The lobby door abruptly shot open, socking Liv in the shoulder. She stumbled back as a woman in a baggy blouse with an unlit cigarette in her mouth backed out, arms wrapped around a plastic hamper of laundry. The woman glared, tightening what looked like toothless lips around the cigarette. Before Liv could count the reasons not to do it, she stuck her foot in the door.
She slipped through the gap and hurried past a bank of silver mailboxes and into a mildewed, carpeted stairwell blotched with stains. It took one stair before Liv, cross-country runner, gasped for air. She regretted not bringing Mist, which still rested in the back seat of her car. She should do something to protect herself. Send an email to Krista with the building address. Find a store that sold pepper spray. But these offered too many opportunities for her to chicken out. She was here. She would carry this through.
Liv reached the third floor. The peeling wallpaper was a green-and-silver jungle print. The iron-gray carpet was balding, and two of the three lamps had burned out. It smelled like cabbage, and, from a distant apartment, Liv heard the lonely warble of a Roy Orbison song. She took out her key ring and slotted keys through the fingers of her left hand. Of all the wild weapons she’d handled in her life, this was the best she could do.
She knocked on unit 302.
“Ohhhhhhhh!” Instantly, a man’s incensed moan.
Liv took a step back, wanting Mist, wanting it now.
“You want to kick me out? See me pick food from your trash cans next week? You want to live with that? I’m a disabled American, you son of a bitch! You kick a disabled American to the curb and your ass is going to end up in hell!”
Liv’s mind spun. This man believed her to be some vindictive landlord. She adjusted her perspiring palm around the keys.
“Mr. Carbajal, it’s not—I’m just…”
She trailed off, uncertain how to describe herself or her mission. From behind the door, she heard the clang of a utensil being dropped on a plate. The creak of a chair, the groans of floorboards, a hoarse exhale. Twenty seconds later, the man spoke again, much softer, but so close to Liv that she gasped. He was right behind the door.
“Just what?” he prompted. His voice was a mushy drawl, as if spoken behind food.
“A girl.” It sounded both massively inadequate and disparagingly true.
A bolt lock was shifted, a chain lock thrown. The door flew open six inches. The room was unlit, almost black despite it being the middle of the day, and Liv could discern only the outlines of the man’s rumpled bathrobe, crooked glasses, and unkempt hair. He stood motionless for several seconds. His breathing was louder than the Roy Orbison, a husky wheeze with fluting undertones.
“Planning to take my eyes out with those keys?”
Liv flushed, thrust the key ring into the pocket of her coat.
“I wanted to ask you about … why you got fired.” She swallowed; her throat burned with anxious acid. “I’ve … seen things.”
For a time the man stared. Then he chuckled, the distant rumble of coming thunder.
“I thought you’d never get here.”
He turned and shuffled into the dark apartment, leaving the door open behind him.
“Shit,” Liv muttered. She raised her voice. “Can we talk somewhere else? A coffee shop or something?”
He disappeared around a corner. Liv cursed again, confirmed the locations of her keys and phone, and stepped inside. She paused to let her pupils widen. The place felt like a junk shop, though she couldn’t make out specifics. Objects darker than the general dark threatened from all sides, shelves and piles teetering with jutting, irregular shapes. The spice of decaying books shot into her sinuses.
“The door,” he snapped. “Landlord son of a bitch wants my money.”
Liv closed the door against her better judgment and continued inside, navigating by fugitive slivers of sunlight. She turned a corner, undefinable granules crunching underfoot, and saw the man lower himself into a chair at a small table. Behind the table, the window shades were drawn, and, more alarming, sealed to the frames with thick black tape. Light eked from a dozen fissures, flecking dots of sun across books, clothes, and uncleared plates. There was one other chair, at the man’s right elbow. Liv touched it, felt a layer of crumbs, and brushed them off before sitting.
Carlos Carbajal stared straight ahead at the wall, and Liv could see him only in profile: tangled hair, sloping forehead, brushy mustache. She investigated the right side of his face. His brown skin was shades darker from beard growth, and wrinkles cascaded from his eyes like Monk family fireworks. With his right hand, he picked an object off the plate before him. Liv expected a cigarette lighter, maybe something harder, but it was a container of Tic Tacs. Carbajal thumbed it open, tossed white pellets into his mouth.
“Don’t tell me your name,” he said. “I don’t want to know.”
Here was a man farther off the grid than Lee Fleming had ever been, one who, if the nonfunctional doorbell was an indication, barely interfaced with the outer world. What did she have to lose by divulging the outrageous truth? If he responded like she was crazy, she could say thank you and get the hell out of there.
“We caught one,” she said. “My friend and I. In a hunting trap.”
She watched his bushy right eyebrow lift. Still he did not turn her way.
“I don’t know what you mean.” His tone was artificially flat.
“You do. I know you do.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“A thing. Like a person, but … not.”
Carbajal looked down at his table of rubble.
“What’d you do with it?” he asked softly.
“We … kept it.”
“You still have it?”
She thought of Doug and A, their uncertain fates. “Sort of.”
“Holy shit. Holy fucking shit, girl.”
Carbajal chuckled, then coughed. His chest resounded with phlegm. He choked on it, his face going dark purple, thick strands of spit glossy in the sunspots. He panted, hocked, and spat on the floor. He wiped his mouth.
“Lung cancer,” he gasped. “On my last goddamn leg here. The mints help.”
Two days of apologies and she was still going: “I’m sorry.”
He flapped an irritable hand. “Look at this place. I’m dead and buried.”
“It … the thing we caught … it said your name.”
“Is that so? I suppose that’s flattering. Probably overheard someone talk about me. Thought I could help, offer protection. Wrong about that, though.”
“So you saw one of them, too?”
“One? Little girl, I saw a whole group.”
“Then why didn’t you say something? Why haven’t you told anyone?”
He slammed the Tic Tac container to the table. “Don’t you judge me. Don’t you dare judge me, little bitch.”
Liv tensed. Little bitch was not little girl. The apartment layout raced through her mind. Estimates on how quickly she might leap from the chair, how many steps it would take to reach the door.
“They wiped me out,” he seethed. “Persona non grata. The good old US of A. But you think they shut me up? You think they shut up Carlos Carbajal? I’ve got a computer, girl. And I know how to use it. I’ve got software and plug-ins that block prying eyes. I’m still out there. People call them conspiracy sites, like that’s a disparaging word. But conspiracy’s the right word. That’s the word you use when there are multiple entities—right?—colluding to enact a secret policy. Log in to any of the top sites. Mr. Brown—that’s what I go by now. Mr. Brown has thousands of followers. Go ahead and check. Thousands.”