Noone squints and thinks. Tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes suggest he might have woken up with a headache. “She has white hair. That’s all I know about her. I don’t know her name, I don’t know who she is. She puts a crown of flowers on my head and takes me to the river, and I just ... go in. The current gets stronger, until I’m swept away. And I drown. Then I wake up.”
Nomi blows on her coffee. “Well, that sounds fucking awful.”
“No kidding.” Noone stops studying his mug and makes eye contact. “So you’re really okay? No vision changes? No ringing in the ears?”
“Nope. I’m really okay. A few aches, but nothing Advil won’t fix. The headache and dizziness and nausea are gone.”
“Good. The stitches look fine. You should apply some more Neosporin later.” He squeezes the back of his neck again. “So what’s the plan today?”
Nomi sips. She’s been thinking about it. “First, I have to find Janice D’Addario. I’m pretty sure Ricki wasn’t tortured to death because hespilled the beans to Janice, but she might know who he did talk to and what he said.”
“How does this get you closer to Brittany Jackson?”
“I might hear about a location—the place Ricki had to pick up his drug deliveries, maybe? I don’t know. All I want is a location. Where the hell are they holding this kid?”
He’s looking at her in a way that makes her think her facial expression might be a little too glowering. “Have you ever met Brittany?”
“No.” She glances elsewhere. But she can give him a reason without sounding overly invested. “I just hate the idea of a seven-year-old being held against her will. And her mom is terrified.”
“So you track down Janice, get more information ...”
“Yeah. But not yet.” At every stage, process and common sense temper her impatience. It’s such a drag, being a stickler. “I’ve got some business cards and phone numbers from Ricki’s wallet that I should follow up on first. I’d also like to find out a little more about Solange’s client, this Jeremy guy. And I want to find out the name of the jerk who jumped me. And it’s only eight thirty in the morning.”
“Right.” He smiles faintly at the reminder that they’re both still newly awake. “How will you get the courier jerk’s name?”
“No clue,” she admits. “All I can do is ask around with a physical description. I haven’t got a photo, and there’s no CCTV here in the building, so no action stills. But I want to know who I’m dealing with.”
“What about CCTV at the subway?”
She shakes her head. “There’s no way I can get access to that. I’ll just write down everything I can remember about him. If you’ve got any details you can add, that would be—”
“I could draw him.” Noone leans to put his mug on the coffee table. “I followed him for a while yesterday—I got a fairly good look at him. I think I could just about draw him from memory.”
Is he telling her he can make the equivalent of an Identi-Kit picture? “But can you actually, like, draw? Because that’s where I always get tripped up—”
“Yes, I can actually, like, draw.” He sounds reasonably confident about it. “Just find me some paper and pencils.”
She does. In fact, to make it easier for him, she retrieves his topmost hardcover notebook from the stack on her office desk, so he’s working with a familiar format. While she’s rooting around in the office, he goes to the bathroom. When he returns, she’s set a small pile of materials on the table, including an eraser and a pencil sharpener.
“Will this be okay?”
“This will be fine.” Noone has run a wet hand through his hair in the bathroom; damp strands spill over his forehead. He wipes remaining dampness onto his waffle weave shirt, collects the notebook, eraser, examines and selects pencils. Then he sits back in the lounge chair and opens the notebook on his knee. He sticks one of the pencils behind his ear. “He was stocky, wasn’t he? Pale, with a kind of blunt nose ...”
“His face was sort of craggy,” Nomi offers.
“That’s right. He had those grooves either side of his mouth ...”
Noone’s sketching hand moves with unhurried confidence—broad strokes, firm angles, making corrections with the eraser or smudging with the edge of his thumb. He digs absently into his pants pocket for a cigarette, lights up. She’s going to have to talk to him about smoking in her apartment, but not while he’s engaged like this.
“That’s it.” A face is taking shape on the paper, one she recognizes. “Bushier eyebrows, though.”
“You saw him close up.”
“Unfortunately, yes.” She glances between the image and Noone’s loose posture in the chair. “That’s really good. How are you so good at this?”
“From being in the village.” Smoke eddies up from the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth as he concentrates on some finer shading. “Before I learned enough Spanish and Maaya t’aan to communicate, I used to sketch the stuff I didn’t have words for. I think this is getting close, yes?”
“Yes. Holy shit, that’s him. You can really draw. Could you do this before?”
