He didn’t call. I sat alone for an hour, and the phone never rang.
I fished the FBI card that Stuart Felicano had given me from my wallet. He’d asked me to call if I had any information. I’d told myself I never would, but I’d slipped the card into my wallet anyway. Now I wondered if that meant I’d always known I was a liar.
I dialed the cell number printed on the card.
After three rings, Felicano picked up.
“It’s Joe Kozmarski,” I said.
If I’d said I was a large roach, he might’ve sounded happier to talk with me. “What do you want?” he said.
“I’ve got information,” I said. “If you want Johnson and his crew, I can tell you where to find them tonight. You can get them on about thirty charges. Prostitution. Grand theft. Racketeering. Kidnapping too. I’ll testify for you. You don’t have to promise me anything.”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “You’re too late. We’re off the case.”
“What do you mean?” I almost dropped the phone.
“I mean, your friend Bill Gubman talked to my boss, and my boss talked to me. It’s part of a new spirit of cooperation between city and federal agencies, she said. This is a city matter. We’re letting the city cops handle it.”
“But Johnson has my partner-”
“Tell it to Gubman.”
“I tried but I can’t reach him.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?” I shouted.
“Not even very,” he said.
I hung up.
I paced the kitchen for awhile. That didn’t help, so I walked to the living room and sat on a chair next to the boy on the floor and the one on the couch. Their mother was somewhere else, probably upstairs. The video was ending, the credits rolling up the screen, and it all washed over me like a haze.
The seven-year-old rolled onto his back and stared at me. He looked worried and I figured I did too.
So I tried to smile. “Hey,” I said.
He smiled. “Hey.”
“What’s your name?”
“Emilio.”
His mother swept downstairs and into the room. She said, “¡Emilio, vete a tu cuarto!”-Go to your room. The boy got up and shuffled toward the hall. Sanchia turned to the older boy. “Tu tambien.” He got up and followed his brother.
“Buenas noches,” I said.
The seven-year-old giggled.
His mother didn’t. She turned to me. “You will wait here. My younger son will sleep in his brother’s room. You can sleep in his bed.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I can sleep down here.”
“No,” she said and gave me a look that let me know I was in her house and I would do as she told me.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded once and followed her boys upstairs.
A bath turned on. Sanchia talked with her boys in Spanish and English. I sat and listened and tried not to think.
When the house got quiet, I went up the stairs. A light was on in a bedroom-the younger boy’s. Toy cars, a tower made of Tinkertoys, and about a dozen jigsaw puzzles of jungle scenes and birds, neatly constructed and lined up edge to edge, covered the floor. The bed was unmade, the covers pushed to the bottom. Crayon pictures of birds hung on the walls. I went in and closed the door, stepped through the mess to the window, and opened the shade. Across a gap of about four feet, another window and another shade faced the house from next door. If you leaned out far enough, you could kiss your neighbor.
I closed the shade, sat on the bed, and took off my shoes, socks, and pants. I straightened the sheets. They smelled like soap and the gentle sweat of a kid. I climbed in and turned off the lamp, then closed my eyes and breathed deep.
After awhile, I slept, and sometime during the night I dreamed a good dream, one that I’d dreamed before. I was with Corrine and Jason. We were on a powerboat, motoring across blue-green Caribbean water. The sky was clear and the sun gleamed on the ocean ripples. We wore swimsuits and cotton shirts that billowed in the salt breeze. We said nothing to each other. We didn’t need to say anything. We were happy. Happy.
A hand shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes, expecting to see Corrine and Jason. The room was dark. The hand shook my shoulder some more. “Wake up!” whispered a voice, a woman’s, accented Spanish-Sanchia’s voice, I realized when she whispered again, “Wake up!”
“What?” I managed to say.
“Get up!” she whispered. “You must go.”
Other voices were yelling somewhere else. Downstairs. Outside. Men’s voices.
“Who-?” And then I knew and I sat bolt upright in bed.
“Quick,” Sanchia said and she stepped out of the bedroom.
I put on my pants and shoes and followed her into the dimly lighted hall.
The men outside were quiet now.
Sanchia opened a hall closet and took out an aluminum stepladder. She set it under a ceiling trapdoor.
“That go to the roof?” I asked.
She nodded and pointed toward the side of the house. “Three houses and you go inside. They wait for you,” she said.
Men shouted outside the house again.
I climbed the ladder, unfastened a latch, opened the heavy door, and heaved myself onto a flat tar roof.
Downstairs, someone kicked the front door, kicked it again, and kicked it a third time. Wood splintered and the door slammed open.
I turned and said, “Thanks,” but Sanchia was already putting the ladder back in the closet.
Heavy footsteps ran up the stairs.
I lowered the trapdoor and heard the latch snap shut, then stood still and silent in the cold night.
A man’s voice yelled at Sanchia. Not Finley’s. The voice of one of the other men in Johnson’s crew. He wanted to know where I was.
I didn’t hear Sanchia’s answer.
He yelled louder.
She yelled back, “¡No comprendo!”
The night was black and a cold breeze cut through my clothes. What could I do? Sanchia had said, Three houses and you go inside.
I looked both ways. On one side, there were two roofs and then the church with the mural of the naked woman in a canoe. On the other side, there were just roofs, four or five feet apart on the closely built houses.
They wait for you, Sanchia had said.
I inched quietly to the edge of the roof. In the shadows twenty feet down, garbage cans stood on the path between the houses. They would break my fall but not much.
I estimated the distance between Sanchia’s roof and the next one, breathed deep, and jumped. My foot caught the edge of the roof and I fell forward. Anyone under me would’ve thought an ox fell on the house. I got up, ran across the roof, and jumped again, landing on my feet.
Three houses.
The next gap was wider than the first two but I didn’t slow. I cleared it with plenty to spare.
In the middle of the roof, there was a trapdoor that matched the one on Sanchia’s house.
I ran to it and reached to open it but it opened as if on its own and a hand came out and then a man’s cheerful round face. “¡Hola!” the man said. “Come in before you freeze.”
I went down a stepladder into a dark house. “Come with me,” the man said and he led me to the stairway and downstairs. In the living room, he gestured at a sofa. “You can sleep here. I’ll get some blankets.” As he went to get them, he whistled cheerfully. It was three in the morning, a stranger had dropped through his ceiling into his house, and he was whistling.
I sat on the sofa and he brought two folded blankets and set them next to me. “Sleep now,” he said. “You’re safe here.” And, whistling, he climbed the stairs to the second floor.