“A couple hits, maybe, but see what you think.”
Nomi stuffs the papers into her tote, takes a swig of soda. She’s been considering something for a while, and on this gloomy, brushed-steel day—after what she witnessed last night at the club—she thinks maybe it’s time to do it.
She keeps her tone casual. “While I’ve got you running around doing chores for me, you wanna check out a print? I picked this up on another thing. It could be a random, some bit of scene contamination, but I want to be sure.”
She hands Irma an index card from her tote. Two pieces of clear packing tape are fixed to the card; each piece of tape has a single fingerprint—one is a thumb, the other one is probably a middle finger,she’s not sure. The whorls and ridges of Simon Noone’s prints are clearly outlined in the tape adhesive.
“Easy.” Irma tucks the card away and finishes off the dregs of her own soda. “I can send the results through Enrique, probably by tomorrow?”
“No rush.” The act of handing over the prints has made Nomi break into a light sweat. She diverts. “You doing okay at the station? They’re not throwing more stuff at you than you can handle? I feel bad for loading you up.”
“Nah, you know me—I don’t stretch out of shape for nobody.” Irma grins, then gets somber. “Nomes, you said you had someplace you can go if things get too hot, right? Lamonte’s torturing people, buying off journalists ... Maybe you want to put some thought into an exit plan, s’all I’m saying. Maybe pack a bag for emergencies. Put your plants on a timer or something.”
“I’ll think about it.” Nomi knows Irma; the woman is not an alarmist. This means something. But she’s made commitments, and she’s not reneging on them now. “I just want to get this kid back to her mom. The longer Lamonte has her, the easier it gets for him to think of her as a transactional asset—and he already has connections to the sex trade.”
“You’re scared for her,” Irma notes.
“Yes. But I’m also fuckingfurious. This sort of stuff—kids and their moms, you know? It just ... gets me.”
“With what happened to you and your mom, that’s understandable.” Irma grinds out her smoke, stands, reaches for her hat. “But you get too attached, sweetie. It was always your thing. I applaud it—I do—but you’ve gotta keep something in the tank.”
“I’m trying.”
“Just don’t burn yourself out. And don’t get burned. And keep me posted, okay?” She gives Nomi a hug, a smacking kiss. “Mwah—see ya, babe.”
Nomi sits on her side-ended apple crate after her ex-partner leaves, capping and uncapping her soda. Thinking about leverage, about blowtorches, about exit plans ... about fingerprints. Then she goes through the bodega’s pantry storeroom, back into real life. Pays Benni, checks the outside landscape at the door, heads back onto West Forty-Ninth.
The afternoon is waning, and Old Glory, on the fire escape up ahead, is limp and dripping. On the other side of the street, an older man pushes his food cart. People are mostly at work or inside, taking refuge from the first miserable day of fall weather. School hasn’t let out yet, and the normal bustle in the street is absent.
Nomi hears her own footsteps echo strangely in the quiet. She glances back over her shoulder. Seeing Lamonte and Ameche at Big Mouth last night shouldn’t have been a shock, yet somehow it was. Now she’s letting Irma’s warning spook her.
“Fuck it,” Nomi mutters. But when a cab passes, she flags it down.
Back home, she hangs her jacket, dumps her keys, pulls on her warm black sweatshirt. Going through the mug sheets from Irma, she adds the info to her files: She can dig a little into Dinkins and Hart, find more connections and, hopefully, locations. When she’s done updating her Jackson file, she pulls out the sheets with the East Coast missing person info. It takes all of two minutes to establish that none of the cases Irma’s highlighted have anything to do with Simon Noone.
She goes to the kitchen and washes out the coffeepot, replaces the filter, refills the machine, turns it on. Waiting for it to brew, she does a little tour of the apartment, wiping leaves here, spritzing with water there, pinching off brown tendrils and petioles. Mainly thinking about Irma’s info, but occasionally allowing herself to consider why she handed over Noone’s prints.
At least three things changed her mind. First, he seems desperate to find out who he really is, and her foremost responsibility is to Noone as a client. She said she’d help him find out his real identity, and that’s what she’s going to do.
Secondly, he flipped from normal guy to satanic sex god at the club last night, and it threw her. Maybe he was just putting on a show for Janice—but if Noone is that good an actor, how can she tell which parts of him are real and which are faked? Doesheeven know the difference? She needs some understanding of his actual personality.
Third was the main event: the way he’d gone for Ameche. Noone’s movements had had an almost robotic efficiency: fluid, spontaneous, instinctual. Ruthless. Nomi has seen some shit, but she’s never seen anyone use a paring knife to stab someone so hard their body part got stuck to the surface underneath.
She can make allowances for Noone being under the influence, sure. And she’s no wide-eyed innocent; she’s familiar with violence—perpetrated it, on a number of occasions. But even in her angriest, most off-the-leash moments, she’s known when she’s taken things too far. Noone doesn’t seem to have those guardrails.
He hadn’t even seemed particularly angry. He’d been completely cold about it. And she’d seen his look of confusion as she’d bawled him out in the cab: He really did not get it. Not only had he ignored her explicit instruction—a prohibition she’d set down, that he’d trampled over without thinking of the consequences to herself or Brittany Jackson or anybody else—but he’d seemed oblivious as to why physically attacking someone at a nightclub was a bad idea.
Her fury was insulating in the cab last night, but now, in the cold gray light of day, Nomi finds herself even more unsettled. Yes, she told Noone that he should stop worrying about the man he’d been. But for her own peace of mind, she’d like as much information on that man as she can get.
There’s a knock at the door, and she startles.
Before she takes off the chain, she remembers Irma’s words:Maybe you want to put some thought into an exit plan.She stops her hand, steps to the side of the door. “Who is it?”
“It’s just me, Nomi.”
Noone’s clipped consonants bring instant recall—and Nomi discovers the worst thing about all this. Because it’s not only the confusing, infuriating, frightening parts of last night that are coming back. She’s also remembering unbuttoning Noone’s shirt in the lobby ... His lean dark figure at the bar, like a demon on shore leave ... His breath on her neck, and the way he looked at her, greedy and sensuous ...
The way he plunged that knife into Claude Ameche’s hand, the blade piercing skin and sliding right through, the sight of it exploding inside her mind like an atom bomb—
