So he makes the switch, knowing he can take the train between cities and get a few hours of paperwork in, and maybe he’ll even call it virtuous. The train is a hell of a lot more comfortable than the plane, anyway.
He hates the subway, isn’t particularly fond of the metro back home, but it still seems a better option than dropping fifty bucks on a taxi just to get into the city. He stands against one of the poles, a safe distance from heaped shopping bags, luggage, and sprawled limbs, counting stops and listening to the familiar mix of phone calls, conversations in a dozen languages, and the fuzzy music that seeps too loud out of headphones and earbuds.
A little girl perched on her grandfather’s lap catches his eye and giggles, her hands fisted in a hand-knit scarf almost the same obnoxiously bright green as his. He smiles slightly, and she giggles again before burying her face in her grandfather’s shoulder. She’s still laughing, though; he can see the two puffs of ponytail high on her head shake.
He knows, in a purely theoretical sort of way, that Inara lives in a shit neighborhood. She was straightforward about that much the first time they questioned her. When she was released from the hospital, she moved right back in. The agents in the New York office prefer to visit the restaurant if they need to see her or Bliss for something.
Knowing it is very different from seeing it.
Standing outside the stairs to the subway, he takes a deep breath and promptly gags on an unexpected lungful of garbage and urine from the alley. He adjusts to the smell after a minute or two—he’s breathed worse, in his line of work—and carefully buttons his suit coat and trench to cover the gun at his hip. He’d feel better if he could access it quickly, but that’s not the kind of attention he wants to bring to himself, especially not when he’s technically on his own time.
He finds the building, a faded brick monstrosity with the remains of a wrought-iron gate hanging around the front steps. There’s an intercom to the left of the door so guests can be buzzed in, but that seems more like wishful thinking. He’s not sure if the sledgehammer hit it before or after the bullets but either way, it’s not working. In the tiny lobby, half the mailboxes are cracked open, envelopes and circulars strewn over the floor. He can see official letterhead on some of the stomped-on envelopes.
The girls’ mailbox is just fine, though, freshly painted in dull silver that almost matches the tarnished metal beneath, and covered in flower stickers. Above it, a note on cheerful pink paper is pinned to the wall. He recognizes Bliss’s handwriting, large and round, almost bubbly, really only missing the cute shapes above the lowercase i’s. If you take our mail, I take your balls. Or lady-balls, I’m not particular.
Jesus.
It’s signed with a fucking smiley face.
Both paper and ink are a little faded, and their mailbox is intact, so clearly it struck the right tone for the building. Adjusting the weight of his bags on his back, he heads into the stairwell. There’s an elevator shaft, but it seems to be lacking the rather necessary elevator.
And doors. Doors would be important.
He’s a little winded by the time he reaches their floor, second from the top, and is contemplating adding stadiums to his exercise regimen. He can run for miles across level surface, but stairs are surprisingly problematic.
Fortunately—or not—he doesn’t even have to remember the apartment number. All he has to do is look for the drunk passed out on the floor. The man’s been sleeping outside their door for years, apparently, and none of the girls have the heart to chase him off or tell the cops, so they just go up to the roof and down the fire escape to come in through their very large window.
Eddison isn’t that kind.
He kicks the drunk’s feet, just hard enough to jolt him without risking energy. “Find someplace else, buddy.”
“’Sa free country,” the man slurs, curling tighter around his bottle.
Leaning over, Eddison grabs the man’s ankle and starts walking backward, hauling the swearing and wailing drunk along with him until he can plant him halfway between doors.
Inara’s door opens and a head pops out, red-gold hair fluffing out around it in an enormous halo. “Hey, are you harassing our drunk?”
“Just moving him,” Eddison replies. He drops the man’s ankle. The drunk promptly sprawls along the floor, messily gulping from his bottle. “Are you Whitney?”
“And you are?”
He’s unaccountably relieved by her blatant suspicion. “Special Agent Brandon Eddison, here to see Inara if she’s in.”
The woman’s face lights up in recognition. She’s probably in her mid or late twenties, one eye discolored and the pupil blown in a way that looks permanent. “Hang on. I’ll get her.”
After a short wait, a sleepy-eyed Inara walks out into the hall, still shrugging into a hoodie. Her hair is mussed around her, her feet shoved in Eeyore slippers. “Eddison?”
“If we go to the roof, will you be warm enough?”
She nods and fumbles with the hoodie’s zipper. She has to stop halfway up to wrestle her hair out of the way before she can close it the rest of the way. Her hands, curled into the sleeves, rub at her eyes as she leads the way up to the roof. The roof is strewn with furniture, from basic lawn chairs to a plastic-wrapped couch under a makeshift awning that may have started life as a pair of hammocks.
She walks all the way across the roof until they can sit in a cluster of canvas camp chairs against the front ledge. If he leans over just a little, he can see their landing of the fire escape, two of Inara’s roommates smoking and laughing.
“You realize it’s three in the afternoon?” he asks eventually.
She scowls sleepily, and it’s a little bit adorable in a way she generally isn’t, soft and growling and a bit like a grumpy kitten. “Kegs had a party after closing,” she mumbles around a yawn. “We didn’t get back till eight this morning. And then we were helping Noémie practice her presentation for her eleven-o’clock class.”
“And you go to work . . .”
“We have to leave around four-thirty.” She pulls her feet up onto the chair. “What’s up?”
“Judge Merrill granted the no-contact order,” he tells her without preamble. “Any further attempts to contact you, and Desmond can be charged.”
Well, that wakes her up. She stares at him for a moment, her pale, almost amber eyes wide and fixed on him. Then she blinks, thinking her way through it, and finally nods. “That was fast.”
“There wasn’t really a way for the defense to argue against it. While it wasn’t illegal for Desmond to write you, it was inappropriate, and the judge wasn’t happy with the content of the letters.”
“The cont—shit. Of course you had to read them.”
He clears his throat. “Vic read them. And the judge and lawyers, but Vic. Vic read them.”
She rests her chin on her knees, and he has the uncomfortable feeling she’s stripping the words far past what he wanted them to mean. Christ, his mental health and well-being are suddenly very dependent on her never meeting the Sravastis. Priya and Deshani understand him far too well as it is; he does not need them teaching Inara anything. A man needs to preserve some capacity for self-delusion, after all. All she says, though, is “I guess you wouldn’t find the letters of a lovesick twat very interesting.”
He snorts and leans back in the chair. “From what I understand, that part of it wasn’t the problem.”
“Problem?”
“From what Vic tells me, somewhere in the midst of begging your forgiveness, Desmond slipped in a few pleas for you not to testify against him or his father. To, ah . . . understand.”
She blinks at him.
“Asking forgiveness is one thing, even if he still doesn’t seem to have a full grasp of his part in things. Asking you not to testify, putting that kind of pressure on you with the weight of your history . . . that’s attempting to influence a witness, and that crosses into bad territory.”
“Still claims to love me?”
“Yes. Do you believe him?”