Sage’s dark eyes lit up, but then he studied me, wary again. Rex’s groans and Mina’s reassurances moved toward the front of the house. The door opened. Then it crashed shut.

  In the silence that came after, I asked, “Did they hurt you?”

  The boy touched the shadow of the bruise, but he shook his head.

  “Did he hit you?”

  “To make me—to make me come.”

  I nodded. I thought I might make a house call on Mina and Rex later. Ask Rex to let me see his other foot.

  “Let’s call Goran.” I took out my phone. “What’s his number?”

  Sage stared blankly at me. “I don’t know.” He gestured. “It’s in my phone. It’s not like I have it memorized.”

  Sure, I thought. It’s not like anybody ever had to do that. But I asked, “Did they take your phone?”

  He shook his head. “They made me leave it at the house.”

  “Okay. Why don’t we go back to the house, then? Let me look around for a minute; I bet we can find you something to wear.”

  He shook his head again. “I want to go home.”

  “Then let’s get you home.”

  He let me help him up, and we made our way to the Hellcat. The night felt cold enough to cut if I turned around too fast. Sage’s legs were pebbled with goose bumps, and he walked gingerly in his bare feet across the frozen ground. But he also had that bizarre mixture of indifference and bravado that a lot of teenagers seemed to show with regard to the weather. Plus he had my coat, and it’s a heck of a coat.

  He gave me directions, and we headed out of the city and into the suburbs. Neither of us spoke. Sage looked like he was numb, maybe dissociated, his face blank, his eyes heavy. I let him be; nothing I could say would make it any better.

  The drive took us about twenty minutes. The house was a Sunset Hills McMansion, a monstrosity that someone had probably described as French country style. Sure, I thought. Like the Croissan'wich at Burger King—real, authentic Frenchy stuff. The house had a fieldstone veneer and steep roof, with dormer windows that, I swear to God, had little dark trim at the top that made me think of eyebrows. I parked front and center on the circular drive, and we got out.

  “I’d appreciate a good word,” I said as we approached the front door. “Goran’s going to be angry.”

  “You saved me,” Sage said, and he sounded all of his nineteen years, like that was the end of the story.

  I didn’t reply, but I did check the HK, making sure I could clear the gun quickly if I needed to.

  Sage didn’t slow down when we reached the door. He opened it and stepped inside, and I followed him. Something tickled the back of my brain. The lights, maybe. The lights were already on. But I had to hurry to keep up as Sage moved into the house, calling, “Goran? Hello? Goran, I’m here.”

  The house felt as large on the inside as it had looked from the outside. It had walls the color of warm sand, floorboards that said rustic but had probably cost more than a mid-sized sedan. Call me Freudian, but I think it said something that most of the paintings were of trains going into tunnels.

  Ahead of me, Sage slipped into the kitchen. “Goran, I—Filip? Oh, thank God.”

  I didn’t know the man called Filip, but I didn’t need to; I’d known a lot of Filips in my life. He was taller than me, bigger too, with a mane of black hair starting to silver at the temples, and he looked like every wannabe tough guy in Bevo Mill. The suit was expensive in a subtle way. The watch, which he wore upside down on his right hand, was not. A leftie, part of me catalogued automatically. He’ll lead with his left.

  Right then, Filip was pawing through a pile of documents. The empty drawer, which had been pulled out and left on top of the kitchen island, suggested he’d dumped it out to go through everything more easily. He froze when he saw us, but Sage didn’t seem to notice. He rushed forward and hugged Filip, and after a stiff moment, Filip folded his arms around the boy. That tickle at the back of my brain got a little more insistent.

  “Sage,” Filip said, and he moved the boy back to study him. “Oh my God. Where have you been?”

  “Someone kidnapped me,” Sage said. His voice began to break up, and he wiped his eyes again. “Where’s Goran? I want to see Goran?”

  “He’s losing his mind,” Filip said. “He’s out looking for you.” He braced Sage by the shoulders, but his eyes cut to me: studying, assessing. “Come on. I’ll take you to him.”

  “I want my phone. I want to talk to Goran.”

  Filip’s façade only broke for a moment, and then his face was smooth again. “Goran has your phone, silly. Let’s get going; you can call him while we drive.”

  Sage snuffled into his sleeve—technically my sleeve—and let Filip turn him toward a door on the far side of the kitchen.

  “Sage,” I said.

  One of Filip’s hands tightened on Sage’s shoulder; the other hand fell to his side. His left hand. It was a well-tailored suit, and his left side was angled away from me, but I didn’t need anybody to draw me a map. Someone had tipped Rex off about Sage. Someone had planted the idea, had told Rex when Sage would be alone, had given him the address. And how many people would know about Goran’s boy toy? How many people would know where Goran kept him, and when Goran would be busy, and when Sage would be most vulnerable? How many people would be tearing up Goran’s house, looking for—what? I didn’t know, but I was sure it was something Goran didn’t want anybody to have.

  “I didn’t get your name,” Filip said.

  “Sage, come here right now.”

  “That’s Luka. He helped me.” Sage frowned, as though now catching the current. His gaze swung from me to Filip. “Filip, he’s a good guy. He helped me.”

  “I’m sure that’s what he wanted you to think,” Filip said. “That’s how they do these things.”

  “Sage,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. I locked eyes with the boy, but I kept Filip’s left hand in my peripheral vision. “You need to listen to me. Step away from Filip and come over here.”

  “They always have someone else that you never see. That way, if things go badly, there’s someone to ‘save’ you.” Filip didn’t draw the air quotes, but I could hear them in his voice. “Let me guess: he even got in a fight with the other man, the one who took you. It looked dramatic, I’m sure. He came charging to your rescue. But didn’t you wonder who he was, or how he found you?”

  Hurt shattered Sage’s expression.

  “Sage,” I said, “someone told Rex where to find you. Someone who knows you, knows Goran. Think about that.”

  “Come on,” Filip said, his hand tightening around Sage’s shoulder. “He’s not going to hurt you, I promise.” He gave Sage a nudge, and Sage shuffled a step toward the far door.

  “Sage, don’t—”

  I took a step after them, and that was when someone scrambled my channels. The blow seemed to come out of nowhere; I’d been so focused on Filip’s left hand that I hadn’t noticed someone else coming up behind me. My head rocked to the side. My vision skewed. I stumbled, and my legs started to fold, but I caught myself on the lip of the counter. A second blow, an ugly little rabbit punch, caught me at the base of the skull, and my world went white.

  Vaguely, I was aware of cold tile under my cheek, of my world tuned down to gray. They didn’t let you do that anymore, not in any legitimate sport. The cervical vertebrae. The spinal cord. My body felt heavy and detached. Hands grabbed my sweatshirt and hauled me across the floor like I was a sack of flour—dead weight to be dragged around.

  I landed on my back and stared up at an unfamiliar face. A big head that ballooned in my vision. A wine-stain birthmark at his hairline. I felt the HK ripped from its holster, and then it was gone. My vision swam, tuned out some more, came back again. Then I saw the dried blood around his ear, and I recognized him from my apartment. My mouth tried to smile, and I thought, What’s up, Doc? Bugs Bunny meets Chinatown.

  Maybe I was smiling, because now he was smiling too. That’s the nice thing about smiles; they’re contagious. One big hand wrapped around the back of my head. The grays in my vision sharpened. His other hand came up, and his fingers rested behind my ear. He pressed, and a million volts of electricity went through me. I screamed.

  I kept screaming.

  When it was over, the big guy was still smiling down at me. His mouth hung open. His tongue hung out. It was a doggy kind of smile. I gulped air, shuddering, aware of the cresting need to sob, childlike, because the pain had been so great and because in the face of it, I had been a child again. He adjusted his big hand around the back of my skull, and he made a shushing noise. He brought his fingers to the back of my ear again.

  The nice thing about having uncles who are shitheels? The nice thing about knowing Kris, whose dad had taught him every dirty cop trick in the book? The nice thing about growing up in Bevo, where fuck around and find out is what you learn in kindergarten?

  You get real scrappy, real fast, whether you want to or not.

  The way the dumbass was leaning over me left plenty of room for me to bring my forearm up and drive it as hard as I could into the side of his neck. The brachial nerve is a thing of beauty. The big guy’s eyes got wide, and his hands loosened around my head. He wobbled. I bucked my hips and threw him off, and then I rolled with him, coming up on top. I caught him by the hair and pounded his head into the tile once, and then twice. His eyes rolled up in his head. I gave it to him a third time, to be sure, and then I flopped off of him. I was shaking. The need to cry surged up again, and I squeezed my eyes shut, smelled the dust on the tile, listened to every aching inch of my body.

  A shout came from what seemed like a long way off. Sage.

  Somehow, I got to my hands and feet. I found the HK. I had to lean on the counter as I shuffled toward the garage. The thing about pain compliance, pressure points, all that? Sometimes, once it’s over, it’s over. And sometimes, once it’s over, you still feel like your head is attached to your body by a live wire.

  When I threw open the door, the dark maw of a garage waited for me. Filip was trying to force Sage into a car, and Sage, arms braced on either side of the door, was fighting him.

  “That’s my coat,” I said.

  Filip stared at me. Sage stared at me.

  Filip recovered first, gripping Sage like he might spin him around as a shield. “You can’t—”

  I didn’t even bother aiming. Well, okay. I aimed a little. Enough to be sure I wouldn’t hit Sage.

  Noises sound different after a gunshot. Filip’s scream, for example, had a tamped down quality that didn’t quite seem real. He stared at me, a hand clapped over his arm where I’d winged him. And then he turned and ran. He shrank down the driveway, a little dot of darkness moving against all that other darkness. And then he was gone.

  Sage stared at me, white faced and trembling.

  “You’re okay,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”

  I led him inside, and I sat with him on the couch, and while we waited for Goran to come home, I rubbed his back and let him cry.

  4

  The next day, I went to my mom’s. She still lives in the house where I grew up, a brick bungalow with a camel-hump addition of vinyl clapboard. The grass is a little shaggier than it used to be, and in the spring and summer, the flowerbeds are mostly weeds. The foundation has a crack, and the basement takes on water when it rains, and some of the windows don’t open now because of how the house has settled. But the front porch is wide and deep and cool, and I replaced the deck last summer, and most importantly, the inside is the same. Mom forgets things, and she does better in places she knows. She keeps photos on the wall of me and Mina. I taped more recent ones to the fridge because, believe it or not, kids grow up.

  I did the dishes in the sink. I recycled the papers on the porch. Picking up is half the job—the tea bags left forgotten on the counter, the blanket she carried in from the living room and let fall on the floor, plates abandoned on the coffee table. It was Thanksgiving, but I did chicken instead of turkey—butter under the skin, herbs and garlic and a cut lemon wedged inside. Even after I washed my hands, I smelled lemon. Later, I’d do green beans in the skillet, and I had a box of Stove Top ready to go. Mom hadn’t ever liked to cook, not as long as I knew her, and she said she was fine with toast and cereal, and I always checked that the milk was fresh. But she needed more than Special K, so most weeks, I did my cleaning and prepped a meal or two, even if it wasn’t Thanksgiving.

  It took longer, in case you’re wondering, when it felt like I had electricity running from my neck up to a light bulb behind my eye.

  I was bringing up toilet paper from the basement—if I don’t, Mom will do it, and I don’t like her risking the stairs—and when I stepped into the kitchen, Mina was there. The leather jacket. The flannel. Fingerless gloves. Tights worn with what she called her ass-dusting boots. We have the same eyes; you can see it in the pictures. After a minute, I stepped around her and finished stocking the bathroom with TP.

  When I came back, she was still standing there. She flexed her fingers like they were cold, and then she said, “Rex is in the hospital.”

  I wrapped my hands around the back of a chair.

  “They broke his knees.” Her voice broke. “They say Rex isn’t ever going to walk again, not like before.”

  The tablecloth was old. It was thick vinyl, covered with a muted, brown-toned print of assorted fruits. Bananas. Apples. Cherries.

  “Say something!”

  I looked her in the eye. “Did you know?”

  I hadn’t meant to ask; I’d learned a long time ago not to ask Mina anything because I didn’t want to know. But—and you’ll find this hard to believe—every once in a while, I fuck up.

  She slapped me. It was a big, open-handed blow, and I saw it coming in for touchdown. It cracked my head to the side, and a moment later, blood bloomed inside my mouth. Her shoulders shook. Her chest heaved. She touched her face, and the pale gray wool of the fingerless gloves darkened where tears touched it. Then she turned and left, slamming the door behind her.

  My cheek prickled with heat. I checked the chicken, and the oven felt cool in comparison. I closed the oven door. I closed my eyes and saw red, like I was looking into a furnace. Mom liked to say that people—specifically, her various frenemies on the block—never remembered the hundred times you helped them. They only remembered the time you didn’t. Dad used to say who cared if they remembered. And then he’d turn up the TV.

  “What are you doing here?” Mom’s voice was shrill. She stood in the doorway, clutching her housedress, her face puffy with sleep. A crease from the pillow made her look strangely childlike. “I told you I didn’t want you here. I told you not to come back.”

  “It’s me, Mom. Luka. Your son.”

  She was quiet. The change happened in her eyes. “What’s going on? What’s happening? I heard something.”

  “Mina stopped by. She wanted to wish you a happy Thanksgiving.”

  Mom’s face softened. Her hand relaxed its death grip on the housedress. “She left? She’s not eating with us?”

  “She has to go to the hospital to see Rex.”

  “She might be hungry.”

  “How about I take her some leftovers?”

  Mom patted my arm. “You’re a good brother. You’re a good brother. You always have to remember to be good to your sister.” And then her expression clouded again, and she was silent for a long time, staring at me. When she spoke, her voice was full of a weary unhappiness, the sound of someone harping on an old complaint. “Conrad, you have to talk to Luka. He’s spending too much time with those boys. You’re his father; you have to talk to him. You need to tell him it’s time to bring home a nice girl.”

  The Dog That Barks

  1

  “I could,” I said. “But I won’t.”

  Harry glanced at Rich, then back at me. He had the bluest eyes, and they got wide on those rare occasions the world didn’t do what Harry thought it should. They could get wide other times, too, if you knew what to do and you did it just right. I’d learned that in college one night, when we’d both had too much to drink and Davey was in the wind again. “Luka.” He spread his hands. Somehow, his eyes got wider. “Please?”

  It was December 1st, and there was a leak in the ceiling, and Harry had brought Rich here. To my office. All three of those things were pissing me off. “No.”

  “Did you listen to a word I said?” Rich was thin and Black, and he had a chin like it was trying to crawl away behind the graying goatee. “What didn’t you understand? This is serious.”

  I looked past him—through the door, to the office’s tiny waiting room, and out the window. Cherokee Street was quiet this time of day. Across the street was Tacos and Ice Cream—if it had a name, nobody knew it, but that’s what the sign said. And we weren’t that far from the native statue, although it was gone now; they’d voted to remove it a few years back. We’d voted, I guess. Those were the kind of wins you got on Cherokee Street—a racist statue got removed, and everybody clapped shoulders and tweeted and ’grammed the victory, and then we all bent over for another good fucking.

  One of the people who wanted to be in charge of said fucking was currently sitting across from me.

  Harry was pinching his lips between two fingers. It wasn’t something he did in public; it would have ruined the image: broad-shouldered, a head of thick, beautiful hair in a classic cut, the hint of a tan even though we were at the end of autumn. His eyes, if anything, had gotten wider, and he was staring at me. I looked away first.

  “I don’t know what crawled up your ass—” Rich began.

  “Rich,” Harry said, “give me a minute.”

  “Fuck that. He wants to be a fuck-for-brains? Fine. There are other people—”

  “I want a minute alone with Luka.”

  He didn’t raise his voice, but then, he didn’t have to; that had always been one of Harry’s tricks. Rich grimaced, but he grabbed his briefcase and the thousand-dollar overcoat, and he went out into the waiting room. He slammed the door behind him.