Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(2)

“She’s still up there,” I tell him. “You can see her leg.”

“Her leg?” I can hear him typing. “What else? Hold on … Bruce!” He’s shouting to the photo editor. “Bruce, who’s out there for you? Rebekah … who’s there for photo?”

“I haven’t seen anybody.”

“Hold on.” He clicks off. I try to communicate with Mike in these conversations. Every shift it’s the same: he tells me where to go and why; I tell him what I find. I’ve seen him in person twice in six months. He’s fifty pounds overweight, like most of the men in the newsroom, but unlike most of them he is polite and soft-spoken. When I walked into the office after three weeks of speaking several times a day, he said hello and avoided eye contact, then turned back to his computer.

I rock back and forth in my boots. I’m standing in the sun, and I’ve got fleece inserts over socks over tights, but I still can’t feel my toes. Mike comes back on the phone.

“Johnny’s coming.”

“Johnny from Staten Island?”

“Yeah. Larry is working sources at 1PP.” Larry Dunn is the Trib’s longtime police bureau chief. “Talk to somebody from the scrap yard. We’re hearing a worker called it in. Is Calloway there?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t lose sight of him.”

“Got it.”

“I’m going to the meeting with a woman in a scrap heap. We need an ID.”

“I’m on it,” I say.

The rest of the TV newspeople start rolling up in their vans. The on-air reporters always ride shotgun, camera techs squat with the equipment in the back. Gretchen Fiorello from the local Fox station steps out carrying her battery-powered microphone. She’s in full makeup, eyes lined and shadowed, lipstick just applied, and her strawberry blond hair is coiffed so that it lifts as one entity against the wind. She’s wearing panty hose and slip-on heels and a matching scarf and mittens set.

DCPI has nothing new, and the men at the scrap heap are still staring up at the steel fist with the body in it, so I push into the gas station convenience store to warm up. Working stakeouts or active scenes in the cold requires a tedious amount of energy. Hot coffee or tea warms you best from the inside out, but if you’ve got your hands wrapped around a cup, you can’t take notes. Plus, the more you drink, the more likely it is you have to find a bathroom—which usually isn’t easy. I shake powdered creamer into a white cardboard cup and pour myself some coffee from a mostly empty pot sitting on a warmer. I pay, then stand beside the front window and sip. From where I’m standing I can see most of the scrap yard.

My phone rings. It’s my roommate, Iris.

“Where are you?” she asks. Iris and I both majored in journalism at the University of Central Florida, but she works in a cubicle on Fifty-seventh Street and I’m never in the same place for more than a couple hours.

“Right by home,” I say. We share an apartment just a few blocks away. This is the first time I’ve ever been on a story in Gowanus. “The canal.”

“Jesus,” says Iris. “Hypothermic yet?”

“Nearly.”

“Can you still come?” We have plans for drinks with an amorphous group of alums from Florida tonight.

“I think so.” My shift is over around five.

“Will Tony be there?”

Tony is a guy I’ve been hooking up with. He’s very much not Iris’s type, but I like him. Iris likes metrosexuals. The guy she’s sort of seeing now has highlights and the jawline of a Roman statue. Tony is very not metrosexual. He just turned thirty and he’s balding, but he shaves his head. I wouldn’t call him fat, but he’s definitely a big guy. We met on New Year’s Eve at the bar he manages, which also happens to be the bar where UCF alums meet for drinks and where Iris and I ended up after a weird party at someone’s loft in Chelsea. He kissed me across the bar when the clock struck midnight and then we spent the next two hours kissing. He’s an amazing kisser. And despite his decidedly less than polished appearance, Iris seems to like him. Iris is the beauty assistant at a women’s magazine. We haven’t had to purchase shampoo, nail polish, lipstick, soap, or any other grooming toiletry since she started last summer.

“I think so,” I say.

“You don’t know?”

I don’t want to get into it, but I didn’t return his last text—and Tony isn’t the kind of guy who’s gonna blow up a girl’s phone.

“I’ll be there by six,” Iris says.

“Me, too,” I say.

I tuck my phone back into my coat pocket and put my face to the steam rising from my coffee. Bodega coffee almost always smells better than it tastes.

The glass door rings open and two Jewish men walk inside, carrying the cold on their coats. I know they’re Jewish because they’re wearing the outfit: big black hat, long black coat, beard, sidecurls. It’s not subtle.

The men walk to the back corner of the convenience store, and the tall one whispers fiercely at the other, who looks at the floor in a kind of long nod. Behind them by a few steps is a boy, a four-foot clone of the men, in a straight black wool coat, sidecurls, a wide-brimmed hat. His nose and the tips of his fingers shine like raw meat. He is shivering. The two men ignore him, and he seems to know not to get too close to their conversation. He stamps his feet, laced tight in neat black leather oxfords, and shoves his little hands into his pockets.