Page 34 of A Friend in the Glass

Giving the door another nudge for Rufus to follow, Sam headed into the room. He drew the Beretta from his waistband and held it low against his thigh. The rush of circulating air seemed enormously loud, somehow, swallowing up everything else. His reflection moved with him in the glass.

The training came back, the way it always did. He found the light switch and cleared the hallway. Then an empty bedroom and a bathroom that looked like it hadn’t been touched. Then a larger bedroom, a suitcase open on a stand. The door to the walk-in closet was open, and—

And instead of suits and dress shirts, uniforms hung in the closet. Army uniforms.

This wasn’t Del Jolly’s room.

A whiff of something foul met him as he approached the door to the attached bathroom, and a part of him already knew, even before he turned on the lights.

He was right about the blood on the tile, the streaks and swirls running down toward the shower drain. Right, too, about the smell you never forgot: a body violated, and shit, and piss.

But, then again, sometimes he was wrong.

Because it wasn’t Del Jolly who had been shot twice in the chest and died in a luxury hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. It was Colonel Leslie Bridges.

His face looked smaller in death, and the rictus made his little rat teeth even more prominent. He was still wearing the wool overcoat and the navy suit. A black driving glove—a little affectation, Sam guessed—had fallen out of his pocket and lay on the shower floor.

“Rufus,” Sam called.

“Sam,” Rufus answered back, his voice growing steadier in volume, like he was walking toward the en suite. “There’re two glasses made up in the other room and liquor missing from the bar. Someone had a friend over for—holy shit what thefuck!” Rufus stood in the bathroom doorway, hands firmly in his jacket pockets, eyes wide with shock.

“Have you touched anything?” Sam asked.

“No,” Rufus said with a vicious headshake. He pointed through his jean jacket, the gesture sort of looking like a kid trying to convince someone they had a gun in their pocket. “What’d you do?”

Sam shook his head. Then, returning the Beretta to the small of his back, he said in a low voice, “What the fuck?”

“Isn’t that the colonel?”

“That’s him.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Rufus said on a shaky exhale. He tugged his hands free and was already pulling on his cheap winter gloves. He motioned Sam away from the body while stepping into the bathroom himself. “I could be naked in bed, eating leftover Chinese takeout off your perfectly sculpted butt cheeks, but instead I’m rummaging through the pants of a guy who’s shit himself.”

“Try not to—”

“Touch anything, yeah, yeah.” Rufus crouched beside Bridges, his face twisted up in response to the smell. He carefully patted the dead man’s trouser pockets before peeling back one side of his overcoat. Rufus studied the bloody chest wound for only a second before draping the coat back into place. He patted the outer pockets, and when something crinkled, reached inside. Retrieving a few folded and slightly crumpled sheets of paper, he shifted his weight onto one foot, reached out, and offered them to Sam.

Sam took them, angling them to catch the light. The formatting at the top was a blur at first, and then he processed it as the header of an email. He scanned the text and stopped and held out the page for Rufus’s inspection, his thumb under the word STONEFISH.

Chapter Eighteen

The radiator wasping,ping,pinging when Rufus and Sam stepped through the front door of the tiny tenement studio just after seven o’clock. Rufus held a pizza box in both hands—paid for with an IOU. He kicked the door shut, shoved the box onto the miniscule counter space, and let out a held breath. He dug his burner phone free, thumb hovering over the touchscreen for a long moment before he reluctantly inputted Erik’s number.

The city hadn’t been the free-for-all of Rufus’s childhood for a long time. Back then, bad men could get away with unfathomable crimes simply due to the lack of surveillance or security footage for the law to fall back on. Nowadays, there were cameras everywhere. Not just at ATM machines or inside retail shops, but at traffic lights, on subway platforms, inside apartment lobbies, even elevators. And while Rufus was good at looking unimportant, was great even, at being forgettable, Erik hadn’t been born yesterday. He’d been the one to mention the eighteenth floor, the elevator, the footage. And when Colonel Bridges’s body would eventually be discovered by housekeeping, Erik would be checking the cameras again. He’d see his CI right there in the middle of it.

Rufus needed to establish his whereabouts with his handler before things got messy.

Messier, he thought, when Erik picked up.

Rufus wasted no time in admitting that they hadn’t gone directly home to “play house,” but had instead found a DB in the en suite bathroom of room 1802 at the Savoy, although he kept the email printouts found on the colonel’s body to himself. Rufus had to practically yell over Erik’s explosive bitching that he’d been out to lunch at Diabla around noon—ask the staff if they remember the redhead who asked for no ice and, like, three refills of Pepsi—he’d been at his scheduled therapy afterward—Sam was even signed in at the front desk—and then they’d been at the Javits when Evangeline had gone kaput. There was simply no possibility, based on the level of rigor seen in the body, that Rufus could be involved with the murder.

Rufus wasn’t a killer, for Christ’s sake.

He was just having some monumentally bad luck this week.

Maybe it was a full moon.

Or maybe Mercury was in retrograde. Isn’t that what astrology girlies usually blamed for their shitty day?

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