The Lola Quartet (26 page)

   "It'll be nice when it's over with."

   "It will be like it never happened," Sasha said, and he saw how desperately she wanted this. "We'll pay back the debt and he'll disappear. Are you ordering food?"

   "Two hard-poached eggs and multigrain toast," he said.

   She nodded and turned away from him. He watched her recede across the restaurant, wondering why, if this whole thing was simply a matter of paying off a debt, Liam Deval was in Florida with a gun.

W h e n 
G a v i n  went back to the diner the following night, Sasha was at a banquette with a girl. His breath caught, but she wasn't his daughter. She was older than the girl in the photograph. He realized as he crossed the room that he'd seen her before, leaning on the door frame of a house where everyone was sleeping, her eyes closed.

   "May I join you?" he asked. Sasha had watched his approach. She shrugged, so he sank into the booth across from them. The girl was sitting by the window with Sasha beside her, and it seemed to Gavin that she was dressed oddly. The last time he'd seen her she'd been wearing cut-off shorts and a dirty t-shirt, but now she wore a cheap-looking white-and-pink dress with scratchy-looking lace and bows on the sleeves. She looked like a thirteen-year-old playing at being nine. Her hair was darker than he remembered.

   "Hello, Grace," he said.

   "You two know each other?"

   "I've seen her around."

   The girl only watched him. He couldn't read her expression. She was perfectly still.

   "She doesn't talk much," Sasha said.

   "Probably wise." The girl's silence made Gavin uneasy. "Only gets you in trouble." It occurred to him that she was probably always in trouble anyway. "You dyed your hair," he said. He realized that he had absolutely no idea how to speak to a thirteen-year-old, and he seemed to have said the wrong thing. Grace winced.

   "She's being a good sport," Sasha said. "Aren't you, Grace?"

   "A good sport?" A plan unfolding all around him while he only grasped at its hanging threads. "What do you mean?"

   "You said you knew the plan," Sasha said. "You know exactly what I mean."

   "They said if I sat here in this dress by the window," Grace said, in a voice so soft he could hardly hear her, "then I wouldn't face charges."

   "Charges," he repeated helplessly. He was so close now but he still couldn't see it, he didn't quite grasp how her presence here fit into any sort of a larger scheme, the story just beyond his reach. "Who said that, Grace?"

   "The detective," Grace said. "The detective and Anna."

   "Grace," Sasha said, "would you listen to your music for a minute?"

   Grace had a tiny plastic purse, suitable for a girl much younger. She zipped it open with difficulty— it was cheap, and the zipper stuck— and pulled out a scratched-up iPod, inserted the earbuds and looked away from them. He could hear the music very faintly but couldn't make out what it was.

   "Sasha," Gavin whispered, "I don't know this part of the plan. Could you tell me what's going on here?"

   "What do you mean, you don't know this part of the plan? This
is
the plan."

   "She's not— you're not giving her to anyone, are you?"

   "Of course not," Sasha whispered. "You know that. She's a decoy."

   "So nothing will happen to her?"

   "She'll sit here as planned, and at a certain point I'll walk her toward

the back door in full view of someone who will be waiting outside in the parking lot. That's all."

   "Why her?"

   "She's a runaway," Sasha said softly. "She's facing drug charges. She's at hand."

   "So if she sits here as a decoy, the drug charges go away?"

   "All she has to do is remain in full view through the windows while a payment gets handed off in the parking lot. It's not such a bad deal. How do you not know all of this? You said you knew the—"

   "What happens to her afterward?"

   "Afterward? I'll drive her home."

   "The home she ran away from."

   "It's an imperfect world. Would you rather have Chloe sitting here?"

   Gavin was silent.

   "Me neither," she said, " Grace made a deal. She knows what she's doing. Nothing will happen to her."

   "Then why not have Chloe here?"

   "There's always a risk."

   "And you think this girl's disposable." Something was welling up inside him. He reached across the table and pulled the earbuds gently from Grace's head. He heard thin tinny voices. She was listening to rap.

   "Grace," he said, "do your parents know you're here?"

   Grace reached for the earbuds and turned her face to the window. Sasha was glaring at him.

   "Gavin, what the hell was that?"

   "She's so goddamn young," he said.

   "We all were, at one point or another." Sasha sipped her coffee, watching him over the rim. It struck him, watching her, that he'd never realized how hard she was. "And we all survived our youths, didn't we? She fell into our laps. She's a little old for our purposes, but she looks young for thirteen and Chloe's almost eleven. It's plausible." Sasha glanced at her watch. "Are you really supposed to be here for this?"

   "No," Gavin said, "I don't think I am." His arm was throbbing, a dull sick pain. The floor lurched alarmingly when he stood, the diner lights too bright. "Will you . . . could you possibly tell me where to find Anna?"

   "I don't know where she is," Sasha said. "She just said she was going to another motel."

   "If she— if you speak with her," he said, "will you tell her I'd like to talk?"

   "I will," Sasha said.

   " Thank you." He crossed the room and opened the door with his good hand, walked out of the air conditioning into the heat and the darkness of the parking lot. Long after dark but he still felt heat radiating from the pavement.

   A taxi was pulling into the parking lot. Gavin stepped between two cars and watched Liam Deval get out. Deval paid the driver, but he didn't enter the diner. He was walking toward the back of the building, where shadows hung black and the parking lot faded into bushes and weeds, and Gavin didn't want to see any more. When he looked up Grace was still listening to music in the window, her hair falling over her face. Sasha was staring into her coffee cup.

   The diner wasn't far from his apartment, two miles, maybe three. Gavin slipped between the parked cars and walked quickly away from there, turned away from Route 77 onto a side street. The beauty of the suburbs at night, streetlight shining through palm trees, the flicker of sprinklers on lawns, strange shadows. The pleasure of being alone outside after all these days of interiors. He was wandering through a new housing development when he realized he was lost. He didn't recognize the name of the street he was on. Half of the new houses seemed vacant. At the far end of the development they weren't even finished yet, skeletal beams against the sky. Raw dirt driveways with tall weeds, an abandoned bulldozer silhouetted black. Does a house still count as a ruin if it's abandoned before it's done? Asphalt soft beneath his shoes. He was aware of his footsteps on the silent street.

   He crossed an expanse of weeds to the next cul-de-sac, an older neighborhood where the houses had people in them, out onto a wider commercial strip. A 7-Eleven was shining like a beacon ahead. He went in and bought a map. His thoughts were scattered. He didn't think he'd wandered that far from Route 77, but it took Gavin and the 7-Eleven counter guy a solid five minutes to find themselves on the map. All the streets looped and circled back on themselves and crashed up against grids, the grids broke into a spaghetti chaos of freeways and came back together on the other side and then disintegrated into loops again, and also the 7-Eleven guy was stoned.

   Gavin found the intersection closest to his apartment after a while, but the loops and circles of the outer suburbs made for a confounding route and the 7-Eleven guy was distracted by the way all the streets
converged
, man. Gavin thanked him and set off in what he thought was the correct direction, but it wasn't easy to tell and all his thoughts were of Anna, Chloe, the girl in the diner. He kept realizing that he'd been walking without thinking, taking random turns. He wandered in and out of three cul-de-sacs. All the houses looked the same to him. Dogs barked occasionally. A shadow in the middle of the street turned into the silhouette of an animal he couldn't identify, then ran off into the bushes. An iguana, he decided a few blocks later, and he wished the street had been bright enough to see its skin.

   Gavin lost track of where he was on the map, so he resolved to set his course by the stars. It was a clear night and in theory he was trying to get home again, but it seemed to him later that he'd really just wanted to keep walking and stay alone with his thoughts, away from the diner where at this moment a glassy-eyed runaway in a frilly dress was playing the part of his daughter and a plan that had a gun in it was moving into action. He was trying to understand and something was pulling at him, a memory of a story covered years ago by the
New York
Star
, something about a lost child. Gavin found the North Star and kept it over his left shoulder, or tried to, but the streets wouldn't cooperate.

A
f t e r  s o m e  time Gavin came upon a wider road— a semitrailer roared past in the darkness— and ahead were the bright signs of chain restaurants, a shopping mall that he recognized. The mall had faux-Greek pillars around the entrance, a banner reading summer midnite madness
!!!

sagging over the glass doors.

   Gavin walked blinking into the mall's winter chill and found a bench under a plastic-and-fabric palm tree. It was a mall filled with elevators and mezzanines. He found himself gazing blankly up at the levels of other people, these stragglers under the spell of a late-night summer sale, sales clerks smiling fixedly from store entrances. What was the
Star
story? It had been published years ago but there was something in it that he thought might somehow pull everything together, if only he could remember the details. There had been a lost boy in the Bronx, a transaction. He hadn't worked on the story but he remembered his editor and another reporter talking about it, and what was startling was that after all these months, here under the halogen lights of this distant southern land, in this unrecognizable life, he still had his editor's cell-phone number programmed into his phone. He scrolled through the names, all these ghosts from his vanished life, let her name slide past on the screen three times before he summoned the courage to press the button that sent the call through the satellites to New York.

   "I almost didn't pick up," Julie said. He imagined her in the night quiet of the
Star
newsroom, her stocking feet on her desk and her hand on her forehead, the far-off look she always had when she talked on the telephone.

   "Hello, Julie," he said. He hadn't seen her since an afternoon months earlier, a different lifetime actually, when he'd risen from a conference-room table with her and the editor-in-chief and the directors of the personnel and legal departments staring at him and walked out of the
Star
building for the last time.

   "You know where I work now?" Her tone was studiedly casual. "A
website,
Gavin. There isn't even paper involved anymore."

   "You lost your job?"

   "Most of us did."

   "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't tell you how sorry I am." He could think of nothing else to say. He closed his eyes against the mall's cool light and pressed the palm of his hand against the plastic bench.

   "I'm not even going to ask why you lied in your stories, Gavin. Nothing you could possibly say would make it better."

   "I wasn't myself," he said. "I came a little undone."

   "Just like that," Julie said, but she sounded deflated, the fight fading from her voice. It was, after all, one thirty in the morning. She sighed audibly and he reformatted his image of her into another, imagined office. What kind of space would a website occupy? He pictured a loft, an open workspace, her feet up on a different desk, the ceiling so high that shadows gathered up above her.

   "Julie, I have to ask you something. It's about a story."

   "You know, I've often wished over the past few months that you'd

come to me to ask about stories," she said. "But it seems a little late now, doesn't it?"

   "You have no reason to believe me," he said, "but it's important. I wouldn't have called if it wasn't."

   She was silent, but she didn't hang up.

   "Do you remember two years ago, maybe two and a half, the paper covered a story about an abandoned boy in the Bronx? You worked on the story. I think there'd been a shootout or something, and the kid had somehow been part of it. There was some kind of drug connection."

   "Theo," she said, after a moment. "Theo Cordell. He was seven."

   "Will you tell me about it? I was thinking about it just now."

   "You called me at, what, one thirty-five in the morning," Julie said, "to ask about a story I worked on two years ago?"

   "I knew you'd be up."

   "You knew I'd be up. Fine," she said, "why not? Let's tell each other stories. A seven-year-old boy was found wandering in the Bronx after a shootout. Turned out the boy's father was one of the men who'd been shot. He'd taken the kid along to some meeting, I can't remember all the details but it was a drop-off of some kind, at the other party's request."

   "But why would the other person request that? Wouldn't a kid just get in the way?"

   "The deal was, if either the product or the count was off, I can't remember which it was, the other party would take the kid."