Chapter 2 The Man Who Knows Too Much

"Nobody." The word came out of Sophie before she could stop it. "I'm dead. There's a stone with my name on it. Nobody knows."

"Good." Jackie let out a long breath and held out his hand, palm up. "Give me the phone."

She looked down. Cynthia's phone was lit in her fist with another missed call from Vine's number. "No."

"Someone will call it, and whoever picks up will tell them exactly where it is. It's a tracker now, Sophie. You're holding up a lamp."

She heard her own name, and the cold reached her all at once. She had never told him. She dropped the phone into his hand and watched him snap the card in half and toss both pieces into the cup holder.

"I never told you my name."

"Sophie Vincenzo."

For four years, no one had said it to her face. At school she used her mother's maiden name, and the only place she wrote her real one was inside her Bible, in pencil, where she could rub it out. Her hand flew to the door handle. It would not move.

"Let me out."

"In a minute." He was not looking at her. He was looking in the mirror. "Right now I need you to put on your seat belt."

Two headlights had swung into the street behind them, high and bright. A truck, boxy and dark, rolling too fast for a road this narrow. It was not slowing down.

"Dario's friends," Jackie said. "They must have seen the plates."

He started the engine, and the sedan lurched out from the shadow of the pharmacy. Sophie grabbed the dashboard with both hands as he took a corner so hard the tires howled. The truck followed. Its horn blared once, long and furious, and she saw the shape of two men inside it, one pointing at her through the windshield.

"Hold on."

He cut through a market where the stalls were already being unloaded, scattering crates and a startled dog. A woman shrieked. The truck came on behind them, smashing through a table of fruits, and Sophie screamed when its bumper clipped their front wheel and the whole car shuddered. Jackie spun the wheel, shot through an alley barely wide enough for the mirrors, and skidded out the other side into traffic. A bus blocked the truck's path for exactly three seconds. It was enough. Jackie turned off his headlights, rolled into a loading yard, and cut the engine.

They sat in the dark. The truck's roar passed on the street outside, slowed, hesitated, and left.

"That," Sophie said, her voice shaking, "was not boring."

"No." He wiped sweat from his forehead with the heel of his hand. "I'm usually better at boring because boring is best."

The safe house was a narrow flat above a locksmith's shop, and Sophie decided not to trust a single thing about it before she reached the top of the stairs. Jackie went in first, checked every room, and turned three locks behind them. There was a table, two chairs, a sagging couch, and a kitchen so clean it looked unused. There were no photographs anywhere.

She stayed by the door with her arms wrapped around her ribs. "Who are those men? The ones at the club."

"People who own more than a club. Warehouses, trucks, a few judges." He filled a glass at the sink and set it on the table, then backed away as if it might frighten her. "If I walk into a police station tonight, my report lands on a desk they pay for. By morning I'm dead and you're in the back of a van."

"So Cynthia and Vine just stay gone?"

"I'll find where they were taken. I can't do it loudly."

"That isn't good enough." She took a step into the room. "You knew my name, and you were already in that corridor. You didn't come by accident."

"No." He did not look away. "I take the long way past the market on Thursdays so I can watch you buy an arepa from the woman you tip in coins and apologize to. I know you go to the seven o'clock Mass at San Judas and leave before the last hymn. I know you avoid Calle Bolívar because of a yellow dog."

Heat rose in her face, then drained away, leaving her dizzy. Scenes began to line up like cards being dealt in her head: a gray car across from her building one winter morning, a man at a bus stop who never got on any bus. She had told herself it was nerves. It had been someone.

"For how long?"

"Four years."

"Since I was thirteen." Her voice came out scraped raw. "Why? You don't know me. Why would a man like you follow a girl like me?"

Jackie's hands tightened on the back of a chair. He looked at her at last, and the tired eyes she had noticed in the club were not tired at all. They were haunted, like windows in a house where something terrible had once happened.

"Because I was there," he said, "the night your parents died."

For a long moment the only sound was the refrigerator humming.

"There," Sophie whispered. "Where?"

"Close enough to know what was done." He rubbed the scar through his eyebrow. "I belonged to the organization that gave the order. I'm not going to pretend I didn't."

"Did you kill them?"

"I had no part in giving that order."

It was a careful sentence, built like a bridge with a few planks missing, and she could hear the gaps. "That isn't what I asked."

"I know."

"I saw the men who came into that house. Through a crack in a wardrobe door, I saw every one of them, and I have not forgotten a single face." Her voice cracked and she let it. "You weren't one of them. I would know."

"No. I wasn't in the room."

"But you know who was."

"Yes."

"Then tell me."

"I can't do that, yet."

She crossed the floor, picked up the glass of water, and threw it. It hit the wall a foot from his head and burst into bright pieces, and a splash ran along his cheek. He wiped it away without looking at his fingers.

"Four years," she said. Her breath was coming in sharp pulls. "You watched me eat, and walk, and hide in a church, and you never said a word."

"I couldn't."

She ran. The first lock gave way, then the second, and her fingers trembled so hard on the third that the metal rattled. Behind her, Jackie didn't move. "The top one sticks. Lift while you turn."

She lifted. It turned. The door swung open on a dark stairwell.

"Dario will have made his calls by now," Jackie said quietly from the kitchen. "Every man between here and the valley knows there's a girl in a green dress who saw the loading bay. If you walk out, you won't be a girl who escaped. You'll be a loose end, and those people don't tolerate loose ends."

Sophie stood in the doorway with the cold air on her face. Below, a car crept down the street, slowed at the corner, and moved on. Where would she go? Home was a rented room with a flimsy lock, and she had a sick feeling the man behind her already knew the address.

"Give me one reason."

"I don't have a good one." He sounded tired down to his bones. "But your friends need someone outside who's still breathing, and I need you alive to help me look."

She shut the door and turned the locks one by one, and she hated that her hands knew how. "Until morning. I'm not staying because I trust you."

"I know."

He showed her to the second room, which held a narrow bed, a barred window, and a bolt on the inside of the door. "The bolt is on your side. It always was."

She shut the door in his face, and he heard the bolt slide home.

Jackie swept the broken glass into his palm and tipped it into the bin, then sat at the table in the dark and listened. After a while he heard what he had expected to hear through the wall, a girl crying into a pillow as quietly as she could, the way someone cries when she has learned that nobody is coming. He stayed where he was until it stopped.

At 11:03 p.m, his phone buzzed against the wood. An unknown number.

He opened the message, and the blood drained from his hands.

The girl escaped. Scofield wants to know why.

He read it three times, and the words never changed.