The radiator was ping , ping , ping ing when Rufus and Sam stepped through the front door of the tiny tenement studio just after seven o’clock. Rufus held a pizza box in both hands—paid for with an IOU. He kicked the door shut, shoved the box onto the miniscule counter space, and let out a held breath. He dug his burner phone free, thumb hovering over the touchscreen for a long moment before he reluctantly inputted Erik’s number.
The city hadn’t been the free-for-all of Rufus’s childhood for a long time. Back then, bad men could get away with unfathomable crimes simply due to the lack of surveillance or security footage for the law to fall back on. Nowadays, there were cameras everywhere. Not just at ATM machines or inside retail shops, but at traffic lights, on subway platforms, inside apartment lobbies, even elevators. And while Rufus was good at looking unimportant, was great even, at being forgettable, Erik hadn’t been born yesterday. He’d been the one to mention the eighteenth floor, the elevator, the footage. And when Colonel Bridges’s body would eventually be discovered by housekeeping, Erik would be checking the cameras again. He’d see his CI right there in the middle of it.
Rufus needed to establish his whereabouts with his handler before things got messy.
Messier , he thought, when Erik picked up.
Rufus wasted no time in admitting that they hadn’t gone directly home to “play house,” but had instead found a DB in the en suite bathroom of room 1802 at the Savoy, although he kept the email printouts found on the colonel’s body to himself. Rufus had to practically yell over Erik’s explosive bitching that he’d been out to lunch at Diabla around noon—ask the staff if they remember the redhead who asked for no ice and, like, three refills of Pepsi—he’d been at his scheduled therapy afterward—Sam was even signed in at the front desk—and then they’d been at the Javits when Evangeline had gone kaput. There was simply no possibility, based on the level of rigor seen in the body, that Rufus could be involved with the murder.
Rufus wasn’t a killer, for Christ’s sake.
He was just having some monumentally bad luck this week.
Maybe it was a full moon.
Or maybe Mercury was in retrograde. Isn’t that what astrology girlies usually blamed for their shitty day?
After Rufus hung up, he tossed the cell onto the pizza box, but it slid off the cardboard and fell into the sink with an obnoxious clatter.
He left it there. “Come eat something.”
“Someone shot him,” Sam said. He pushed a hand through his hair. “Twice. What the fuck is that?”
Rufus cast his winter garments to the floor. He flipped open the lid on the box and removed a slice. He folded the pizza, took a big bite, then asked between chews, “How relevant is the argument the colonel had with Del in the hotel bar, you think?”
Sam didn’t appear to have heard him. He rubbed his chin, expression distant, and then said again as though speaking to himself, “What the fuck is that? What does he want ?”
Rufus had started to raise the pizza to his mouth again, but stopped. “He who? Del?”
“Del? No, Lew.”
Rufus dropped the slice back into the box and wiped his hands on his jeans. “What the fuck’s Lew got to do with the dead colonel?”
“What the fuck does he have to do with it? What does that mean? He’s been up to his ass in this from the beginning, Rufus. She said his name—Shareed, I mean. And Stonefish, Went—do you want me to draw you a map?”
“We talked about this already. Before accusing Lew like we’re in a game of Clue, you’ve got to look at the available evidence objectively.”
Sam drew a deep breath. Then he shucked his coat and sat on the bed to undo his boots.
At Sam’s non-answer, Rufus rolled his eyes. “The silent treatment. Cool.”
“I think we could use some silence,” Sam said. He scooted back along the mattress until his back was pressed against the wall, flattened the emails Rufus had taken from the colonel against his thigh, and bent over them like a man who was choosing to read instead of commit murder.
Rufus stood at the sink, his back to Sam. He finished the slice of mostly cold pizza. After, he retrieved his phone, got a drink from the tap to wash the wedge of crust down his throat, and took the box to the bed. He dropped it on the floor, motioned to it like Sam could help himself, then sat on the mattress. He held a hand out. “Can I read those too?”
Sam grunted and slid the pages he’d already read toward Rufus.
Rufus read the entirety of each printed email twice, from header to footer, because he didn’t want to keep feeling ignorant about military whatchamacallits and thingamajigs. The back and forth between Del Jolly and Colonel Leslie Bridges, in his uneducated opinion, seemingly amounted to: Do me a big favor? Stonefish got a little fucked. Can you keep that on the DL so Conasauga keeps getting government contracts? Thanks, babe, I owe ya.
Rufus didn’t need a college degree to recognize blackmail material. He understood now what Shareed had been doing in the elevator, what she’d been delivering to the eighteenth floor. Looking sideways, Rufus couldn’t tell if Sam was still reading or pretending. So he just stated, “If the colonel knew about Conasauga’s past fuckups, would that be enough reason to consider him a danger to the company’s future? Enough of a danger to Del’s success?”
“Maybe.” Sam was staring off into space. “He said, ‘We had a deal.’”
Rufus tapped the pages he held in one hand. “This.”
“Yeah, of course, but—” He stopped again. “That’s not how it sounded. He said—how did he say it? ‘I did what you wanted.’ That’s not quite it. Del was practically begging. He didn’t sound like a man who was about to kill someone.”
His voice low, Rufus murmured, “People kill when they’re afraid, Sam.”
Sam rubbed his thumb between his eyebrows. After what felt like a long time, he said, “He kills the colonel, but he leaves incriminating paperwork on the body. What’s that about?”
“I don’t know,” Rufus said, doing his best to keep irritation from coloring his tone. “So Del’s an idiot. Maybe he’s not good at killing people and freaked out. Like a panic attack.”
“He killed him in the shower. Two shots to the chest. That’s not a panic attack, that’s an execution.”
Rufus set aside the papers and climbed to his feet. “We both know I’m an idiot, so explain to me why you don’t believe, based on the content of those emails, that Del wouldn’t have reason to kill the colonel.”
“You’re not an idiot. That’s not what I meant.” Sam pulled on his shirt the way he did sometimes when the sensory overload got to be too much, but his voice stayed level—or close enough. “What if it was Lew? What if it was someone else, I mean. Someone trying to make it look like Del did this. Isn’t that at least a possibility?”
Rufus reluctantly leaned down to be eye level. “It’s a possibility,” he agreed. “It’s just… I hesitate to believe that level of subterfuge is actually going on.”
Music filtered into the apartment—AC/DC. And, right on cue, a moment later Pauly Paul began to sing. Badly.
“All right,” Sam said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Whether Lew did this or—or Del, either way, this is proof that Stonefish was a cover-up. You saw the emails; Del needed Stonefish to go away, and the colonel made it go away. And that means somebody, somewhere, knows what really happened to Went.”
Rufus was quiet as he slowly drew himself back up to his full, albeit lanky, height. He considered how to say this—because if you didn’t know the intimate ins and outs of depression, if you didn’t know that crippling, debilitating sense of hopelessness, the ideation that was far stronger than the fear of death, of the unknown, that made a bullet or a rooftop feel like the only answer, the only way out, the truth could sound… cruel. But Rufus decided, even if it hurt beyond measure to hear, Sam would know it came from a place of real understanding.
“Sometimes… people just want to die. Sometimes life eats at you until you’ve had enough—until you can’t do it anymore. Sometimes, there’s no conspiracy.”
Sam nodded. “But at least I’d know.”