Hummingbird Salamander(57)

Ridiculous spy disguises. Friends of Silvina unused to some new focus? From the feds? From criminal organizations?

“What did she want this time?”

“She wanted me to sell the taxidermy I’d made. For her. I said no.”

“Because you knew it was dangerous?”

“Yeah. I thought for sure they’d tried to sell it already and something had gone wrong. I didn’t want any part of that.”

“Do you know what she needed the money for?”

I could hear the shrug over the line. “The way Ronnie talked about it, maybe they’d been in the middle of some project where the money dried up. She asked me if I knew anyone who could unload them. At a discount. I didn’t volunteer anyone.”

I chewed on that, asked, “Has anyone else been nosing around since I was there?”

“A couple strange phone calls. A guy outside I figured was watching the place. I’m leaving soon. Closing the shop for a while.” Or the shop was closing him.

“I’ve got a gun now.” Just blurted it out. Cursed the drink, but who knows where the impulse came from.

“Smart. That’s how you’ve lasted longer than…”

“Longer than you thought.”

He laughed. “Yeah. The person who walked into my store wasn’t going to last long. That I know.”

I didn’t want the grudging respect. Should’ve recoiled from that camaraderie. But instead I leaned into it.

“Where are you going to go?”

“Wouldn’t tell you.”

But I sort of knew. Upstate he had some land and a cabin where he used to hunt every summer. I cared. I didn’t care. What was the pang I felt? The pathetic sense that I could talk to Fusk about things I couldn’t tell my husband. And now Fusk was fading. Fusk was going to disappear. A sense of desperation came over me.

“Fusk?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think Silvina was a good person?”

As if he were some kind of final arbiter. As if his answer would settle it for me.

Fusk put me out of his misery. He hung up. I never talked to him again.





[62]


A vault of night. An enormity and weight to it. Beyond the trains and the cars and the traffic lights and drones. Stars were all airplanes and the streaks like lights were really lives, far above. Unless they were satellites. I just knew they weren’t stars. Something mysterious beneath or beyond the artificial. I was in a strange mood, almost an altered state.

The warehouse had a shallow, M-shaped roof with a tin-like texture, only thicker, and off-white walls lit only by a blurry yellow light out front. Woods to either side cocooning, enveloping. Nearest building was a gas station at a crossroads a quarter mile south. You could hear the highway, but distant. In theory, this was an incorporated part of the county, but not really. Enough little roads around and sudden elevations that it would be easy to double back and make sure you weren’t being followed. So I did. Then eased into a dirt parking space. A fallen tree nearby made me think no one had been here in a while. Or taken care of the place in a while, at least.

Another text came in as I took bolt cutters to the lock, put my shoulder to the jammed door to make it give, hollow out a space for the likes of me. I dropped the bolt cutters, read the glowing words.

Any satisfaction I’d felt at leaving Hellbender blind left me.

>>Jill, you need to tell me where you are.

I couldn’t move. Felt like I was suffocating, realized I was holding my breath.

Jill. Only one person had gotten “Jill” as my name the past three years. The man who had stood me up at the conference. The one who had given me a false hotel room number.

So that was Hellbender. Not Langer but some third party.

Tracking me all the way to New York. Wanted a look. A guy brazen enough to dress in a clown wig wouldn’t mind getting close. A guy who’d done that so I wouldn’t recognize him from the store clerk’s description.

Jack. Not Langer. And he wanted me to know it. To make me answer.

I began to text him back, but a car had slowed on the street beyond. Something European and expensive, like a Jetta. So I pushed the bolt cutters inside with my feet, pulled the door shut until it was only open a crack, and watched.

They cut their lights, rolling to a quiet stop next to my car. Three men got out, hard to see in the crappy lighting.

But one of them I thought I recognized, even though the haircut was different. Something about his affect raised the hairs on my arm.

Langer. Not on my phone after all, but there in the flesh. He had a sharp, intense look to him. He didn’t waste much motion. I hated him at a glance. Feared him, too. A kind of bulkiness built into Langer’s pals that I read as heavily armed.

I retreated into the warehouse. It smelled moldy and like rust. The corridor or antechamber was narrow and long, with a weird fake stone veneer to the floor. I guessed the wings filled out into storage rooms only accessible from farther in. Like a corridor you’d lead cattle down, then isolate them through a U to either side. I put a door between us, then another. I could hear Langer and his men, faint, at the front door, being cautious. Maybe there was a back way out.

I felt foolish. Raw and inexperienced.

Too late.

Through a small window in the next door, I could see that the main space lay beyond. A dim-lit vagueness suggesting height.