Chapter 58 - The Meeting With Duncan

Chapter 58: Chapter 58 - The Meeting With Duncan

Central Park was crowded the way it only got on a sunny weekend.

Jesse came down the wide stone stairs toward Bethesda Terrace a few minutes before noon. Tourists clustered around the fountain, taking pictures of the bronze angel on top. Rowboats drifted across the lake beyond it. Under the arcade, a man with a cello was playing something slow and mournful, and the sound rolled off the tiled ceiling and filled the whole passage.

Duncan was sitting on a bench by the north stairs, exactly where he’d said he’d be.

He wore the same fitted black jacket and black jeans as before, with a slim manila envelope resting on his knee. He looked like a man waiting for nobody in particular. His eyes moved steadily over the crowd and checked every face that passed.

They passed right over Jesse’s face too.

Jesse walked up and stopped in front of the bench.

"Duncan."

Duncan’s right hand drifted toward the inside of his jacket.

Jesse saw it coming before it happened. He caught the slight shift in Duncan’s shoulder and the tightening in his wrist a split second before the hand moved, as if he’d watched a frame of film before the projector played it. Sharp Reflex. He’d only had it a couple of hours, and it was already working.

He kept his own hands loose and visible at his sides.

"Relax," he said. "It’s me. Jesse."

Duncan didn’t relax. His hand stayed where it was, near the jacket. He looked Jesse over carefully, from his face to his shoulders, his build and his hands, and then back to his face, where his gaze lingered.

"Jesse Byrne’s eyes don’t point in the same direction," Duncan said quietly. "And his nose has been broken."

"I know." Jesse sat down on the other end of the bench, slowly. "You met me two days ago. I parked a black Porsche outside the building in Canarsie and kept looking back at it like someone was about to steal it. Three guys on the stoop across the street were watching me. You told me nobody would touch my car, and one look from you sent them back to sitting on the steps." He kept his voice low. "You punched a code into the keypad at the bottom of the stairs. Mr. Monroe told you I was family, and you asked if he was sure. You told him to tap the button on his desk if he needed you."

Duncan said nothing for a long moment.

Nobody else had been in that stairwell or that room. Nobody else could have known any of it.

Slowly, his hand came away from his jacket and settled back on his knee.

"All right," he said. "It’s you." His eyes went back to Jesse’s face. "So what happened to your eyes? And your nose?"

Jesse had been expecting the question. He’d had the whole drive over to think up an answer.

"Eye drops," he said. "Special ones. And exercises. I’ve been doing them for a long time. Some days the eyes are good and some days they aren’t. Today’s a good day." He touched the bridge of his nose. "The nose has been Eastern medicine. Acupuncture, cupping, herbal compresses and a bone-setter in Flushing who does things with his thumbs I’d rather not describe. It’s been a slow process, but it’s finally paying off."

He said it calmly and easily, with a little self-deprecating smile at the end. It sounded like the truth.

Duncan studied him.

"Huh," he said.

That was all he said. But his eyes stayed on Jesse’s face a beat too long. Jesse could tell he wasn’t buying it. Duncan couldn’t point to what was wrong with the story, but something in it smelled off to him, and he was the kind of man who noticed when something smelled off.

Duncan held out the envelope.

"Everything I found on Angus Dent," he said. "It’s on paper only. I didn’t make copies, and nothing went through email. Read it, then burn it."

Jesse took the envelope and opened it.

There were maybe twenty pages inside, typed and dense, with a few grainy photographs paper-clipped to the back. Jesse turned the first page and let his eyes move down it.

Super Photographic Memory caught everything.

He went through the pages one after another, barely pausing on each. There were three addresses for Angus, including one that wasn’t on any lease. There was his schedule, laid out almost hour by hour. Jesse read where Angus drank, who he drank with and where he kept his product. He learned who supplied him, who he paid off and an old charge that had disappeared before it reached a courtroom. One name on page eleven made Jesse’s jaw tighten.

Every word, number and photograph settled into his mind, where it stayed, sharp and complete.

He closed the envelope.

Duncan was watching him with a faint crease between his eyebrows.

"You read all of that?" he asked. "In about ninety seconds?"

"I’m a fast reader."

"Huh," Duncan said again.

He stood, buttoned his jacket and glanced around the terrace once.

"Mr. Monroe says to remind you of your promise. Everything legal." He nodded once. "Good afternoon, Mr. Byrne."

He’d taken two steps toward the stairs when Jesse spoke.

"Duncan. Wait."

Duncan stopped and turned.

"I need help with something," Jesse said. "Just you. Without Uncle Dean knowing about it."

Duncan’s face went flat.

"No."

"You haven’t even heard what it is."

"I don’t need to hear it." Duncan’s voice didn’t rise, but it went cold. "I work for Mr. Monroe. Everything I do goes through him. If you want something from me, you ask him, and if he says yes, I do it. That’s how it works, and that’s how it’s always going to work."

Jesse looked at him. Duncan’s loyalty to Dean ran right down to the bone. No amount of money would pry him loose from it, and a lie wouldn’t hold up under those eyes.

’Charisma Boost,’ Jesse thought.

[Activated.]

He felt it settle into his voice like warmth into a cold room.

"I’m not asking you to betray him," Jesse said, and his voice came out easy and steady, every word landing exactly where he meant it to. "I’m asking for the opposite. Uncle Dean told me to keep my hands clean. He told me to let the proper channels handle Angus and keep myself far enough back that nothing traces to me. That’s what I’m trying to do." He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "I want to set Angus up and call the police on him. I want them to catch him in the act, so they never need a witness. But I can’t pull it off alone, Duncan. I need someone who knows how men like Angus move."

Duncan stood very still.

The cello under the arcade slid into a new piece. A child ran past them, chasing pigeons.

Jesse watched something shift in Duncan’s face. The cold flatness was still there, but it had cracked a little, the way ice does in the first warm week of spring.

Duncan walked back to the bench and sat down. He kept a few feet of distance between them and fixed his eyes on the fountain.

"I’m not agreeing to anything," he said. "But I’ll listen."

He turned his head and looked at Jesse.

"What exactly is your plan?"

*****

The meeting was over by half past twelve.

Jesse walked back to the Porsche with the envelope tucked under his arm and a feeling in his chest that he didn’t quite recognize at first. He’d slept badly for three nights. In the last seventy-two hours he’d had two surgeries, sat through someone’s overdose and paid for an apartment. He had a dozen things to do, a lawyer fighting his uncles and a drug dealer to bring down.

None of it needed him for the next two hours.

He realized he was tired, and that for once he could afford to do something about it.

There was something he’d wanted for years. He used to walk past the massage parlors on 30th Avenue and look at the price boards in the windows: sixty minutes, ninety minutes, hot stones, deep tissue. He always kept walking, because a ninety-minute massage cost about as much as his mother’s electric bill.

Now he could afford the electric bill for the entire block.

He drove back to Astoria and parked outside a place called Still Waters, a few streets from his mother’s building. It had a frosted glass door, bamboo in tall pots on either side, and a menu of services written in white chalk on a little slate board.

Inside, it smelled of eucalyptus and lavender, with soft flute music drifting out of hidden speakers. The receptionist was a young woman with a nose ring, and she smiled at him from behind a desk made of polished river stones.

"Welcome to Still Waters. Do you have an appointment?"

"No. Do you have anything open? Full body, ninety minutes."

She checked her screen. "You’re lucky. We just had a cancellation. One of our therapists is free right now." She slid a clipboard across the counter. "Just fill this out, and I’ll show you back."

Five minutes later, Jesse was lying face down on a padded table in a dim room lit by a single salt lamp. His clothes were folded on a chair in the corner, and a warm sheet was drawn up to his waist. His face rested in the cushioned cradle at the end of the table, and through the opening he could see a small square of polished wooden floor.

He let out a long breath and felt his shoulders sink.

He could get used to this.

There was a soft knock, and the door opened.

"Hi there," a woman’s voice said. "I’ll be taking care of you today. Is there any area you’d like me to focus on?"

Jesse went very still.

He knew that voice. It was warm and slightly husky, and the last time he’d heard it, it had been whispering *oh my God* through her fingers in the front seat of his car.

A pair of white sneakers stepped into his little square of floor. A moment later she leaned over him to fold the sheet a little lower on his back, and the scent of amber and vanilla drifted down to him through the eucalyptus. A long black curl slipped over her shoulder and swung into view beside the face cradle.

Angela Bonham.

She hadn’t seen his face, and she had no idea who was lying on her table.

Jesse stared down at the floor and felt a slow grin spread across his face, hidden in the cradle.

’Oh,’ he thought. ’This is going to get freaky.’