Page 17 of A Friend in the Glass

“Well, she’s AWOL. Nobody knows where she is. Are you still in New York?”

“Should I answer that?”

“Probably not. My guy in CID said she’d bailed twice on her annual drug test, and rumors had already been floating around that she was using. She was erratic. Not doing her work. Pulling old cases from storage. I think they were hoping she’d fail the drug test and they could get rid of her.”

“Old cases? What old cases?”

Surprise laced Colly’s voice. “I don’t know. Do you want me to find out?”

“No. Thanks, Colly.”

“Save the thanks. Maybe sometime just call me when you don’t need something. How about that?”

Sam grunted. He reached for the End button. Then he stopped. “Did you know Lew Frazer is in New York City?”

“I knew you were still there. Are you with that guy? The cute one?”

Rufus choked and started coughing.

“Colly: Lew Frazer.”

Rufus smacked Sam’s bicep and whispered loudly, “Let her talk about me.”

Sam glared at him and turned up the volume slightly.

“Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong about what happened.” Colly’s voice was weary. “Yeah, that piece of shit probably made the call on Stonefish, and yeah, Went is the one who took it in the neck, and yeah, it still tears me up what Went did to himself. But you already threw away your career over this jerk. You’re in a better place now, right? Don’t let him get inside your head again.”

“You can find out where he’s staying.” The thought hadn’t occurred to Sam until now, but it hit him at sixty miles an hour. “He’s here in some sort of official capacity; he was in uniform. So you can find out where he’s staying.”

“I can’t—”

“Yeah, you can. You call the travel office, and you tell them you’ve got something you need to overnight him. You just need the hotel where he’s staying, the address and room number, that kind of thing.”

“Sam.”

“If they ask, tell them it’s classified, which they’ll buy because you’re intel—”

“Sam, the answer is no.”

“This isn’t—”

“Let it go, the thing with Lew. He’s as crazy about you as you are about him. I’m not putting the two of you on a collision course.”

“That son of a bitch murdered—”

“Call me sometime, Sam. Hell, call me even if it’s only for another favor, the Auden way. But not about this.”

She disconnected.

Sam stared at the phone. “What the ever-loving fuck?”

Chapter Ten

On their way back to Rufus’s tenement on East Fourth Street, Rufus had segued to grab some dinner from a Chinese restaurant called Super Flavor Plus 2. (He was uncertain of the fate of Super Flavor Plus 1.) It was a hole-in-the-wall in nearly every sense: no tables, no chairs, just the faded, backlit display of meal options hanging overhead the bulky cash register. And if you weren’t a neighborhood local, you’d have no reason to know that they’d been out of shrimp chow mein since at least 2003 but had never stopped advertising it. Once his takeout containers had been loaded to the brim with hot and aromatic food, Rufus passed the auntie working the register several wrinkled bills, grabbed the knotted plastic bag, and disappeared back into the cold night.

Upon entering 4D, and after kicking off his salt-crusted Cons and dropping his jackets and hat into their usual pile on the floor, Rufus removed containers from the bag and set them all out on the floor beside the bed. He said to Sam, “I got dumplings, hot and spicy beef, and chicken lo mein.” He sat on his knees before the food. “Pick your poison.”

“Dumplings,” Sam said, opening the closest container. Luck was on his side, apparently, and he sat back and grabbed the paper-wrapped chopsticks.

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