Tiger (16 page)

“
Hey! It's January! I'm too busy crushing Manhattan to answer the phone right now, so leave me a message, bitches!
”

WALLY, JAKE, AND ELLA LOOKED AT EACH OTHER
in stunned silence.

Ella handed Wally the phone, and Wally checked out the text message from Paige Jackson again. There it was: the cell number of
her
January—party girl and volleyball jock. And it had been dialed six times over the previous two weeks by the very person who had been hunting Wally.

Wally felt lightheaded. She realized she'd been holding her breath since the message had played. She exhaled and gave herself a moment to calm down from the adrenaline rush she was experiencing. She clicked on the number again. And again came the rapid key tones of a phone number being dialed. Again, the connection was made.

“
Hey! It's January! I'm too busy crushing Manhattan to answer the phone right now, so leave me a message, bitches!
”

“I
knew
there was something wrong with her,” Ella growled, revealing an attack-dog side that her friends had only been exposed to on rare occasions. Ella rushed to the apartment door, her eyes on fire.

Wally and Jake jumped up after her.

“Ella, stop!” Wally yelled, but Ella was already rushing down the main staircase.

Confronting January directly wouldn't necessarily be the best option—it might even be the worst—but by the time they caught up with Ella, she was already at the end of the hallway one floor below, banging on January and Bea's apartment door.

“Open up, January!” Ella hollered.

There was no answer. “We have to get in,” Ella said, determined. Wally shrugged—there was no stopping Ella, and part of her needed to know more just as badly as Ella did.

Jake hurried upstairs and returned with a knife from Wally's kitchen, and from there it took him less than thirty seconds to throw the cheap door lock open. The three of them entered the apartment quietly, closing the door behind them.

“Wow,” Jake commented, stunned. “They're pigs.” Coming from Jake, this said something.

January and Bea's cramped living space was half full of cheap furniture—off-the-curb cheap—and everywhere were piles of dirty laundry and half-eaten fast-food containers. The place reeked of spoiled food and dirty gym clothes. An overflowing cardboard box full of empty wine and beer and vodka bottles graced one corner.

Wally realized that she had never seen more of the apartment than a quick peek through the door on their way out at night, and now she wondered if they had been too embarrassed to invite her in.

“They have no money,” Wally said. Both had been trying hard to save money for college, and the wages they earned at the coffee shop were meager.

“But they're out every night, Wally,” said Ella.

“New York can be a friendly city for pretty young girls in heels,” Wally answered, remembering when she'd thought the same thing at Cielo only a few nights ago.

It was a one-bedroom apartment, and January and Bea's possessions were so intermingled that it was impossible to tell who slept in the bedroom and who took the sofa bed. The sofa was still open, covered by wrinkled sheets and a pile of laundry (clean or dirty?) that included many pairs of lacy, expensive underwear—who had paid for those? One wall was tacked full of family photographs—one family fair-skinned Irish and the other Hispanic—plus newspaper clippings from January's championship high-school volleyball career. One clipping included a color photo of January spiking a ball over the net, her red ponytail flopping forward from the force of her swing and a look of fierce determination on her face.

“I don't get it,” Jake said. “Yeah, it's a sty, but so are half the pads of people around our age. Nothing here says they're anything more than two girls working hard and living cheap and partying their guts out. This is New York.”

“That's because you—like all men—see a pretty face and assume the girl behind it is an angel,” said Ella.

There was a beat-up Ikea desk in the corner with an open laptop resting on it, but when Wally flicked the touch pad a password prompt came up. She could take the laptop and have it hacked, and as she pondered the risk of it she noticed a cardboard file box under the desk. She opened it up and found exactly what she'd expected: piles of utility bills, pay stubs from the coffee shop down at the corner, plus assorted other boring paperwork.

There was a collection of monthly bank statements amid the bundle, unopened and addressed to January. Wally opened the most recent one—it had been mailed just a few days ago—and tore it open. In the transaction list for January's debit account, Wally found a series of deposits going back one month, all wired from the same account. The deposit amounts ranged from two hundred dollars to five hundred dollars, all in even dollar amounts.

The sight of this evidence—if that's what it was—finally stirred Wally to feel rage welling up inside of her. Up to that point, she hadn't wanted to believe that her new friends had turned on her—or that maybe they'd been enemies all along. Wally felt like a fool for even considering an innocent explanation for January getting phone calls from one of the gunmen.

“These deposits for the last month add up to nearly two thousand dollars,” Wally said as she flashed the document for Ella and Jake to see. “She sure as hell doesn't make that at the coffee shop.”

“What do we do?” Ella asked, her voice serious.

Wally thought it through. “We'll take the bank statement but leave everything else. For now, the girls are the only link to Alabama and the others. If they know we're on to them, they could take off—and then I'm screwed.”

Jake and Ella didn't disagree. The three of them left the apartment as they'd found it—trashed—with the laptop untouched, and took only the recent bank statement with them when they closed the door behind them.

As soon as the three of them returned to Wally's apartment, she logged on to the Ursula Society's database, Jake and Ella peering over her shoulder. The Society subscribed to the same in-depth credit-analysis services that most banks and loan companies used, so they could track basic financial records pretty easily.

Using the account numbers from the payments that had been made to January's account over the previous two weeks, they traced the payments to a simple checking account in Tampa, held in the name of someone called Norton Freud Queely.

“Wow,” said Jake. “Some name. If he'd gone to my high school, my friends and I would have made his life hell. Just sayin'.”

“Well,” Wally said, “I don't think this Norton was ever bullied.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because he doesn't exist.” Wally had started running down the particulars associated with the account, and immediately found that the home mailing address given to set up the account—in Tarpon Springs, Florida—did not exist at all. The Social Security number given actually did belong to someone named Norton Freud Queely, but he had passed away in Philadelphia two years earlier.

“It's a bogus account,” Ella said.

“The money in it was real enough,” said Wally, “but completely untraceable. It looks like the account was set up just to deal with January, because the only action on it is the payments to her.”

“Shit,” said Ella. “There's gotta be something else. . . . ”

“Hold on,” Jake said—he sat down next to Wally and switched to a different browser. He typed the name
Norton Freud Queely
into the search box.

“But it's not him,” Ella objected. “The actual guy is two years dead.”

“He isn't the one who opened the checking account,” Jake said, still running through his Google search as he spoke, “but you can't tell me that the name is random. Who thinks up Norton Freud Queely?”

On the laptop screen, results for the keywords
Norton Freud Queely
, in that order, were nonexistent. The drop-down window in the Google toolbar, however, asked, “Did you mean N. F. Queely?”

“Maybe I did,” Jake answered.

He clicked on the name and a whole bunch of hits showed up, almost all of them listed in the category “News.” N. F. Queely had been an investigative reporter for a weekly independent newspaper called the
Philadelphia Metro
. The most recent story that included Queely's name hadn't been written by him, but
about
him: two years ago, Queely had been abducted in front of witnesses outside a gay bar in the downtown area called “the Gayborhood.” He had been missing for several days when his decomposing body was found in a local park, having been beaten savagely.

Local gay activists had raised hell as time went on, and the murder went unsolved, citing it as on obvious case of “gay bashing,” a hate crime given lowest priority by law enforcement.

Jake didn't stop his search there, but kept scrolling backward through the timeline and found that several months before his death, Queely had posted the highest-profile feature story of his career, which the
Metro
submitted for a Pulitzer. It was a story detailing a rise in illegal arms shipments headed overseas from the eastern United States. For the first time in years, according to Queely's “inside” sources, American black-market arms dealers were going head-to-head with the more recent leaders in that market, including Eastern European and Russian crime organizations.

The mention of Russian organized crime caught Wally's attention. Both Tiger and Klesko had deep roots in that world, but she felt obligated to call “bullshit” on Jake.

“So just like that, we go from my volleyballing party-girl neighbor to a bogus bank account in Tampa to international arms dealers,” Wally said. “Paranoid, much?”

“It's not such a leap,” Jake insisted. “Break it down: some very heavy guys—well-financed and vicious—have been coming after you. We don't know what they want yet, but we know it has something to do with your brother Tiger, because his picture was stored in one of their phones. The hitter used that same phone to call January, who we find out has been on someone's payroll—for what? Watching you, probably. That still doesn't tell us what they're up to, but it confirms that they are well-financed and determined. So the stakes are very high for them. Follow me so far?”

Neither Wally nor Ella could dispute his reasoning.

“Good. So we're still in the dark about what exactly this is all about, except for one thing: the alias used for the payments to January is the same as the name of a reporter who did a deep-background exposé on competition among American and foreign arms dealers, and the reporter was killed soon after that story ran. Arms dealing is a high-stakes business. I'm not a big conspiracy guy, but these goons coming after you, Wally—they've gotta have something to do with black-market arms dealing. I'd bet on it.”

“But even if it's true, what does all of this have to do with Tiger?” Ella asked.

“He grew up inside the
Vory
,” Wally said. “The Russian mob. Arms sales are a huge part of what they do, especially over the last few years. He's on the run and probably doesn't have a lot of options, so he might somehow have gotten himself into that world again.”

Wally felt a terrible sinking feeling as she considered this. The only conclusion she could arrive at was that Tiger was in very deep trouble, and she was probably powerless to help him.

WALLY, JAKE, AND ELLA STAYED UP FOR HOURS—
they were waiting for January and Bea to come crawling back home, but they hadn't completely decided what they would do when that moment came. It didn't matter—when two o'clock in the morning rolled around and the two girls were still missing in action, Wally realized that it was pointless to wait. With the schedule the girls kept, they might not come home at all.

“What are you going to do?” Ella asked.

“Don't know, but it can wait until morning. You guys go to bed.”

Both Jake and Ella eyed Wally skeptically. “You're going to sleep too, right?” Ella wanted to know.

“I swear,” Wally said.

Jake raised one eyebrow—but didn't argue. They were right, of course—Wally's head was full of puzzles that needed unraveling, and in the quiet and dark of her living room they haunted her more than ever. She brainstormed ways that she might manipulate January and Bea into contacting whoever it was that was paying them—a way that Wally might follow them to a meeting—but she never settled on a plan that would work without alerting the girls that their secret connection had been discovered.

The more she thought the situation through, the more Wally felt a sense of foreboding. The list of actions that had been taken against her—and
Tiger?
—was growing by the hour: from the attack on her outside Harmony House to the attack at the lodge and now the conspiracy involving the only two friends she had made since starting over in Greenpoint.

It seemed obvious that January and Bea had been employed for two basic reasons: to monitor Wally's activity and lure her into a vulnerable situation, where Alabama and the others would finally be successful in grabbing her. Wally thought back to the night at Cielo, when January had offered her the tab of Ecstasy—or
whatever
that pill was—and now it seemed like an incredibly transparent attempt to drug her. She had finally left the club when she sensed she was being watched, and now she figured that it was her refusal of the drug and her sudden exit that had ruined their plan.

Wally heard distant thunder at around four o'clock in the morning, and soon a spring storm arrived overhead, with rain pouring down and lightning illuminating the sky. It was a full-on storm: loud and violent to match the dark thoughts consuming her heart and mind, and she didn't know what she would do to survive it all. Even with her best friends sleeping just a few feet away, she felt deeply alone.

She tossed restlessly on the couch, too hot and stuffy under her blanket and never quite finding a comfortable place among the cushions. Her mind was as restless as her body—her thoughts went from Kyle to January and Bea to the Get Money Bitches and, of course, to Tiger. She remembered that her face-to-face online encounter with Tiger had taken place late at night and decided it might be worth trying to connect with him again. She sat up and grabbed her laptop, but was immediately distracted by a blinking green light on the kitchen counter—it was the notification light on her smartphone.

Wally's notifications were set on
vibrate
only
—if she was distracted with something else, she often missed the notification entirely. She turned on her screen and saw that there were seven new text messages waiting for her, with a phone number she didn't recognize listed as the source.

R U there?
the first message read, and had been repeated two more times, a half hour apart. The time code showed that the first message had come in about four hours earlier—probably right about the time she and Jake and Ella had been downstairs, riffling through Bea and January's apartment. Wally had no idea who had sent the messages—the only thing she could tell was that they had been sent from a cheap phone—another burner, no doubt—since its messaging program didn't autocomplete the words like Wally's smartphone did.

Messages four, five, and six had come in a cluster, just seconds apart:

Dont blame U

Srry for everything

Gbye

And the final text, sent a few minutes after the others:

I lkd swimming w u ... Never again I guess

It was Kyle. Wally felt a sudden rush of—
something
. Excitement? Anxiety? Since she'd made the call to
911
, Wally had basically written Kyle off as a lost cause. The possibility that the connection between them might return left her confused but exhilarated. What was the right thing to do? For a brief moment she considered not replying to his messages at all but dismissed that idea. According to Greer, the police had found out that Kyle and his father had left their city apartment days earlier and never returned. Since she'd heard that, Wally had been wondering and worrying about what had happened to him. She hoped he was still reachable.

I'm here
, she typed.

Nearly a minute passed, during which she kept her eyes glued to the screen, waiting. Finally, the phone vibrated in her hand and a new message popped up.

Sorry I left u
, the message said.
So sorry
.

Wally smiled, relieved.

No matter
, she typed.
You okay?

Almost another minute passed before the next message arrived.

Afraid
, the message said.

I know
, she typed, and without hesitation added,
I can help. Where are you? Can you meet me?

She immediately wondered if her offer to help had been a mistake—considering her history with Kyle, it probably was. But Wally also knew herself, and realized that until she had a clear idea about what had happened to Kyle—and whether or not he was safe—she would never be able to keep him out of her thoughts.

There was a long pause then—at least three or four minutes. She was just beginning to believe that something had gone wrong when the phone finally vibrated again.

Come to eagle rock res
, the message read.
I can get there
.

The name sounded familiar to Wally but she didn't immediately know why. She opened her laptop and checked Google Maps. Eagle Rock Reservation was near Montclair, New Jersey: it was a fairly large block of green with only a few roads along its perimeter. Not a long trip from Greenpoint as the crow flew, and traffic in the middle of the night would be almost zero.

Wally paused before sending her reply. Was this even a good idea? She debated the issue in her head for a moment, but it was no use trying to be overly rational. Kyle was asking for her help and she would go to him. That was it.

Will take me some time
, she replied.

Fllw gates ave to end
, the reply came back.

I'll be there
, Wally typed.