“Can I Sit With You?” The Mafia Boss Asked The Homeless Woman — Unaware She Was His Past Eye Donor
Chapter 5
By the ninth block, Julian took out his phone and called Milo Reyes. Milo answered after one ring, voice thick with sleep, thirty-three years old and long since accustomed to the fact that when this number appeared at eleven at night, a man didn’t ask why. Julian said he needed information about a dog.
There was a brief silence, exactly the kind made by someone making certain he hadn’t misheard, and then Milo said, “Yes, sir.” Julian described the collar, the nail holes, the crescent-shaped notch in the left ear, and said three words: “Kestrel Road.” He heard Milo sit bolt upright in the darkness. Julian said he didn’t care how long it took. Then he ended the call.
Rain tapped against the roof of the car in an uneven rhythm. Dean sat with his spine straight and both hands resting on his knees, and he said that a dog that had been dead for three years wasn’t worth losing an evening over.
The words came out too quickly. Julian didn’t turn his head. He kept watching the water stream across the glass. But inside his mind, something had just been recorded, sharp and clean, the way a spoon touching ceramic had been recorded earlier that night. He had never told Dean the dog was dead. He hadn’t told anyone. He hadn’t even known it himself. He had only described a collar and an ear. He counted slowly in his head and couldn’t find a single sentence from that evening that could have led Dean to conclude the animal was supposed to be dead.
Julian turned and looked at him. He looked for a long time, longer than was comfortable, the kind of look he used across negotiating tables, when he wanted the man opposite him to fill the silence himself. Dean didn’t. He simply met his gaze, calm and perfectly ordinary, then tilted his head slightly, as though waiting for an instruction. Julian thought perhaps he was tired. Perhaps it had only been a figure of speech. He turned back toward the window and let it pass. But it didn’t pass entirely. It merely sank, the way a heavy object sinks to the bottom and lies there waiting.
Four days later, Milo called back, and his voice didn’t sound like the voice of a man who’d just finished an easy job. He said he’d found the kennel ledger. Kestrel Road had kept a handwritten book in ballpoint ink, stored on no computer anywhere, sitting inside a plastic box at the home of a man who’d moved to Florida. Milo said Julian wasn’t going to like this. The dog was number forty-one, a male Neapolitan mastiff brought in from a place in Pennsylvania. And in the final column of that entry were three initials used throughout the industry. Those three letters meant disposed of. It meant the dog was dead. The date written in the ledger was a night exactly three years ago.
Julian remained still for a long time. Inside his mind, that memory rose to its feet without anyone calling it forward. He knew exactly which night it had been. He knew because he was the one who had given the order. Three years earlier, on a March night, he had sat inside a different car on a different road and spoken one brief sentence, and six hours later Kestrel Road had been reduced to ashes and blackened posts, and he hadn’t thought about it even once since.
He asked Milo whether anyone had taken the dog out beforehand. Milo said no. The ledger clearly showed it had been disposed of before the fire, and the men there had no reason to lie in a book they believed no one would ever read, because they’d recorded everything else in it too, including things that could have sent them to prison for fifteen years.
Then Milo said the words that made Julian rise from his chair. He asked: if the dog had died on March eleventh, three years ago, what exactly had been lying beneath the table at Ruth Hollis’s diner the previous Tuesday night?