Page 152 of Boardroom Ties
The game has not yet finished.
She reaches over and touches the back of my hand. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Be useful.” I tap the closed lid of the computer. “If I don’t make it through the next forty-eight hours, you find the right reporter and you burn thismudak’slife to the ground anyway. For Caroline. For Susan. For Bill. Whoever’s left.”
She looks at me for a long beat. Then she nods. “Alright. I can do that.”
As I wait for Afon to come pick me up from Jillian’s, I watch a couple stroll by. They’re holding hands and laughing, clearly besotted with each other. Nothing in their world is on fire. Their day will not end with a senator in a body bag.
I don’t envy them, not truly.
I just wonder, abstractly, what that’s like.
Soon, my uncle’s Mercedes turns the corner. He just glides to the curb and waits with that patient, undertaker’s stillness, the ever-present cigarette lit and bobbing at the corner of his mouth.
“You found something?” he asks as I fold myself into the passenger seat.
I give him a quick rundown. For once, his expression shifts from dead neutral to mildly surprised. I file that away for future reference: It only takes a vast conspiracy involving a United States senator and a murderous Eastern European criminal syndicate to get a rise out of Uncle Afon.
Good to know the bar is low.
He whistles, low. “Senator DeMaris.Tvoyu mat’.”
He doesn’t ask the obvious questions. He’ll get there. For now, he keeps glancing over at me as he drives. I run my thumb along the rib that’s been chewing on me since the bank. The pain is starting to feel less like a ghost and more like a passenger, a rude son of a bitch that puts its feet on the dash and won’t shut up.
“It’s killing you to leave her in there, eh?”
I don’t bother answering.
He nods knowingly. “Yeah. I get it.”
Clamping down my molars, I look over at him. “I just want her to know I didn’t fucking abandon her. The whole world, you included, tried to push me into it, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I still won’t.”
“I won’t lecture you, nephew,” sighs Afon. “You’re too old and too smart for that. But I’ll remind you that these are not corner thugs we’re dealing with here. These are men with resources. Say you want her out, consequences be damned. You walk into that visitor’s room, you put your face in front of that glass—and then what happens? Josiah surely has eyes in that building. The minute he sees you go to her, he knows she matters. And if he knows she matters, then?—”
“Don’t.”
But he does anyway. “—then he finds a nurse in the infirmary who needs to put a child through college or an inmate whose cousin owes a debt. He finds a syringe with the wrong thing in it, or a toothbrush with a sharpened handle, and your woman gets an unfortunate little prick. There is an endless supply of all of those things in there.Endless.You know this.”
I do know it. That’s the part that’s wrecking me.
“Listen to me, nephew: She is safer in there hating you than out here loving you.”
I look out of the window. We’re crawling east on Houston. A delivery guy on an e-bike weaves around a double-parked van, middle finger raised at no one.
I glance back at Afon. “Give me one of those.”
Afon’s eyebrow climbs. “Plemyannik, now is not the time to start bad habits.”
“Give me a fucking cigarette, Afon.”
He shakes one out of the pack and hands it over, along with the lighter. My second cigarette in two days. My second cigarette in my life. I cup the flame and breathe in.
I love you,I think.I love both of you. I’m not gone; I’m running toward you. I’m just taking the long way there.
I crack the window and flick the half-spent cigarette out. It sparks once on the asphalt and is gone.
We’ve got two days left to frame a senator.
