Bill cracked his knuckles. “He’s playing dumb, Leo. He thinks you’re a sucker.”
“It’s fine,” said Leo. “We’ll find him. Nobody hides from me in my city. What I really want to know is, what do you do with them? Your victims?”
“Nothing,” I said. “We don’t have victims.”
He grabbed the file off the table where he dropped it, flipped the page, and shoved it in my face. “Here’s one of the kids your grandpa saved. We found him two weeks later. Does he look saved to you? Huh?”
It was a photo of a dead person. A little boy. Maimed. Horrible.
He punched me in the stomach. I doubled over, groaning.
“Is it some kind of sick family business? Is that it?”
He kicked me and I fell to the floor.
“Where is she? Where’s Agatha?”
I was saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” or trying to, while he kicked me twice more, until I could hardly breathe, and my nose was leaking blood all over the floor.
“Get him up,” Leo said, disgusted. “Goddamn it, now I gotta get the carpet steamed again.”
I was hauled up by my arms, but my legs wouldn’t take my weight, so I knelt.
“I was gonna kill Gandy,” said Leo. “I was gonna kill that sick son of a bitch with my own hands.”
“Gandy’s dead, Leo,” said Bill.
“Gandy’s dead,” Leo repeated. “Then I guess you’ll have to do, junior. What time is it?”
“Almost six,” said Bill.
“We’ll kill him in the morning. Make a thing of it. Invite the troops.”
“You’re wrong,” I whispered, voice trembling. “You’re wrong about him.”
“How do you want it, kid? Drowning or shooting?”
“I can prove it.”
“How about both?” said Bill.
“Nice idea, Bill. One time for him, one time for dear old Grandpop. Now get him out of here.”
That night they turned off the light in my cell for the first time. I lay aching in the thin dark, wishing my body would disappear, wrestling with my thoughts. I worried for my friends. Were they being beaten, tortured, threatened? I worried for Noor, and what they were planning to do with her. Would she have been better off if I hadn’t tried to help her at all? If I had listened to H and aborted the mission when he told me to?
Yes. Almost certainly yes.
I admit, I worried for myself, too. Leo’s goons had been threatening me since I arrived, but for the first time their promise to kill me felt genuine. Leo didn’t need anything from me anymore. He wasn’t trying to get information out of me. He seemed only to want to watch me die.
And what was all this madness about my grandfather? I didn’t think for a second that any of it could be true—but how could anyone? My one thought was that wights had framed him, staging kidnappings and killings to look as if Abe had committed them, in hopes that Leo’s clan might have killed him and done the wights’ work for them. As for my grandfather being identified at the scenes of some of these crimes (a point Leo had emphasized), the wights were masters of disguise. Maybe one of them had dressed like him, or made a lifelike mask.
There was a sudden, loud banging at my cell door.
This was it. They had come for me. They hadn’t even waited until morning.
The hatch in the door slid open.
“Portman.”
It was Leo. I was surprised, but then it made sense—he wanted to pull the trigger himself.
“Get over here.”
I got up from the cot and stood before the hatch.
“The wights framed my grandfather,” I said, not because I thought he’d believe me, but because I needed to say it.
“Shut your goddamn trap.” He paused to collect himself. “You know this lady?”
He held a photo up to the hatch. I was so thrown off by this unexpected pivot that it took me a moment to react. It was a snapshot of a dyed-blond diva in white gloves and a feathered hat. She was holding a can of Drano, and she was, it seemed, singing to it.
“That’s the baroness,” I said, grateful my memory hadn’t gone blank.
Leo lowered the picture. He observed me for a moment with his brow furrowed. I couldn’t read him at all. Had I passed a test? Or had I said the wrong thing?
“We made some calls,” he said finally. “Your associates told us you stopped through the Flamingo. Naturally, we were concerned, so we put in a call to our friends down there, to see if you’d left anyone alive. Much to my surprise, not only did you comport yourselves as gentlemen and ladies, you also took care of some business I’d been meaning to handle.”
I was floored. “Business?”
“Those idiot road warriors who act like they run things? I’ve been meaning to go to Florida and stomp them. You saved me the trouble.”
“It was, uh, no problem.” I was trying to sound calm and collected, not like someone who was still half expecting to be killed.
Leo chuckled and looked at the floor, as if embarrassed. “You might be wondering why a big shot like me cares about some tourist loop. Well, I wouldn’t, except my sister lives there.”