The Reign of the Kingfisher Read online

  “Them?”

  “Penny and Paulina.”

  “Hold up. You think Paulina is in danger, too?”

  “I’m just trying to cover bases. When did you last see them?”

  “All right. I saw Penny,”—he thought about it for a while—“maybe two days ago. He came home to change clothes and take a shower and then he went back to Lucky’s. And I saw Paulina yesterday morning. Before she left for work.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “Mercy Hospital.” And he added, proudly, “She’s a CNA. Just got her degree.”

  “What time did her shift end last night?”

  “She worked a twelve, so about nine, I guess.” Ibrahim seemed to ball up, constricting against the weight of these questions, the subtext lingering beneath them. He was grabbing his hair with white knuckles, maybe just to hold on to something. “Are you trying to tell me that whoever killed that guy might kill Penny? He might have my girl, too?”

  “I’m not saying that. Just being cautious is all.”

  Ibrahim nodded, breathing out deeply.

  “I need some things from you,” she said. “I need Penny’s cell phone number, along with your fiancée’s. I might try to get in touch with them myself. And while you’re at it, give me some names of people I might want to talk to in order to get in touch with Penny. But if I were you, I’d also start trying to track them down yourself, because I have to go check up on someone else after this.”

  As he jotted down phone numbers and names on the back of an envelope, Tillman was suddenly reminded of a question she had meant to ask, more out of personal curiosity than anything else. “I take it the police haven’t stopped by here today looking for Penny?”

  Ibrahim shook his head, still scribbling. “Should I call them?”

  “May not be a bad idea,” she said. She wasn’t at all surprised the cops hadn’t shown up, but she wished she were. This only confirmed what she had already known—Stetson wasn’t looking for the hostages. Or even if he was, he wasn’t looking all that hard. “If you get in touch with the police, I’d just ask that you keep my visit between us.”

  He nodded automatically. “Sure.”

  Tillman left her number with him. But before she could leave, he grabbed her elbow. She pulled away, but only to turn and find him looking at her with a pained expression, begging and unassuming. “Be straight with me. Do you think Paulina is in trouble? I know you don’t know for sure, but just tell me what you think.”

  She ignored the question. Any answer could only lead to unnecessary pain. “Give me a call if you find them,” Tillman said over her shoulder as she shut the door behind her.

  She exited out into the hallway, which had fallen silent, save for the distant tremors of a subwoofer several stories overhead blasting techno music. She took her phone from her pocket and texted Jeremiah an update, as per his request: No Penny. Talked to daughter’s fiancé. Said he hadn’t seen either of them since yesterday. And then she sent another: No cops dropped by. Going to check on Bedford.

  As she passed down the stairwell and back out onto the street, the sky was drab with the cloak of a soon-to-be thunderstorm. She entered the next address into her GPS and lit a cigarette. It felt magnificent to smoke out in the open once again, instead of hiding on her fire escape from her father. She nearly felt like a cop again. But as soon as she felt this, she pushed the thought away. She wasn’t a cop. Not right now and maybe not anymore. She was a citizen doing what the cops should have been doing.

  She got a reply from Jeremiah as she started the SUV: Fucking Stetson. Followed by: Keep me updated. Be careful with Bedford. Dude’s got a long rap sheet. I’ve got a bad feeling.

  10 QUEEN CLEOPATRA AND ANNABELLE LEE

  WHEN WREN RETURNED TO THE APARTMENT after her shift at the bowling alley, Parker was seated in the same spot and same position as that morning—hunched over the couch, her laptop on her knees. The only change in the surroundings was a half-eaten Bowl-O’-Noodles between Parker’s crossed legs. She stared into her laptop and acknowledged Wren’s arrival with only a grunt. Either Parker was still upset with her for leaving that morning or she was too engrossed in her work. Or she was simply being herself. Parker had never been what Wren might call an “emotive” person, and she had learned that trying to read Parker’s various and inscrutable emotional states was a certain brand of torture not worth the effort. Not like that ever stopped her, though.

  Wren passed directly to their bedroom, where she stripped down to her underwear and lay down on the egg-crate mattress. The box fan hummed lazily in the window, joining the cadence of rain tapping at the glass.

  She wanted to smoke a joint, or a few of them, but it was Parker’s week to buy weed and she always procrastinated on these things.

  “Guess today’s a granny panty sort of day?”

  Wren saw Parker leaning against the doorway, studying Wren’s beige and ill-fitting underwear. Parker had a way of smirking without a detectable movement of her lips. It was a talent she brandished often.

  “Shut up.” Wren smiled. “It’s a million degrees in here.”

  Parker cleared a space on the mattress and sat down beside Wren.

  “I don’t know if you saw this or not,” she said. “I’m guessing you were busy doing whatever exactly it was that you do at that shitty bowling alley. But I wanted to let you know that the rest of us voted.” She paused. “We’re going to hack the CPD servers for the ME report. Tonight.”

  “Did you say our move?”

  “We’re a group, Wren. We voted.”

  “For a collective of anarchists, I’m a little confused by the sudden democratic logic.”

  “I know you don’t want to do this.” Parker spoke calmly, but without so much as a trace of apology. “We all know you’re against it. You made yourself pretty clear on the thread. Very clear, actually. But still, we want your help. We need your help. We won’t get within a mile of their servers without you. You know that. We need decryption. We need you.”

  Wren stared at her fingernail as though she had found something intensely interesting beneath it, but she still felt the weight of Parker’s gaze.

  “Are you going to say anything?” Parker asked. “We need you, Wren. Don’t overthink this. We don’t have time for you to overthink.”

  “I don’t know,” Wren mumbled. “It’s just that I think we’re making a huge mistake. We can’t give that gunman what he wants. It’s wrong.”

  “We would be saving those other hostages. How is it that wrong?”

  “Because. It just is.”

  “Not good enough. Tell me how.”

  “When death becomes a means to an end”—she paused, searching for her thoughts—“there’s no way back from that. We become just like them. Just like the gunman. Just like the police. We’d be compromising our morals and ethics and codes just to protect ourselves.”

  “We’re not just protecting ourselves. We’re protecting those hostages.” Parker’s rebuttals were always crisp, delivered with a confidence difficult to see beyond. “Because the police aren’t doing it. They could deliver the ME report and put an end to this, but they aren’t. They won’t. They’re going to let innocent people die just because they won’t release some stupid file? If that’s the case, someone needs to intervene, and we’re the only ones capable of it. But we need your help.”

  It was only mid-afternoon, but Wren wanted to take a shower and feel the day slide from her skin, pool around her ankles, swirl down the drain, and flush out into the reservoir of everyone else’s yesterday.

  Parker reclined on the mattress. “We can’t change the fact that someone died. It’s tragic and sick. It fucking sucks. All of us agree on that. And we’ve condemned the video as a group on all of our social media accounts. But the truth is if the police won’t find a way to fix this, then we need to be the ones to protect this city, to save those other hostages. We need to put an end to this. And the only way we can is to take the ME report. But it’s g
oing to be hard, even with all of us. The FBI is going to be monitoring the CPD servers like hawks. But we need to do it.”

  “Do what? Assist a murderer?”

  Wren expected Parker to become angry, but she didn’t. In fact, she only moved closer. “Here’s how I see it. We can either sit back and allow the cops to decide what the public gets to see, which will result in who-knows-how-many more deaths, or we can take that report from them and put an end to this fucking violence. Neither option is perfect, obviously, but if we don’t act at all, that’s even worse. It’s like what Marx says—”

  “Oh God, please don’t bring Marx into this.”

  She ignored Wren. “He says that morality evolves. The only thing that matters is the pursuit of the greater good. This”—she gestured around at nothing in particular, the closed space between them, the open space above them—“is the greater good. We’ll still catch some shit for doing it, but it’s for the best.”

  The rain quickened outside. A thunderclap long and far away, an echo of itself.

  “You’re pretending like the rest of the Liber-teens care about those hostages, Parker. You know they don’t. They only care about taking down the police. They want anarchy. They don’t care how it comes about. They just want to see it happen so that they can take credit for it. You know I’m right.”

  “So what?” Parker laughed dryly. “Intentions are useless. It’s the end result that matters.”

  “You’re contradicting yourself.”

  “I’m allowed to. It’s the twenty-first century. We’re living in new history. The whole thing is a fucking contradiction.” She breathed in deeply, then lay down on the mattress with a long sigh. Her shirt crawled up her ribs. Her pierced belly button shined like a fishing lure in Wren’s periphery. “Oh, before I forget.” Parker nudged Wren and handed her a neatly rolled joint. “I called Bronze Eagle a few hours ago,” she said, referencing Jack, their diabetic drug dealer who liked to use code names for himself and his clients. “He dropped off some supply. Said it’s a new shipment. Supposed to be pretty good. But you know him. He doesn’t even smoke the stuff. Makes him more paranoid than he already is.”

  Wren feared that taking the joint from Parker might be mistaken as a concession, so she refused until Parker said, “Relax, it isn’t a bribe. Just take it. It’s my week.”

  Wren lit the joint lying down. She passed it as she held the heavy smoke in her lungs.

  “What was Jack’s code name for you today?” Wren exhaled.

  “Queen Cleopatra,” Parker said, suppressing a smile. “When he got here he was looking around for you. I think he likes you, by the way. He asked where Annabelle Lee was. Tried to step inside the apartment and take a look around. Like he thought you were hiding around the corner.”

  “Annabelle Lee? Seriously?”

  “I know. I was surprised he’s literate, too. At least he’s got that going for him.”

  Wren nodded as she exhaled a thick plume of smoke that hung delicately over the tips of their noses as they stared at the weathered ceiling.

  “I thought it was a good name for you, actually. Annabelle Lee,” she repeated, hanging on the name. “Oh, and he wore a trench coat. Like, a flasher’s trench coat. I think he figured it made him look nondescript.”

  “Did you say anything about it?”

  “I told him he looked like a flasher.”

  “That’s good. He needed to hear that.”

  Back and forth they passed the smoldering joint until each inhalation burned the tips of their fingertips and tongues. Wren cracked open her window that faced a neighboring brick wall and threw the roach outside. It tumbled down the side of the building, a spinning orange ember, until it disappeared altogether.

  “What if we could do something else?” Wren asked.

  “About what?”

  “I was putting the gunman’s video through Pixie at work today, and I saw that one of the hostages has an engagement ring. Or at least I think it’s an engagement ring. I was trying to match that woman hostage with women from the missing persons database. I’m still trying to narrow it down, but if we can get the list small enough, we could probably give the names to the police.”

  Parker groaned.

  “Or, if we get the list small enough, we could even do it ourselves. We could get into their cell records like we did a few months ago with that congressman’s aide. Where they’ve been, where they are. We might be able to identify and locate her that way.”

  Wren realized for the first time how close together their bodies were positioned. Their arms were touching. Parker’s skin felt warm and electric. Wren’s was goose-bumped, cold.

  “Look, I’ll help you try to identify your mystery woman if you agree to help with the ME hack later tonight,” Parker said. “I think it’ll be impossible to identify her, though. Not to mention that the FBI is probably trying to do the same exact thing.”

  “We’re better than they are.”

  “I know that.” Parker inched closer to Wren, then reached her arm beneath Wren’s back and pulled her closer.

  Wren felt her body relax, a disentangling of figurative and literal knots.

  “Have I ever told you about when I came out to my parents?” Parker asked. She turned her head to meet Wren’s semi-stoned, sea-squall gaze. Maybe it was the pot, but Parker’s voice sounded far away, though not so far away that Wren didn’t want to reach out and touch it, hold the words in her fingers like water. “My father, he told me, ‘You have to do what you hope is the best.’ It’s sort of a beautiful thing to say, I think. Don’t you?”

  Wren shrugged. Even though she was lying down, her shoulders felt impossibly heavy.

  “I know you, Wren.” Parker said, her voice lower now. Close enough that Wren could feel her breath on her face. “And you know me. You know that I love how much you feel. You feel things deep down. But sometimes that can blind you. It messes with your judgment.” Parker let a silent moment pass. “Is it weird if I say I’m actually really turned on by those granny panties?”

  “Shut up.”

  Parker ran her fingers down Wren’s thigh. “I’m deadly serious.”

  Wren pushed it away, playfully. She felt high. Her eyes were heavy, unfocused, struggling to make out the shapes and colors of Parker’s face hovering above her own, shadowed and backlit by the desk lamp. Gentler than usual, gentler than ever. A frozen moment, crystallized and permanent. Parker’s neon hair draped over Wren’s face, and then her face coming closer and closer still. Lips parted, eyes closed. A kiss so soft Wren wasn’t even sure it had happened at all.

  “We’re planning to execute the hack around nine o’clock,” Parker said. “That’s when we have the best shot at infiltrating their network.” And then she added, consulting her phone for the time, “That gives us four hours to identify your mystery woman. Let’s get to it.”

  Wren put on a pair of sweatpants and pulled her laptop out of her bag while Parker fetched her own. She sat back down on the mattress and waited for Parker. The fan spun in the rain-freckled window. A siren called out from far away, far enough to ignore, but Wren listened anyway. And she allowed herself, briefly, to slip into the high-pitched cry of a city drowning in its own miserable beauty and beautiful misery.

  11 D-I-N

  A TRIO OF MEN older than Marcus sat at the counter of the diner, marking their words with knotted fingers, their bombastic argument rising above the radio in the kitchen, which was broadcasting news coverage of the video from the morning. One of the men said in a voice meant for everyone to hear, “They’re here somewhere among us. Sleeper cells of Mohammed.”

  The front windows of the diner were divided into four panels, with letters painted in thick, dripping red on each panel: D-I-N and then on the final panel: ER. The bottoms of each letter bled down to the window frame, and it had always been this way ever since the first day he’d walked past on the sidewalk, though this was the first time he had actually gone inside. Peter was the one to suggest it over the
phone. Like so much of the city, this diner never seemed to Marcus like an actual place—a business where short-order cooks hollered out commands, where people spent a micro-fraction of their lives chewing an Italian beef sandwich. It seemed more like adjustable scenery, a one-dimensional movie-studio construction, where if you opened the door there wouldn’t be anything beyond but a black, unlit space. But here he was, sitting in a booth, nursing a tepid cup of coffee and trying to peer through the glass panels for Peter to appear.

  He had been hesitant to make the trip back into the city for the second time in one day. He was tired enough already, and he had a feeling like tomorrow might be longer. But he wasn’t sure he’d ever get another chance to find out what had happened to Peter Richards.

  After the Kingfisher died, Peter stopped dropping by the office altogether, and Marcus had no way of contacting him. He almost missed Peter’s sporadic visits—welcomed distractions from his fifteen-, sixteen-hour workdays. In Peter, Marcus had found someone who understood the significance of what they were both doing, even though neither of them could articulate this significance in any coherent way. And it was surely because of this shared, ineffable understanding that Peter stopped visiting Marcus after the Kingfisher died. The only common bond between them was scattered in ashes across a frozen Lake Michigan.

  When he began planning the book, he wanted to interview Peter. He looked up his name in the Chicago white pages, then sent a typewritten letter to every single Peter Richards he found. He had no reason to think that Peter was still in Chicago except that he knew he was. Peter Richards was the sort of person so fully engrained in the texture of this place that Marcus suspected he would literally dissolve if he were to step outside the city limits. After he sent the letters, Marcus awaited a response. Nothing. He was surprised at how much he was surprised.

  He checked his watch. A quarter after four. The waitress came by to top off his coffee. She asked if he was expecting someone else, and he nodded, though he was beginning to wonder if Peter would show up at all.