“Not now, Toe.”
“Cugino,the perimeter — “
“Not now.”
He shut up.
Olimpo was at the door, the big bark of him gone, replaced by a low continuous whine that the dog did not seem to know he was making. He pushed his head under my hand. I put my hand on his head. I did not feel it.
Marco came through the door at 11:03.
He did not say anything to anyone. He went straight to the workstation. He moved me out of the chair with one hand on my elbow, gentle, the way you moved a child out of a doorway, and he sat down in front of her three monitors and opened a fourth window I did not know was on the machine and started typing.
“Phone records,” he said, to no one. “Carriage house WiFi went through the router I set up last August. I have the log.”
I watched him work. Sal had come over. Dante was here too now—I had not registered him arriving—and he was standing at my shoulder with his coat still on and his gloves still in his hand and the look on his face I had seen in the kitchen yesterday morning when I had told him what I had done.
“There,” Marco said.
He turned the second monitor.
A 312 number. 10:09 a.m. Duration: one minute, twenty-three seconds. The call had come in. She had taken it. She had stood up.
Marco was already typing again. The 312 spat back through three databases and gave him an address before he had finished the third query—that was Marco, that was how Marco worked—and the address was on the South Side, behind a vacant lot, behind a fence, under the el.
“Santo,” Dante said.
He did not raise his voice. He said it into his own phone, which was already at his ear, and the word was the whole instruction. Santo, who had been at his own house six blocks away, was in a car inside two minutes with four men, and the car was on the Dan Ryan inside four.
I stood up.
“I’m going.”
“No.”
Sal said it. Not Dante. Sal.
He had stepped between me and the door without my noticing him move and his hand was flat on my chest in the center of my sternum and his eyes were on mine in the way I had not seen them since we were sixteen.
“Cugino,listen to me.”
“Get out of my way.”
“You go in that door and they put one in your head before you clear the threshold. You are no good to her dead in a kill box. Let Santo clear it. Let Santoclearit, Pietro.”
I did not move.
His hand did not move.
We stood like that for a second and then for two and then I sat down. I sat down on the chair he had moved me out of and I put my elbows on my knees and I put my hands over my face andI did not weep, because weeping was not something my body remembered how to do, but I sat with my face in my hands and I breathed.
The minutes did the thing minutes did when there was nothing to do with them. They stretched. They thickened. Marco kept typing. Dante kept his phone at his ear. Tonio put a cup of coffee in front of me and I did not drink it and he did not say anything about my not drinking it. Olimpo lay down on my feet. The cold had come back into my socks now and the dog was warm and I let him be warm.
Santo’s first update came at 11:31.
“Workshop’s empty.”
Dante had the phone on speaker. We all heard it.
