Lisa Unger - Smoke

“That philosophy has not worked well for us in the past,” said Jeffrey.

“True,” said Lydia, nodding and meeting his eyes. “Let’s go home then.”

They were all quiet for a second. Dax was the first to laugh.

“So how do we get in there?” asked Lydia after a minute.

“Well, there’s good news and bad news,” said Dax. “The bad news is that there is no way into The New Day once it has been locked down. Not without setting off alarms. If I had six weeks for recon to gain passwords and a trained team, maybe. But since all I had was six hours and the two of you, we’ll need to get in while the place is still open.”

“What’s the good news?”

“There’s a door in the kitchen that supposedly opens only from the inside and is not attached to any alarm system before the place locks down at night. The plan is for one of you to get to that door and let the other one in. You use the same door to exit. It’s the only door in the building that doesn’t have a security shutter coming down over it at night. You should be able to push it open from the inside, no problem. Just remember, if you’re in there after the place locks down an alarm will sound. I’ll be on the street waiting in the Rover. But you’ll have to run. Fast.”

Lydia sighed, rubbed her head that was starting to ache. “So what? We’re just going to walk in the front door?”

“There’s a meeting tonight,” said Jeffrey, looking at his watch. “In forty-five minutes.”

“Okay,” said Lydia, standing. “I’ll go in and meet you at the door, Jeffrey.”

He shook his head. “No way. I go in and meet you at the door.”

“I want to see Trevor Rhames,” she said, pulling her coat back on.

He looked at her. “You’ve been followed. They know who you are.”

“Not necessarily,” she said weakly, regretting having said anything. “It could have been a coincidence. Some random freak.”

“Give me a break,” he said. She could tell he was getting mad because she saw the small vein on his temple pop out.

“Look. If they know who I am, then they know who you are and we both have an equal chance of being made. I’ll wear a hat and some glasses. I’ll be inconspicuous.”

“We’ll talk about it in the car,” said Dax, moving toward the door.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” said Jeffrey, following him.

“You’re right about that,” said Lydia, closing the door behind them.

Matt thought, not for the first time, that Missing Persons might not be the right place for him. He pulled into the driveway of his house and looked over at his parents’ bedroom window. It was dark, but he knew his mother had heard his car pull up, seen the lights in the drive. He took the extra-large pizza, six-pack of Coronas and Lily Samuels’ file off the passenger seat and went into his house.

When he’d stopped back by the precinct, he’d seen Rosa there at her cube, poring over the Mendez file. She had a desperate, angry look to her that he recognized from the mirror. He knew what she was thinking. How can a flesh and blood person just disappear? It’s not right .

He had walked over toward her and leaned on a desk nearby.

“Any developments?” he’d asked pointlessly.

She shook her head and looked up at him. Evelyn Rosa was a café au lait-skinned woman, with fifteen years on her and a bad attitude. She would have been beautiful but she was hard as granite, tough from growing up on the streets of the Bronx, tougher still from her years on the street as a cop. For all that steel in her, every once in a while, she’d come in with a bruise on her arm or the shadow of a shiner. Rumor was her live-in boyfriend of over ten years sometimes had too much to drink and they went at it. Apparently she gave as good as she got-most of the time.

“I hear you gave Alonzo a hard time today,” she said.

“Yeah, sorry. He got to me,” said Matt. “He really got to me.”

“He has that effect on people. I really hate that motherfucker.”

“You think he killed her?”

She nodded. “I think he killed her and doesn’t give a shit about it. But I’ve got no evidence. Nothing. And he’s all lawyered up now.”

“Where’s your partner?”

“He went home. He figures we’re looking for a corpse. No rush.”

She shrugged and couldn’t meet his eyes. He felt for her.

In his living room, he saw Rosa’s face again. Haunted, she’d looked haunted. He imagined that they were all getting that look about them, all of them that were carrying around the ultimate unanswered question. Where have they gone?

How are you supposed to live with this job? he wondered, as he flipped open the lid of the pizza box and scrolled through the channel guide on his digital cable with his other hand. He had the sound down and flashed through the images quickly: a guy pulling a huge marlin from crystal green waters, a woman crying by a fireplace looking beautiful and sad; a couple kissing.

Homicide, okay. The deed was done; your job was to find the perpetrator and bring justice. But Missing Persons, you had to find people who have dropped away from their lives. There was a terrible urgency at first and then when those intense thirty-six hours passed, slowly people moved away from it. When people started to get the sense that a person has fallen through one of the cracks in the universe, that when news does come, it will be bad, they start to distance themselves. Even cops did this, the good ones anyway, the effective ones. The sane ones. It probably helped if you had kids or something else important going on in your life. Those guys were able to keep the ones that never got found off the list of things that they thought about in bed at night. He hadn’t been able to do that. Not with Lily. He thought about her all the time, even when he was thinking about Rosario Mendez.

He flipped off the television and walked to the kitchen where he popped the lid off a Corona. There were two plates of dinner in the refrigerator for him and a note on the Formica table in the kitchen. “Eat!” it read. “Love, Mom!” He felt guilty for bringing home the pizza. She’d see the box when she came in to clean and her feelings would be hurt. He’d have to remember to take it out to the garbage can on the side of the house before he left in the morning.

He walked through his house and upstairs without turning on the lights. His row house was spotlessly clean, not a speck of dust on the used furniture collected from his brother, his parents, his cousins. The only things he’d bought himself were the big-screen television in the living room that sat in front of a blue velour couch that had once belonged to one of his aunts, and the new desktop computer that sat on the old wood desk in the spare room upstairs, the desk on which, as a kid, he’d done his math homework. Up in his bedroom, he knew he’d find his laundry in neat piles on his bed, his shirts pressed and hanging in the closet.

Upstairs, he set the Corona on the desk, booted up the computer, and opened Lily’s file again. Maybe it was the fiftieth or the one-hundredth time he’d been through it. But he had new information now, information about The New Day, thanks to Lydia Strong. Maybe there was something he’d missed before. Maybe.

It took Jesamyn exactly one evening with Dylan to remember why they weren’t married anymore.

The three of them had shared a pepperoni pizza and then piled into Jesamyn’s Explorer, heading up to her apartment. They were all light, laughing, joking around like a normal, happy family. Once strapped into the backseat, Benjamin was asleep in under ten, emitting a funny little snore that had Dylan and Jesamyn giggling quietly.