Double Cross [2] (26 page)

I force myself to eat a couple bagels and finish the coffee Shelby brought. I throw on a gray V-neck sweater and black jeans with boots.

My limbs feel leaden as I tromp down the steps, as though the realization that Otto and I are actually over has added a physical heaviness to my being. He’s gone. And it’s my fault.

Stepping out onto the sidewalk, I’m surprised to see Mr. K. outside his shop so early on a Saturday morning.

He stubs out his cigarette, motioning to workmen inside. “Updating the security system.” He’s surprised I haven’t heard about all the overnight break-ins on our block. He points out scraping marks on the lobby door to our building. “Tried to get in through that way, too. And did you hear about Feethum?” He points to the still-boarded-up second-story window. “The same group tried to get in there. Four drug addicts. Scott Feethum clocked ’em and chased ’em off with a hockey stick.”

“Drug addicts?” I say.

“Feethum said they were perverts, but the cops told us it’s a ring of drug addicts that fences electronics.” Mr. K. shrugs. “Feethum thinks everyone’s a pervert.”

“Maybe they’re drug-addicted, electronic-fencing perverts,” I say.

Mr. K. twists his lips in a semismile. “They hit this building again last night, but somebody called it in. Sirens scared them off.”

“Shit!” I say, wishing I could talk to Otto. He would have a handle on all this. Insight. Advice.

Mr. K. lights another cigarette. “Cops say they’re pretty out of it. Sounds like they’re about to make arrests. Still, I don’t want to take chances.” He motions at his shop. “The Dorks and now this.” We watch a guy in coveralls crawl into the empty display window and wire one of the black velvet display necks. Mr. K. suggests I stop back later and get a look at his new system—more state-of-the-art than his last, which was the ultimate state-of-the-art. He’s always showing me things about his security system, thinking I’ll be impressed since I’m supposedly in the security business. I always act duly impressed, while explaining that I’m not really on the tech end.

“Be careful out there,” he cautions as I leave.

An hour later, I’m standing in the hall outside Packard’s
door, waiting for him to come open it, trying to think if he’s missed three or four nights of sleep by now.

“Justine!” Packard seems baffled and pleased to see me, but he’s alarmingly pale, except for the grayish bags under his eyes. Weariness usually makes people look older, but Packard looks younger, oddly. Sort of vulnerable.

He ushers me in and I give him the papers, explaining what they are.

He studies my face. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. You need to concentrate.”

He examines the list, then he calls Carter and reads off a few names, makes another call. He reads off a few more names. I’m shocked when I put it together that they’re starting to haul some of the customers down to HQ.

“Great,” I say. “How many exactly are you hauling down?”

“As many as it takes. The Dorks are on these lists somewhere.” He sinks wearily into an overstuffed chair and looks up at me still standing there. “Got a problem with it?”

“No,” I say, sinking into his couch.

Packard leans forward. “Now I know something’s wrong.”

I don’t know what to say. I only feel this ache.

“Justine.”

I stare up at the ceiling, willing myself not to cry. “Otto’s finished with me. It’s over. I should’ve told him about Ez like you warned me. And I didn’t. He won’t even talk to me—he’s that disgusted with me.”

“Don’t think that.”

“You know it’s true. He refuses to speak with me
whatsoever
. I think that shows a new level of disdain.”

He waves this off. “There could be any number of reasons.”

“Oh, please. The man I’ve always wanted has finally dumped me.”

“Man you’ve always wanted,” he scoffs.

“Yeah. The man I’ve always wanted.”

“You don’t really want him.”

“That just shows that you don’t understand me. And the bottom line is, you don’t get to tell me who I want.”

Packard gives me his weary, you-are-so-clueless look.

“I can’t believe you.” I stand. “Screw you. I am so sick of being defined and bossed by you. And for sure, you don’t get to tell me who I want. In fact, you don’t get to tell me anything—” I so want to tell him I’ve quit being his minion.

“I can tell you this,” he says. “Otto may be the man the frightened little girl Justine fantasizes about, but he’s definitely not the man the brave, smart, grown-up woman wants—or needs.”

I widen my eyes, incensed. “News flash: both Justines want to be with Otto.”

Packard smirks.

“You think that’s amusing?”

He yawns, shaking his head. “Mostly misguided.”

His casual treatment of my loss enrages me, and my words come out sharp and hard. “I am done being defined and bossed by you.”

He goes still, sensing something new.

“I am done.” I stop, way too close to telling him. I cross my arms. “Last summer, you told me I should’ve chosen you instead of Otto, but you were wrong. You’ve always been wrong about that. Even though Otto hates me now, I still know I made the right choice, and you know how I know? Because he always cared what I wanted, in a way that you never did. You’ve always steamrolled over all the things I desire. This conversation alone demonstrates it perfectly. I tell you I want Otto, and you tell me I don’t. The first day I met you, I wanted to be a normal girl not freaking out about my health, and you implied that you’d give me that, but instead you made
me a minion. Ever since I met you, it’s always been about what you want. In fact, I think you have blind spots in your psycho vision where it’s all about what you want, and not about what you see.”

“Justine, if you can just wait—”

“Just wait? For you to care? For when our desires and dreams line up to be exactly alike? Here I am, telling you I’m sad for losing Otto because he’s who I’ve always wanted, and you think it’s funny, and that I’m just misguided?” I wring my hands, aware that I should be directing my anger at myself, but I can’t stop. “And you go on about me,
the woman this, the little girl that.
You don’t care even to
know
what I want. Why can’t one dream of mine come true? One goddamn dream? Because, you know what? Otto makes me happy.”

This hush comes over the room, and Packard regards me strangely, almost like there’s something new about the way I look.

“He makes you happy?” Packard asks.

“Not that you care.”

“He makes you
happy
?”

“
Made
me happy. As you know, that’s over.”

“I’m sure he wishes he could be with you,” Packard says.

“Are you kidding?”

“If anything, you’re too good for him.”

I laugh—the bad kind of laugh that might as well be crying. “You know what he said just before he left? That I’m just like you.”

He regards me dimly and doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “You were happy with him?”

“Yeah,” I say.

He keeps that gaze on me, like he’s memorizing my face. “So it would make you happy to have him back?”

“Of course. Not that it can ever happen.”

He grabs a bag of red licorice off the sideboard and
tears it open, pulls out a deep red strand from the heart of it, and holds it out for me. I shake my head. He bites off the end and then he says, “Then I’ll help you.”

“What?”

“I’ll help you get him back. I’ll help you get what you want for once, okay? I care what you want, Justine.” He bites off more of the licorice and chews. I watch his cheeks, his throat. I’m unsure, suddenly, what the hell I want.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Remember? All the not sleeping? Making new decisions?” His smile doesn’t quite reach his tired eyes. “There are things I’m going to change, and clearly I need to put this item on the list. On the top.” He raises a licorice strand. “Item number one: help you get Otto back.”

“It’s not funny,” I say.

“Oh, I know it’s not.” He heaves himself up, carries his licorice bag across the room, and slides open the door to the porch, holding it for me. I go out and he follows. Together we lean over the cold metal railing, looking down over Midcity’s north side, a landscape of leafless treetops, brown rooftops, and gray roads. There’s still snow on the ground—dirty mostly, with patches of white. He takes a deep breath and exhales in a pale cloud that lives a second, then disappears. He needed fresh air; I’d forgotten about his exhaustion.

A crow flaps across the sky.

“You have to respect the crows,” he observes.

“Why? They eat roadkill and garbage.”

“And they don’t pretend different, do they? They don’t play the finches’ game—the cuteness and singing and all that. They’ll never be a state bird, you know? But to the crows, that would be degrading. It’s about who they are.”

“They eat
roadkill
,” I say. “And honestly, I don’t see how you can help me.”

He pulls out another strand of licorice. “What’s the reason people love Otto?”

“Reduced crime?”

Packard smirks, watching the crow light on a branch. The bump on the middle of his nose looks bigger when you see him in profile. “Wrong,” he says.

“His style? His idealism?”

A weary wave. Keep going.

“That he challenges people?” I try. “Has faith in people?”

“Faith in people. There you are. Here’s the thing you need to understand about Otto—he relies on the faith of others. He
needs
to see it in people’s eyes. People talk about how he believes in them, and how that feels, but it’s a two-way street, a kind of feedback loop. Otto’s faith in a person builds that person’s faith in Otto, and vice versa. It’s all looped, and the loop can’t be broken.”

Of course he’s read Otto; he’s probably been reading him for years. I don’t know why it should surprise me, or make me feel so uncomfortable. Intuitively, what he’s saying feels absolutely right. Packard. So good at reading and playing people. Except for me, oddly. “Why are you telling me this?”

“You can get back into that loop, but you can’t do it with words. You have to show it in a big dramatic way. He has to feel it. Keeping him in the dark the way you did destroyed that loop. You said,
I don’t believe in you or trust you
.” He lowers his gaze. His lashes look redder than usual under the bright winter sky. He grips the rail, and I recall how much I used to love watching those hands—strong, sinewy, oddly expressive. I think of his hands in the dreams. Boy hands, but the same. He says, “I never thought I’d be giving you relationship advice for Otto.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m telling you how to get him back. Not that you’ve lost him.” He twists his hands on the
rail. “As a man who hates to be managed, can you imagine how he’d hate to be held captive? Even if it was just to protect him? Can you imagine how he’d hate that?”

“Wait, somebody’s holding him?”

“Imagine if one person cared enough to figure it out. Believed in him enough to know he wouldn’t abandon the city in the time of the Dorks, if that person—”

“Packard, what are you telling me? He’s being
held
?”

“Listen before I change my mind. If that person freed him …” He squints at me, as if the brightness hurts his eyes. “Do you really think he’s at a mayoral conference? Do you honestly think he’d leave Midcity at a time like this? And not return your calls?”

“Where is he? You don’t have him. You wouldn’t—”

“—of course not. I don’t know where he is.” He pauses here. “But if I had to guess, I’d look at Covian.”

“But Sophia’s spoken with Otto on the phone. She knows where he’s staying.”

He smiles sleepily. “She told you that, did she?”

I think back. “Actually, no. She never said it. She just said she couldn’t
release the information.
”

“Of course not. She’s got no information to release. She got a text, just like you. She asked me the other day if
I’d
heard from him. Sophia’s got nothing.”

“Oh my God,” I say.

“Otto’s staffers, they think he’s at the conference. But really, has it ever felt right to you? Otto leaving during the Dork crisis? And as much as he hated that you withheld the Ez story, he wouldn’t simply avoid you. He may be unreasonable, but Otto finishes things,” he says. “He’s a finisher.”

“Covian has him. Whoa.”

Packard speaks through a yawn. “Covian’s a fiercely protective personality. And let’s be frank—Otto was endangering himself, walking around the way he was.”

“Like you care,” I say, nodding toward Diesel’s bracelet.

He smiles wearily. “Right. How can I strangle my nemesis with my bare hands if he gets himself killed by the Dorks?”

“That’s not funny.”

“Justine, I didn’t vow to strangle him. I vowed not to take the bracelet off until I strangled him,” he says. “There’s a difference. For now, this bracelet, it’s …” He pauses here, running a finger under the links. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The bracelet reminds me of Diesel, first off, but it also keeps me vigilant about the gravity of my struggle with Otto. And reminds me that I have choices. The bracelet means something, but it means more on than off.”

I search his face, surprised. Impressed.

Packard chuckles dismissively. Does he think he’s revealed too much? “Covian. He was well enough to leave the hospital, yet he’s not at home. Otto wouldn’t have brought Covian to DC; he told me he’d decided to use only human bodyguards.”

“He told me, too,” I say.

“So if Covian’s not in DC or at home, where is he? There’s only one place the Covian
I know
would be, and that’s right here, gunning for the Dorks. He’d be trying to get on one of my teams. I wouldn’t allow it, considering his condition, so he’d insist on supporting us in a dozen other ways.”

“He’d be sleeping and breathing this investigation.”

“Damn right.”

“When Otto left that morning, after our fight, there were no guards with him at all,” I say.

Packard raises his brows. “Can’t imagine Covian enjoyed seeing
that
. Covian’s not an idiot, but he is single-minded about protecting Otto. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s got Otto in his house. Interior room. We have no
reason to believe the Dorks recognized Otto or are specifically after him, so it’s reasonably safe. It’s what I’d do if I was Covian.”