Tiger (12 page)

There was still another photograph stored in the cell phone, and she opened it next. What Wally saw there, on that tiny screen, took her breath away. The picture was a straight-on shot from the waist up of a young man in a white T-shirt standing against a bare cement wall. His face was completely expressionless, as if he was posing for a passport photo. His hair was shoulder length and black, and his eyes—like her own—were dark gray. She had stared into those eyes just two nights ago for a fleeting moment before she had spoken his name aloud and he had ended the encounter.

Tiger
.

WALLY WAS WAITING WITH COFFEE AND DOUGHNUTS
when Jake and Ella emerged from bed the next morning. The sight of her sitting at the dining table—impatience written all over her features—put them on alert.

“What?” Jake asked. “What happened?”

She told them everything: from the late-night phone call to the photograph of Tiger on the burner phone and the game-changing conclusions she'd arrived at. Just a day earlier, Wally had debriefed Jake and Ella about everything that had been going on with her. Now, less than twelve hours later, she had a very different version to tell.

“So, the men who came at you outside Harmony House—” Ella began, processing it all.

“—and up at the lodge,” Wally added.

“AND up at the lodge . . . they were after you, not Kyle?”

“And the pictures in the phone tell me that they aren't just after me,” Wally said, “but Tiger too, wherever the hell
he
is.”

And then Wally told the two of them what she had left out before: the surprise face-to-face, late-night meeting she'd had with Tiger on Facebook. Wally was nervous about how Jake and Ella would react when they heard how
all-in
she was in her search for Tiger. It had been Wally's obsessive need to find her Russian birth mother that had brought so much chaos to their lives just five months ago. But their reaction took her by surprise.

“It's not like a shock or anything,” Ella said. “He's your brother—of course you want to find him. And you are, after all,
you
.”

“Truth,” Jake chimed in.

“There are days I wish I wasn't,” Wally said. “Believe me.”

“As long as you protect yourself . . . ”

“I will,” Wally said, thankful for her friends' acceptance.

“First thing,” Jake said, “we have to find out what we can about these assholes who keep coming after you.”

We
have to find out, Jake had said.
We
.

“Yeah,” she agreed gratefully. “We don't have much to go on, but—”

Wally held up the burner phone that contained the photos, letting them speak for themselves.

“This is what we've got,” Wally said. “What do we do with it?”

It took a moment, but soon Ella's face lit up with excitement.

“Paige!” Ella said. “I haven't seen her in so long. . . . ”

Paige Jefferson. The Cell Phone Whisperer. Of course. Why hadn't Wally already thought of her?

“Her shop opens at ten,” Wally told them, and checked the time. “Which gives us an hour.”

“Let's hit it,” Jake said.

“There's something else I have to do, though,” Wally went on. “After figuring everything out, I realized how messed up all of this was for Kyle. There's a crew of gunmen out there, and all along we figured they were after him. No matter how much of a psycho his father is, it turns out that hanging with me was probably the most dangerous thing he could have done. Plus, I totally went off on him when we were driving away from the lodge. He's got to be tied up in knots by now.”

“There really was something there, huh?” Ella asked, reading Wally. “You and Kyle?”

“I think so,” Wally said, although nothing was clear anymore. “I don't know. I guess I'd like it to be something. There were moments . . . ”

“What are you going to do?” Jake asked.

“I have to get him some real help,” Wally said, her mind made up. “I've only made things worse for him. It's the right thing to do.”

While Jake and Ella got ready to go, Wally grabbed her cell phone. She had weighed the situation and was clear on what needed to be done. It was true that being with Wally had put Kyle in harm's way, but that didn't change the fact that his conflict with his father was still explosive.

First, Wally punched the code into her phone that would prevent the person on the other end of the line from seeing her phone number come up on caller ID. Then she dialed
911
.

“This is
911
,” a woman's clipped, stern voice sounded on the other end of the line. “Please state your emergency.”

“Hi, uh . . . ” Wally made her voice sound as young and scared as she could. “My good friend hasn't been to school in like a week, and no one has heard from him. I'm really scared about it. I tried to call his cell and his home number, but there's no answer at either one.”

“I understand,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “But this is an emergency line. I can give you the number for Social Services—”

“I told our dean at school, but he said it was none of my business. The thing is, Kyle's father is physically abusive. He beats him all the time, and it seems like no one cares. Almost anything could have happened to him.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, and Wally couldn't be sure her report was being taken seriously. Her only goal was to be absolutely, positively certain that New York City authorities paid a visit to Kyle's home, and soon. She'd heard lots of stories about terrible domestic situations falling through the cracks at Social Services, and she was prepared to say anything to make sure that didn't happen. Also, the call was untraceable, so there was no way in hell there would be any blowback against her for making a false report.

“I was visiting his apartment last week,” she went on, “and his father had, like, a lot of drugs in the house. I mean, a lot, packed like bricks? In tall stacks. Plus lots of guns lying around. Big ones. It didn't seem very safe.”

“Okay,” the operator began, sounding very alert now, “let's start by getting your information—”

“I always see those signs on the subway, right?” Wally continued. “They say, ‘If you see something, say something.' So I guess this is me, like, saying something.”

Before the
911
operator could respond further, Wally recited the Townsends' Upper East Side address and hung up the phone. She couldn't be sure if her call to the authorities would immediately make Kyle's situation at home better or worse, but at least his case would be in the hands of people whose actual job it was to help.

 

 

WALLY, JAKE, AND ELLA CAUGHT THE L TRAIN INTO Manhattan and then transferred to the downtown
6
, joining hordes of commuters jammed together on the morning trains.

“It feels good to be crowded and squished again,” Ella said with total sincerity. “There are more people in this train than in the entire town near the farm.”

They got off at the Bleecker Street station and walked one block north, where there was a small, independent cell phone shop called Soul Cell. As they walked, Wally checked the street and sidewalks behind them to be sure they weren't being followed—the menacing phone call in the middle of the night had put her on high alert. Whatever it was that Alabama and the other goons were after, she had no reason to believe they would stop coming for her.

Do you have her?
the man had asked. Replaying those words in her mind still sent a chill through Wally. What the hell was going on, anyway? The only thing she knew was that she finally had a major lead in her search for Tiger—the photo of him on the burner phone—and her chances of finding him probably hinged on the legendary abilities of Paige Jefferson.

It was a few minutes after ten when the three reached Soul Cell, just in time to find fifteen-year-old Paige Jefferson opening up the shop by herself. Paige smiled broadly at the sight of them.

“Jake? Ella?” Paige beamed at her old friends.

Wally managed to stop in at Soul Cell from time to time, but Paige hadn't seen Jake or Ella since they had moved upstate. The three of them crashed into each other on the sidewalk, wrapping each other up in a group hug.

“You're opening up shop without your folks?” Wally asked when the love fest finally broke up.

“Dad's working a freelance IT gig today,” Paige said, “and Mom had some tax stuff to take care of downtown.”

Paige's mother was a Jamaican immigrant who had worked for years as a nanny and housekeeper, eventually saving enough money to open her own business, Soul Cell. The small shop catered mostly to the cellular needs of the students at NYU, just a block away. Mrs. Jefferson was a large woman—three hundred pounds or so—and usually wore some sort of African wrap as a dress with her hair in a massive dreadlock ponytail. She and her husband had home-schooled Paige since the age of ten, but their daughter was a typical enough New York teen in most ways . . . except for the thick dreadlock ponytail hanging halfway down her back, like her mother's.

The three of them stood by while Paige opened the shop and set up for business, lighting the floor-to-ceiling display cases full of hundreds of phones and accessories. When she was done, she invited them all into the backroom repair area. Paige had a well-earned reputation as a sort of cell phone savant—Wally and her friends had always called her the Cell Phone Whisperer. She could fix damaged phones and retrieve lost data where others failed, including some miraculous feats in which she had revived phones that had been swamped in water, trampled in mud, and lost in some unmentionable places that Paige didn't usually like to talk about.

“What's up?” she finally asked when her worktable was clear and ready to go.

Wally pulled out the cell phone that had Tiger's photograph in its memory and handed Paige the phone and the battery that she'd removed.

“It's Korean,” Paige said, examining the phone closely. “A burner, obviously, but not bad quality. No great features or anything, but reliable. We don't carry it here, but it's probably sold in forty or fifty tristate locations. Why did you pull the battery out?”

“Well,” Wally said, “I'd say there's about a fifty-fifty chance that if you fire up that phone, thirty minutes later some armed creeps will show up at the door of your shop looking to hurt me.”

“Huh,” Paige said, apparently unimpressed. “You know what we call that around here?”

“What?” Jake asked.

“Tuesday,” Paige said with a sly smile. “Just kidding. Hold on a sec—I can make sure we're not traced.”

She reached up toward the wall, where a small, homemade-
looking black box was mounted, with only an on-off switch on its front and a small indicator light. Paige switched on the device and the light glowed red.

“Signal jammer,” Paige said. “Look outside.”

The four of them looked out through the shop to the busy sidewalk out front. Streams of commuters and students were moving in both directions, many of them either speaking or texting into their cell phones. Within seconds of Paige's activating the jammer, the pedestrians began stopping in their tracks, glaring at the suddenly useless devices in their hands with looks of betrayal.

“I so love that!” Ella said. “Look how lost they are—it's like you ripped out their souls or something.”

“I know,” Paige said, giggling. “Pathetic. It's oddly satisfying to be a Tower God.”

With the jammer in full effect, Paige placed the battery back in the burner phone and turned it on. Within twenty seconds the device had fully booted up. Paige's fingers ran over the controls with lightning speed as she explored the workings and storage of the device.

“We have a call history that is set to erase automatically,” she said, “so it appears blank. We have no GPS feature, but there may be some location-related metadata stored in the RAM, depending. We have two downloaded files, which are photographs. One of you Wally, dressed for clubbing and the other picture . . . whoa. This guy is hot!”

“Easy there,” Wally said. “That's my brother.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I know. He's pretty good-looking. And screw you for being so surprised that we're related.”

“Okay,” Paige said finally, setting the phone down on her worktable and giving Wally an attentive look. “Tell me the story.”

Wally paused. She had known Paige for nearly two years, but their relationship was really just based on business. During her time on the streets, Wally and her crew—including Jake and Ella—had earned money trading in black-market calling cards, and Paige and her mother had occasionally dealt with them. Wally and Paige shared a mutual trust, but it had never gone deeper than that.

“I've been looking for my brother for a long time,” Wally said. “His name is Tiger, and this photograph is the best lead I've found. Although, to be accurate, it sort of found me.”

“What do mean?”

“I had a run-in with some men—”

“The gunmen that are supposedly after you . . . you weren't kidding about that?”

“Not kidding at all. This phone came off one of those guys. I have no idea what they want from me—all I know is that they have something to do with Tiger. Whatever you can dig out of the phone might be my only way of finding him.”

“But no pressure,” Jake added.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” said Wally.

Paige thought about it. “Well, like I said—there may be some metadata stored in here, off the directory. Depends on the carrier. It'll take me a while to dig it out of the memory, so I'll have to get back to you on that. For now, let me find the CID and see if I can get you the point of sale—I have connections with most of the distributors.”

“That would be great.”

“I'll make you a deal,” Paige said with a sly smile. “I'll help you however I can, and once you find Tiger you can introduce me.”

“Paige, I'm shocked,” Ella said, faking a gasp. “I didn't know you were such a diabolical slut.”

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

“Done, then,” Wally said. “I think you'd be good for him.”

Paige held up her finger in a gimme-a-second gesture, and headed into the back office of the shop. Within just a few minutes, she returned with a discouraged look on her face.

“I don't think this will help you much,” she said, holding up a napkin with a few scrawled notes on it. “That unit was part of a delivery of two hundred cell phones that were jacked two weeks ago from a truck up in Harlem—on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. I talked to the distributor and he said their delivery guys get hassled by local gangs up there all the time. The shipment was never recovered, so there's no way I can tell you who that phone was sold to.”

The news didn't have the negative effect that Paige had anticipated. During their time as a crew, the three of them had done a fair amount of “business” in that area of the city, and their street knowledge was still intact—the three of them looked at each other, calculating the possibilities.

“GMB runs those streets,” Jake said.

“What does that stand for?” Paige asked. “Or do I not want to know?”

“GMB—the Get Money Boys,” Ella said. “Hard-core bangers.”

“Whatever they ripped off, they always fenced it with Panama's smoke shop,” Jake said. “Back in the day, anyway.”

“Panama's long gone,” said Wally, “but if someone else is running his shop now, maybe we can still track the phone.”

“I guess we're going to Harlem,” said Ella.