Chapter 55 - Six Months Rent

Chapter 55: Chapter 55 - Six Months Rent

Jesse looked at Carrie, at the way she was holding her breath waiting for his answer, and saw an opening.

He’d been running the numbers in the back of his mind since the system pinged him last night. Carrie was at forty percent now. At twenty, a twenty-thousand-dollar dinner had turned into four million dollars. He didn’t need a calculator to know what forty could do.

And she and her sister needed somewhere to live.

"My place?" Jesse shook his head. "My apartment’s barely big enough for me. There’s one bedroom, a couch with a dent in the middle and a faucet that drips all night. You’d be sleeping on top of each other."

Carrie frowned. "Then where—"

"I’ll find you somewhere." He was already pulling his phone out of his pocket. "Give me a few minutes. In the meantime, get whatever you need together. You’re both leaving here this morning."

"This morning?" Carrie glanced at Dr. Varga. "He said this afternoon."

Varga looked at Jesse, then at the IV bag, which was nearly empty, and shrugged with the air of a man who’d been paid in full and had no reason to argue.

"Her vitals have been steady for six hours," he said. "I can pull the line now and sign her out. Somebody watches her for forty-eight hours. If she gets drowsy, confused or short of breath, you bring her straight back."

"We will," Carrie said.

Jesse stepped out into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind him.

He came back five minutes later.

Varga had already gone. The IV line was out of Aileen’s arm, a cotton ball taped over the crook of her elbow, and the two sisters were waiting for him by the exam table. Carrie had her purse over her shoulder and her phone in her hand. Aileen was sitting on the edge of the table in a pair of borrowed scrub pants and her cut-off band T-shirt, swinging her feet.

They had nothing else to carry. Everything they owned was still back at the apartment, under the wreckage Angus had left behind.

"Ready?" Jesse asked.

"Ready," Carrie said. She hesitated. "Jesse, where are we—"

He raised one eyebrow.

Carrie closed her mouth. A faint pink crept up her neck.

Beside her, Aileen looked back and forth between the two of them with open fascination.

Jesse checked his watch. It was 9:30, which left him plenty of time before Bethesda Terrace at noon.

"Let’s go."

******

Aileen stopped dead in the strip mall parking lot.

"No way," she said. "No way. That’s your car?"

The Porsche sat across three spaces in front of the nail salon, black and gleaming in the morning sun like it had been dropped there from another planet. Two manicurists on their smoke break were staring at it from the salon’s doorway.

"Car," Aileen breathed, grabbing her sister’s arm. "You didn’t tell me it was a Porsche!"

"I told you it was a nice car."

"A nice car is a Camry. This is..." Aileen walked a slow circle around the hood, trailing her fingertips just above the paint without quite daring to touch it. "This is a rapper’s car. This is a music-video car."

Jesse unlocked it. "Get in before you pass out again."

Aileen climbed into the back seat, sank into the leather and let out a long, reverent sigh. Carrie got in up front. She buckled her seatbelt and folded her hands in her lap, glancing sideways at Jesse every few seconds as he pulled out onto Roosevelt Avenue.

She didn’t ask where they were going. She was clearly dying to.

Jesse found that he liked that a great deal.

He drove them back into Astoria, toward the water.

Ten minutes later he pulled up in front of a glass-and-steel tower on the edge of the East River, a few blocks from Ditmars Boulevard. It was twenty-two stories high, with floor-to-ceiling windows and wide balconies on every floor. A landscaped plaza out front held young trees and a long reflecting pool. Across the water, the Manhattan skyline glittered in the morning light.

Carrie leaned forward and stared up through the windshield.

"This is the Halyard," she said slowly. "I walk past this place every day on my way to Marlowe’s. They finished building it last year. Evie and I used to joke about which floor we’d live on when we were famous."

"Which floor did you pick?"

She turned to look at him, and her eyes went wide.

"Jesse. No."

He just got out of the car.

A doorman in a charcoal uniform with gold piping met them at the entrance, already holding the glass door open.

"Mr. Byrne? Welcome to the Halyard. Ms. Ortiz is waiting for you upstairs. She asked me to bring you straight up to the nineteenth floor."

The lobby was cool and quiet, with polished concrete floors, walls of pale oak and a living wall of ferns and moss climbing three stories toward a skylight. A security desk sat beside the elevators, staffed by a guard who nodded as they passed. Small cameras were tucked discreetly into the corners of the ceiling.

Jesse looked around as they crossed to the elevator, and he thought about his mother’s building.

He thought about the cracked stoop, the security door you had to jiggle to lock, the cardboard taped over the second-floor window and the trash cans that nobody else ever took out. He pictured what it could look like instead, with new brick, new windows and a lobby that smelled of something besides old cigarettes. He imagined a real lock on the front door and a camera over it, so that nobody like Angus could ever walk in uninvited.

Once the Goldfinches were dealt with, that building was getting the same treatment.

The elevator doors slid open.

Danielle Ortiz was waiting outside apartment 19C. She was in her forties, sharply dressed in a navy pantsuit, with her hair pulled into a sleek bun and a tablet tucked under her arm. She shook Jesse’s hand with a bright, professional smile.

"Mr. Byrne. It’s lovely to meet you. I have to say, I don’t usually get calls asking to move in the same morning." She glanced at Carrie and Aileen, taking in the borrowed scrub pants and the oversized gray sweater without letting her smile slip. "But you’re in luck. This one just came open. Please, come in."

She unlocked the door and stepped aside.

Carrie walked in and stopped.

The apartment was enormous. An open-plan living room flowed into a gleaming white kitchen with a marble island and stools along one side. Two long cream sofas faced each other across a low walnut coffee table. Throw pillows and folded blankets were arranged on them as if someone had planned every detail. Fresh flowers stood in a glass vase on the dining table. And beyond all of it, the entire far wall was glass, opening onto a wide balcony that looked straight across the East River at the skyline of Manhattan.

"Three bedrooms," Danielle said, leading them through. "Two and a half baths. The primary suite has a walk-in closet and a soaking tub. In-unit washer and dryer. The kitchen is fully stocked with cookware, dishes and linens. Every unit on this floor is furnished down to the towels." She smiled. "You could sleep here tonight."

Aileen had drifted over to the glass wall and was standing with her palms pressed flat against it, staring out at the river with her mouth hanging open.

"Car," she whispered. "Car, come look at this."

Carrie didn’t move. She was staring at the kitchen island, at the flowers and the fluffy white towels she could see stacked in the bathroom through an open door. She looked like someone who had walked into a dream and was waiting to be thrown out of it.

"What’s the rent?" she asked faintly.

"Ten thousand a month," Danielle said pleasantly.

Carrie turned to Jesse.

"Jesse, that’s crazy. We can’t. That’s more than I make in four months." She lowered her voice. "We don’t need anything this nice. We can find somewhere cheaper. A one-bedroom. Something in Sunnyside, or Woodside. We’ll be fine. Really, we’ll—"

Jesse wasn’t listening to her. He turned to Danielle.

"How’s the security here?"

"Very tight," Danielle said. "There’s a doorman at the front entrance around the clock, and a security desk staffed day and night. You need a key fob to use the elevators, and each fob only works for its own floor. Guests have to be announced and approved by the resident before they’re allowed up. There are cameras on every floor and in every stairwell, monitored on site." She tilted her head. "Nobody gets past the lobby unless you want them to."

Jesse nodded slowly. He thought about the brick propping open the security door at Carrie’s old building.

"Good," he said. "How do I pay?"

"Jesse—" Carrie tried again.

Danielle tapped her tablet and turned it toward him. "We take wire transfer or card. First month, last month and security deposit to move in, and then—"

"Six months," Jesse said. "Up front. Can I do that?"

Danielle blinked. Her professional smile wavered for the first time.

"Six months? That’s..." She recovered quickly. "Of course. Absolutely. That’s sixty thousand dollars."

"Fine."

Jesse took out his card. Carrie stood beside him, completely frozen, and watched him tap it against the reader on Danielle’s tablet.

The tablet chimed.

[Ding!]

[You spent $60,000 on Carrie Morton. 10X Critical Hit! Base reward: $600,000.]

[Affection Multiplier: 40%. Base reward multiplied by 40.]

[Total earned: $24,000,000!]

Jesse kept his face perfectly calm.

Twenty-four million dollars, for six months of rent.

"Wonderful," Danielle said brightly, already tapping through screens to issue the key fobs. "Welcome home, ladies."

Over by the glass wall, Aileen turned around with her hands still pressed against the window behind her. She looked at the apartment, then at her sister, then at Jesse.

"Wait," she said. "We live here now?"

Carrie couldn’t answer. She was looking at Jesse, and her eyes had gone bright and glassy again.