hand across the table. I glared at it for a moment before standing and taking it. “It was a bumpy start, Mr. Carter, but I look forward to our partnership. I think it will prove extremely beneficial for both sides.”
I released her hand but said nothing. She started to leave then stopped, turned, and grabbed the balled-up napkin containing my fingertip off the corner of the table. She clenched it in her fist as she walked out the door. I heard her heels clicking on the linoleum but they soon faded away, leading me to wonder how far this underground facility actually stretched.
So much for having that reattached. Pinkie tips are overrated anyway.
Edward returned with a wad of white gauze and medical tape. He dropped them on the table in front of me, and I wrapped my still bleeding finger as tightly as I could.
“Little help?” I asked, as I tried awkwardly to hold the gauze wrap in place while also securing it with the tape, all one-handed. He grimaced, as if I’d just asked him to put in an extra hour of overtime on a Friday, but took the tape and looped it around several times while I held the wrap. A red bloom formed quickly at the tip of the gauze, but it stopped spreading not long after it started. The pain eased a bit, too, but that was likely more mental than anything. Like when you’re a kid and a Band-Aid is a cure-all. I opened and closed my fist a few times to make sure the tape would hold, satisfied with the job Edward had done.
“Thanks,” I said to him. “Now take me the fuck home.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Guy #3 dropped me off at the curb in front of my building, waving goodbye with just his pinkie finger, laughing as if he’d just reinvented comedy. He never did give me my gun back, but I’d taken the Macallan 18 when I left the plane, so call it even. The bottle, now half-empty, sloshed as I trudged up the stairs, past Sem, the homeless fixture in the corner of the lobby. He was slumped in his usual spot against the potted tree that hadn’t been watered since I moved in three years ago, snoring away contentedly. Lucas, the night manager, would usher him out around eight o’clock. Sometime before morning he would reappear, like a speck of dust that gets swept away only to land in another room.
It drove Lucas nuts, but Sem was the reason I chose this place out of all the other shitholes I looked at when I moved to Brussels. When you have money but live in the gutter, people who might want to find you for the wrong reasons will often step right over you as they search the kind of places where they assume you’ll be. (Hating yourself makes living that way a lot easier, too.) A homeless guy by the stairs who often has flies buzzing around his mouth was the final piece of security that sealed the deal.
I was mildly surprised to see that nothing appeared to have been disturbed inside my apartment, especially with the demolished door hanging impotently open on its hinges. There was a dried bloodstain on the floor where Mike’s face had met my foot, and the TV remained shattered a few feet away, but other than that, the place looked just as shitty as when I left it. Owning nothing of value remains the most effective anti-theft system I’ve ever discovered. I wasn’t worried about noise complaints from the neighbors, either. Meth tends to block out a lot of the nuisances that trouble reputable members of society.
I took off my suit coat and tossed it on the couch, the only piece of furniture in the room other than the dinner tray I called an end table, and the TV stand that was currently missing a TV. I grabbed a rocks glass off the kitchen counter, one that still had a pool of melted ice sitting in the bottom, and filled it with the Macallan that hadn’t splashed out of the bottle on the way up the stairs. Then I went back into the living room, collapsed onto the couch, and drained half the glass in a single swallow. Somehow, it felt more dignified than swigging straight from the bottle.
My mind swirled with possible next steps, failing to settle on one.
Go see Leon and demand to know how he’s connected to Trish and her people?
Withdraw all the money from my accounts and disappear, hope for the best?
Start recruiting right away just to get it over with?
Drink more scotch?
Checking Facebook was not one of the choices on the merry-go-round of bad decisions in my mind, and yet I found myself with phone in hand, doing just that. I needed a shot of something positive. To smile, even if it was only at memories.
Denise had her profile set as private, but that wasn’t a problem. One of the perks of knowing bad people who do bad things is learning how to hack your ex-wife’s social media accounts in less than two minutes. At first, I’d needed the written steps in front of me, but now I could walk somebody else through it without trouble.
Her profile picture had changed since the last time I’d checked in. A selfie at a beach somewhere. Her brown curls had adopted the lighter, almost dirty-blonde color they got after baking in the summer sun, so I assumed it was taken about six or seven months ago. It couldn’t have been much older than that because the wisps of gray, though less noticeable, were still prevalent around her ears.
Her background picture was the same one as before: her and the kids sitting on the front steps of the house, before going out for her birthday. It still amazed me to see Maggie as a teenager. Take away her dimples and she could be Denise when we first met. Then there was Ethan. At twelve years old, he looked ready for high school. A far cry from the towheaded toddler who used to follow me around everywhere I went, giggling the way only a two-year-old can when you blow raspberries on their belly.
Ordinarily, my next move would’ve been to scroll through her photos, looking for the one of her in the black dress and matching heels. The one taken at the wedding of a coworker we attended a year before everything turned to shit. The one she wore in anticipation of a night alone in a hotel room without the kids but wound up being torn off in an elevator instead, the emergency bell ringing in our ears, an act of passion that never would have happened without hours’ worth of free drinks leading up to it. In ten years, she hadn’t deleted the picture. Probably because I wasn’t in it.
But tonight, I never made it past the newest entry on her timeline. It was a photo, but not of her. She’d only been tagged in it. Her sister, Carol, was smiling that big, broad smile of hers. The kind that endeared her to all the kids in the daycare she ran out of her home. The same one that lights up the pages of our wedding album (assuming Denise hadn’t thrown it out), where she appears as the Maid of Honor.
Shorter than Denise and frumpy, she could easily have grown up to be a bitter, middle-aged woman. The kind who argued with the checkout person in a grocery store over an expired coupon she insists should still be deducted from her total. Especially after her husband, Bill, left her childless, her prime motherhood years all but gone, while he started a family with his tall, decidedly not-frumpy office manager.
Carol was the exact opposite of bitter, though. We always got along well. It was impossible not to get along with Carol.
Tonight, I hated her. Not for who she was, but more by association. In the photo that Carol had posted, she was holding a single sheet of paper. Heavy cardstock with eloquent script and silver embroidering around the edges. I could make out the words “You are cordially invited to the wedding of” but had to zoom in to read the rest. It was Denise’s name, a date (August 4), and a second name: Robert Baglioni.
“So excited to be my big sister’s Maid of Honor for a second time!” the caption read. It had racked up 124 likes and over 60 comments. Friends, family, coworkers. All wishing Denise well, telling her how happy they were for the two of them, and that they couldn’t wait to be there on the big day.
Denise had been dating him for about a year. He wasn’t in any pictures, but that didn’t mean anything. Cops can be notoriously shy when it comes to social media. After their first date, she’d written a post that included his full name. He must have said something to her, because the post was gone the next time I hacked in, and she referred to him only as Robert from then on. I’d just gotten lucky.
A simple Google search yielded only the skimpiest of biographies. The first hit was a 2015 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a drug bust in Kensington. The arresting officer was one Robert Baglioni. No photo. I scrolled some more. Found an article about another drug bust from 2016, an obituary for what appeared to be his grandmother, and an old link to his graduating class for the police academy. No photos anywhere. No social media presence at all that I could find.
If I wanted to dig deeper, I could have. I still had connections back in the States that would tell me everything I wanted to know about Detective Baglioni. But what was the point? By all accounts, he made her happy. And he must be good with the kids. Denise wouldn’t tolerate any man who wasn’t. So I opted to do the grown-up thing and accept it. She had moved on, and so would I.
At least, that’s what I told myself. Truth was, I didn’t want to know what he looked like, or what kind of man he was, or how many friends he had. I didn’t want to start tallying up our side-by-side stats and find that I came up way short. Easier to pretend to be the bigger man and just let the two of them live their lives.
But I never expected her to marry the son of a bitch.
“To Denise and Robert,” I said, holding my drink up to the empty room. I finished it in a single swallow and hurled the empty glass at the wall. It exploded, the broken shards joining the remnants of my TV screen on the floor.
I had every intention of side-arming the phone against the same spot, eyeballing the fresh gash in the blue paint as my target, but the last few brain cells that weren’t swimming in scotch stopped me before I went through with it.
There are more productive uses for the device in your hand, they suggested.
I stared at the screen, as if realizing for the first time that it could perform functions other than flagellation by way of social media.
“This is Rick,” I said into it after dialing a number I swore I’d never call again. “Carter.”
On the other end of the line, a female voice spoke. Quietly. Knowingly. “Thirty minutes,” she said.
I considered sweeping up, brushing my teeth, maybe showering while I waited. In the end I just sat and watched the minutes silently tick by on the same phone until the knock came against my useless door. I got to my feet, wobbling a little, and went to her.
