Timmy blinked. He’d chosen the meeting place carefully, a high-end grocery store in gentrified Jamaica Plain, where a small apartment went for a half million—still a rough neighborhood, apparently, to a man in pink pants.
He counted quickly. After twelve years in a cash business, he could have done it in his sleep. “Looks like we’re good,” he said.
“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.” Weaver offered his hand. “Sorry, I never got your last name.”
For a second, from long habit, Timmy hesitated—stupidly, because the guy would see his full name the minute he handed over the title.
“Flynn,” he said. “Tim Flynn.”
HE WATCHED THE CAR DRIVE AWAY. EVEN AT TWENTY MILES PER hour, Ross Weaver rode the brake. Handing him the title, Timmy had felt a wave of sadness and guilt. Selling the Cuda to this douchebag was unfair to the Cuda.
Timmy thought how he and Claudia had driven it together, almost without speaking. Her eyes had never left the road.
As the car disappeared around the corner, he raised his hand in a salute.
With Weaver’s cash in his pocket, he set out walking. The snow had melted and refrozen, melted and refrozen. The surface was crusted over with grime.
When he arrived at the tattoo shop, Connor was sitting at the front flipping through a magazine. Timmy saw him through the plateglass window: his skinny arms and Cub Scout chest, the knobby bones of his shoulders poking through his T-shirt. He looked not much older than Timmy’s son, and yet he possessed an awesome talent. The last twenty-four hours of Timmy’s life, remarkable as they were, were due entirely to Connor. Connor’s ink had gotten him laid. How exactly this had happened was, to Timmy, a mystery. Taking off his shirt had seemed natural, inevitable even. He hadn’t even remembered to suck in his gut.
The hours spent in Connor’s chair, the hundreds of dollars he’d spent, the countless bags of weed. Timmy understood, now, the point of it all. He’d done it so somebody would read him, the entire story of him written on his skin.
He studied his back in the mirror.
“I had an idea,” Timmy said. “Is there room for a person?”
Jumping the gun, probably, but he couldn’t help himself. Later, if things worked out, they could add her name.
14
This is pointless,” Luis said.
They sat shoulder to shoulder in the front office, looking at security footage on his computer screen. Claudia wished that she’d gone home to shower. From Timmy’s she had driven straight to work, in yesterday’s clothes—reeking, probably, of sex and weed.
The front office was tiny. One wall was mounted with video screens, six different views of the clinic: the waiting room and reception desk, the long corridor that led to the exam rooms, the front and back doors, the sidewalk out front. On the desk beside Luis's computer sat Claudia’s laptop, the browser pointed to the Hall of Shame.
“My eyes are starting to cross,” Luis said. “I need a break.”
“Ten more minutes,” Claudia said.
The security footage was grainy, indistinct. To save time they watched it on quadruple speed. Even compressed, it was short on action. The protestors were unbelievably boring to watch. Claudia thought of Puffy, who showed up at the clinic each morning to do absolutely nothing. How could he stand it? What, exactly, kept him coming back?
Luis leaned forward in his chair and fiddled with the laptop. Click to begin slide show. They watched in silence as one woman after another flashed across the screen.
“You know what’s weird about this?” he said.
“Everything?”
“Well, yeah. But also . . .” He paused. “They’re all White.”
Claudia blinked. In truth, she hadn’t noticed. It was, for her, an illuminating moment: the limits of her vision, her own dumb parallax. What else had she failed to see?
Luis stared intently at the screen. “Whoa, what’s he doing?”
“Who?”
“That guy in the back.” He paused the playback and rewound by a few seconds. On the screen, a slight female figure moved jerkily toward the front door.
“Okay, watch this guy.” Luis pointed to the bottom left corner of the screen. A male figure hovered at the edge of the crowd. He stood awkwardly with his elbows out, hands at chest height. He seemed to be holding something.
“He’s taking a photo,” Luis said.
They rewound the playback and watched again, on the slowest speed. One frame at a time, the female figure—dressed in black tights and clunky boots—made its way to the door.
“Wait. I know her,” Claudia said, squinting. “Maybe. I think she’s one of my Access patients.” As soon as she said it, she wasn’t sure. The video was grainy, the resolution muddy. “Can you zoom in on her face?”
Luis did. The resolution got even fuzzier, but Claudia could discern the point of flickering light, the diamond stud above the girl’s top lip.
“That’s Shannon,” she said, her heart racing. “The patient I told you about that night at the pub. She said some guy took her picture, but I didn’t believe her.”
They paused the playback, rewound and played it again. Frame by jerky frame, Shannon approached the door. From the bottom left corner of the screen, the guy in the Sox cap moved toward her—a White guy in a down jacket and Red Sox cap, holding a cell phone.
“Can’t you get any closer?” Claudia asked.
“Nah, that’s the best we can do.”
She squinted. The man was younger than Puffy, a little taller, but identically dressed. He raised the phone to chest height for just a second. Then he glanced briefly over his shoulder, his hand to his face, and stepped out of the frame.
“Did you see that?” she said, pointing. “He hid his face!”
She felt vindicated, weirdly elated. The guy had avoided the security cameras on purpose. To Claudia it was an admission of guilt.
Her feeling of triumph was short-lived. What had they learned, exactly? The photographer was a nondescript White guy in a Sox cap. There was no more common phenotype in the city of Boston. She saw this guy fifty times a day.
“Now we know who to look for,” said Luis. “The next time he shows up, I’ll be waiting for him.”
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY MONTHS, CLAUDIA LEFT WORK early. She felt grimy, overcaffeinated, desperate for a shower. She retrieved her car from the garage under the Common and joined the scrum of traffic—remembering, again, why she always took the T.
Rush hour huffed and honked around her, the daily disaster. A motorized wheelchair stalled in a crosswalk. An irritable driver leaned on his horn. Driving in Boston was like being inside a video game, a closed system with its own interior logic. The streets were booby-trapped with hidden dangers: broken glass in the road, raised manhole covers, kamikaze pedestrians. On a traffic island a man was weeping. It seemed like a reasonable response.
When her phone rang she nearly didn’t answer. The caller was an unfamiliar number with a 617 area code.
“Oh, Stuart!” she said when she heard his voice. “I didn’t recognize the number.” They had spoken only yesterday. It felt like a long time ago.