Chapter 54 - Somewhere Safe

Chapter 54: Chapter 54 - Somewhere Safe

Jesse had driven home a little after midnight, once Dr. Varga said Aileen was stable and Carrie made it clear she wasn’t leaving her sister’s side.

He’d lain awake in his own bed for hours. By the time gray light crept in around the curtains, he’d given up on sleep, showered and was sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold in front of him, thinking.

Angus Dent.

He kept seeing the living room in Carrie’s apartment: the overturned coffee table, the shopping bags torn open, the empty Hermès box in the corner and Aileen’s blue lips on the couch. He heard Angus’s voice crackling through Carrie’s phone, low and gentle and amused. *I even brought her a present. Her favorite.*

Last night, carrying Aileen down four flights of stairs with her head lolling against his shoulder, Jesse had wanted to find Angus and break every bone in his body. He still wanted to.

But Dean’s voice kept coming back to him, soft and precise. Everything must be legal. Your hands stay clean. Nothing traces back to you.

So what did legal look like for a man like Angus?

Angus sold drugs. He robbed drunk men in alleys. He’d forced oxycodone down a twenty-two-year-old girl’s throat and threatened to sell her to strangers. Somewhere in all of that, there had to be enough to put him away for a very long time. The trouble was that the police needed proof, and nobody who knew what Angus did would ever testify against him. Carrie couldn’t, because she’d been his bait. Aileen couldn’t, because she’d been his courier. Jesse couldn’t, because he’d have to explain how his ribs healed overnight.

That left one path he could see. Angus had to get caught in the act, with the drugs or the money or a gun in his hands, by the right people at the right moment. Jesse would arrange for the trap to be there, and Angus would walk into it on his own.

It was the only option that came close to legal. Every other idea he’d had since last night ended with Angus in a ditch.

And none of it would work unless Jesse knew everything about him. He needed to know where Angus slept, where he kept his product, who supplied him and who worked for him. He needed his routines, his habits and his mistakes.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

He pulled it out. The screen showed an unknown number.

He answered. "Hello?"

"Mr. Byrne." The voice on the other end was flat and quiet, with no warmth in it at all. Jesse placed it immediately: the steel door in Canarsie and the man with the scar through his eyebrow. "It’s Duncan. Mr. Monroe’s associate."

Jesse sat up straight in the plastic chair. "Duncan."

"I have the information you asked for on Angus Dent." A pause. "All of it. I’d prefer to hand it over in person. It’s not the kind of thing that should go through a phone or an email."

"That was fast."

"Mr. Monroe asked me to make it a priority."

Jesse thought about it for a second. "You can come by my place. I’m in Astoria—"

"I know where you live, Mr. Byrne," Duncan said, and Jesse felt the back of his neck prickle. "That’s exactly why I’d rather not come there. A man like me showing up at the door of Jamie Byrne’s son is the kind of thing people remember. Especially people who work for the FBI and live three blocks away."

Jesse grimaced. Of course Duncan knew about Percy.

"Somewhere public, then," Jesse said. "Central Park?"

"Bethesda Terrace. Under the arcade, by the stairs on the north side. Noon."

"I’ll be there."

"Come alone," Duncan said, and hung up.

*****

Jesse grabbed his keys and drove to Woodside.

The nurse in pink scrubs buzzed him in without a word and pointed him down the short hallway to the back room.

The door was open a few inches. He knocked lightly and pushed it the rest of the way.

Aileen was sitting up on the exam table with two pillows propped behind her back and a paper cup of apple juice in her hands. An IV line still ran into the crook of her arm. She was pale and hollow-eyed, her bleached hair sticking up in every direction, but the color had come back into her lips, and her eyes were clear and focused.

Carrie sat in a chair pulled right up against the table, still in yesterday’s black work skirt and camisole, with Jesse’s gray sweater from the apartment pulled on over the top. Her hair was a mess, and her makeup had worn off hours ago. She didn’t seem to have slept at all.

Both sisters looked up when he came in.

Aileen’s eyes went wide.

She’d been unconscious when he carried her in last night. As far as she was concerned, this was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on him. She looked him up and down, from his face to his shoulders to the expensive watch on his wrist. Then she turned slowly to her sister with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.

"That’s him?" she whispered, not quietly enough.

"Aileen," Carrie hissed.

Jesse bit back a smile.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Like I have been through it. Like I got hit by a truck and then the truck backed up over me." Aileen’s voice was still hoarse. She set the juice down on the tray beside her. "But I’m alive. Car told me what happened." She hesitated, then met his eyes properly. "She told me you paid for everything. The whole bill, and what we owed from last time too."

Jesse shrugged. "It was nothing."

"It was thirty-four thousand dollars," Carrie said quietly.

"It was nothing," Jesse repeated. "I’m glad you’re okay. That’s all that matters."

Aileen stared at him.

"Thank you," she said. Her voice cracked a little on the second word. "Seriously. You didn’t have to do any of that. You don’t even know me."

"Thank you, Jesse," Carrie added softly. "For all of it. For coming with me. For carrying her. For..." She stopped and shook her head, as if there were too many things to list.

Jesse looked at the two of them, the sisters side by side with the same grey eyes and the same stubborn chin, both looking at him like he’d hung the moon.

"Don’t mention it," he said.

He meant it. He hadn’t stayed up all night in a plastic chair for the sake of a thank-you. But he watched something shift in Carrie’s face as he said it. Each time he waved it off, she seemed to feel the debt more, and the gratitude in her eyes deepened into something that made his chest feel strangely tight.

He cleared his throat.

"I have to step out for a while," he said. "There’s someone I need to meet at noon. I’ll stay in touch."

Carrie nodded quickly. "Of course. You’ve already done so much."

The side door swung open, and Dr. Varga came in with a clipboard in one hand and a coffee in the other. He looked as rumpled as he had the night before, maybe more so.

"Good morning, everybody." He set the coffee down on the counter and flipped through the chart on his clipboard. "Vitals look good. Oxygen’s back up where we want it. No signs of respiratory depression since four a.m." He glanced at Aileen over the top of the clipboard. "You’re a lucky young woman, Miss Morton. I’m comfortable discharging you this afternoon, as long as someone keeps an eye on you for the next forty-eight hours and you come back if anything feels off."

Aileen sagged back against the pillows with relief.

"Thank God," Carrie breathed. She reached over and squeezed her sister’s hand. "We’ll go home, you can sleep in your own bed and I’ll take a few days off work to—"

"You can’t go back there," Jesse said.

Carrie stopped.

Both sisters turned to look at him.

"Your apartment," Jesse said. "You can’t go back to it. Not after what happened yesterday." He kept his voice even. "Angus walked right in. He knows where you live, and he knows when you’re not there. And he saw what was in those shopping bags. He knows you’ve got money now, or someone who does. If he gets it in his head to come back and see what else he can squeeze out of you, that apartment’s the first place he’ll look."

The color drained out of Carrie’s face.

She looked at Aileen, at the IV line taped to her sister’s arm and the dark circles under her eyes.

Then she turned back to Jesse.

"So where do we go?" she asked slowly. "Your house?"