“Doesn’t look like the police are going to do anything,” he said.
“I got that impression. Where should we start?”
“I haven’t agreed to help you yet.”
“But you will, right?”
Liam holds his beer glass with his thumb and index finger and swings it back and forth. He loves giving silence for answers.
“I was thinking that if she’s done it before, finding some of her other victims might help,” I say.
“Other Jessica Williamses?”
“Yeah.”
“You think she’s used that name before? Why?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? She has the ID; why not use it more than once if she can?”
“Or she might have a string of IDs,” Liam says.
“She might. But you and I both know that a good ID is harder to get than most people think.” After I’d left the LOT, I learned that my birth had never been registered. Todd didn’t believe in the government, only Todd. It had taken six months, and a lot of help from Liam, to get the Social Security card in my wallet and the birth certificate in my safe-deposit box, which is also where I socked away my emergency fund, safe from Jessica Two.
“Plus,” I add, “she said this thing about how she played this game ‘every time she met another Jessica.’”
“That might be a clue. Or it might be a lie.”
“Let’s call it a hunch.”
He finishes his beer. “You know what I think about hunches.”
“Eliminate them. Don’t believe. Check.”
“That’s right.”
“So how do we check?”
Liam turns his stool around and rests his back against the bar. He looks out at the crowd of suited men and women. He’s wearing dark jeans and a black shirt, a look he can easily turn into something resembling a suit with the addition of a blazer and a tie. A look for all occasions, he’s called it.
I follow his gaze. There’s a pretty early-twenty-something accepting a drink from an older guy at one of the tables near the door.
“She’s fine,” I say.
“Probably.”
“You don’t have to save everyone.”
He looks at me. “If your ‘hunch’ is right, then there must be points of commonality.”
“Besides our names?” I say cheekily.
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I feel like one.”
“You got taken by a pro.”
“You think?”
“Definitely. What she did took a lot of planning. She must’ve been tracking you for a while, waiting for an opportunity to connect with you and play that game. And the phone tap at the end, that’s clever.”
“That’s how she got my banking info, right? Some kind of capture software.”
“Yes, but that’s pretty sophisticated. There’s encryption in place that should’ve prevented her from getting anything other than your contact information.”
The girl is shaking her head at something the older man’s saying. But then she laughs, and the tension in my body eases. A downside of Liam: he makes you see bad everywhere you look. Which might be accurate most of the time, but it’s a hard way to live.
“Don’t say it, okay. I know I shouldn’t have had my banking information in my phone, but I thought it was safer than e-banking over that shared Wi-Fi in my apartment. I know you always say—”
“Do everything in person—”
“Yes, but life’s not built like that anymore.”
“Expedience over security. It’s always been our undoing.”
A group of recently off-work friends stumble into the bar, laughing. The bartender ups the level on the sound system again and rings a bell: last call for happy hour. “Where the Streets Have No Name” starts playing. They could be describing the Land of Todd.
“I was easy prey,” I say.
“What’s done is done. What matters is what you do now.”
“All right, enough with the sayings. Are you going to help me or what?”
I keep expecting him to offer, but instead he’s made me ask again. Life is like that sometimes. Plans depend on other people.
“I’m at your service, ma’am,” Liam says, then throws his head back and laughs.
Chapter 5
Card Tricks
Liam walks me back to my apartment, a few blocks away from the bar. Jose, the three-card monte man, is set up on the corner of Greenwich and Seventh, the way he often is. He’s got a crowd of tourists around him, smiling and wasting their one-dollar bills like businessmen in a strip joint. Whatever floats your boat.
Liam watches Jose’s hands, which I know from him is what you’re supposed to do rather than watch the cards. Jose is very good, but if you look carefully enough, you can see what Liam pointed out to me years ago: he flashes the red queen, then palms it so it’s one of the other cards that hits the table first. Thinking that you’re following the card the dealer shows you is the mistake everyone makes, the reason the monte always wins unless you guess right through blind luck.
“You going to take him on?” I ask. Sometimes Liam likes to torture the three-card guys by beating them at their own game.
“Not tonight.”
“Instead of saving all of us, you should’ve trained us up like Fagin in Oliver Twist.”
“Find the lady,” he says, tapping my sternum lightly. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it. With you and Daisy, we would’ve made a killing.”
I watch his face. It’s hard to know if he’s joking sometimes, or what he’s thinking in general. He was pretty clear, though, when I made a pass at him on the night of my college graduation a few months before I turned twenty-three. He removed my hand from his thigh gently and told me to get some sleep. I hid out from him for most of the year after that, but it was hard to stay away from Liam forever.
“What held you back?” I ask.
“Is that a serious question?”
I shrug.
“None of you deserved to be used anymore.”
The crowd lets out a loud Ahhh! Jose just took a guy for fifty dollars.
“That guy’s a plant,” I say.
“Oh yeah?”
“Pretty sure.”
Liam checks out the player. He’s in his midthirties and wearing a Mariners cap and jeans ten years out of date. He bets another fifty dollars and wins this time. The crowd’s bigger now, and pretty soon one of the local beat cops is going to break this up.
“You might be right,” Liam says.
“I totally am.”
“Why the confidence?”
“He was doing the same thing this morning.”
Liam gives me one of his deep belly laughs. “That’s my girl.”
I wish.
It took me almost a year to call the number Liam slipped me among the produce. I should’ve left with him that day at the farmers’ market like he asked, but I didn’t want to leave my cousin, Kiki, behind. So instead, I’d taken his number and promised I’d find a way to use it when I was ready.
It took a lot of planning. We didn’t have a phone in the Upper Camp, only a two-way radio for emergencies. The phone at the Gathering Place was closely guarded. Some said bugged by Todd. It was hard to know what was true at that point, which was one of the reasons it felt so dangerous to stay there. Then there was the way Todd kept looking at me. Kiki told me I was imagining it, but I saw how my mother looked the other way whenever he was near me.