“But where’d it come from?” Dax repeated. “I thought pastrami was all we had left.”
Tony gulped down some water. “No, we just have a shitload of it. These probably came from someone’s freezer.”
We scarfed down our sandwiches in relative silence. On the other side of the kitchen, Evie’s tags jingled against her bowl of kibble. It made a lovely sound.
“Now, how was work?” Tony asked, once we had mostly finished eating.
Dax immediately pushed his bottle of water aside. “Vibby’s a better judge of it than me. I just clean bedpans and blood puddles.”
Man, he still sounded resentful.
I waited until after dinner to broach the subject of Alyssa.
Tony had pushed away from the table early on to sit outside. Dax stomped up to bed before I could say much—probably for the best, considering some part of me yearned to smack him. What the hell had gotten into that man? Sure, he wasn’t exactly the toughest piece of beef jerky in the bag, but he had never struck me as a whiner.
Cut him some slack, I thought as I prowled into the living room, searching for something to do. He’s never worked in a hospital before. Very different environment. Helping me bandage up Tony or myself was one thing; being surrounded by the sick, the injured, and the dying all day, every day, was something else.
Maybe he wasn’t cut out for it. A lot of people weren’t.
Does that mean I am?
I didn’t bother ruminating on that fact any further. Instead, I stepped outside and found Tony on the front porch.
“Hey,” I said.
He had an unlit cigarette in his hand. “Sup?”
I closed the door behind me and crept over, seating myself beside him. The air was frigid; I could see my breath with every exhalation, and the night itself was starless and quiet. No birds. No planes. Not even the sound of traffic driving down another street.
We might as well have been the last two people on earth.
“Something interesting happened today,” I said.
He held up his hand. “I need a smoke first,” he said, digging into his pocket and pulling out a lighter. He bounded to his feet, winced, and promptly took the weight off his bad leg. Then he lit the cigarette. “C’mon, I don’t want Dax smelling this. He’ll just yell at me.”
I sighed and followed him into the night, until we were standing at the edge of our block beneath a stop sign. Multiple sets of tracks in the ash were the only indication that others had come through here.
“Now,” he said, puffing away on the cigarette, “what happened?”
“Logan’s sister came in. She used to be a radio operator.”
Tony snapped to attention pretty quickly. “Is that so? And what does she have to say about their whole broken radio story?”
“I didn’t have much time to talk to her. She did say it broke, but that Durkee tried to get it replaced. Then he died and Keller stopped all efforts to fix it, and then replaced her.” I paused, racking my brain for anything else she’d said. “She assumed he had fixed it because it had been so long. She thought there was just no one answering.”
He stared at me for a few seconds. Then he slowly put the cigarette down and squashed it with his boot. “How the fuck did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“I’ve been trying to schmooze these guys since I got in. You talk to some chick and suddenly there’s a whole new wrench in things.”
I shrugged. “For starters, I wasn’t trying to schmooze her. I was making conversation, and she was as surprised about the radio as I was.”
He stuffed his hands into his pockets and tipped his head back, as if to look up at our dark, heavy sky.
“We’ll work on it,” he said. “Could she have been a plant?”
I blinked. “Like a ficus?”
“No. Could Keller have sent her to you to…to throw you off?”
I hadn’t thought the conversation could get much weirder. “Why the hell would Keller do that?”
“He’s paranoid. Maybe rightly so.”
Was she testing me? I thought I was a pretty good judge of mood and character; years of interviewing had given me a halfway decent set of tools to determine if a smiling face concealed rage or boredom or something else. Alyssa had seemed honest, forthcoming. And tired.
We were all so damn tired.
“I don’t think she’s a plant,” I said. “I mean, she could be. But I don’t think she is.”
“Then talk to her again. I’ll try sniffing more, but you’re the first one to come up with a lead of any sort.” He grinned at me, a twinkle coming into his eye. “Look at you, getting into espionage.”
I rolled my eyes, and he clapped me on the shoulder.
We walked back home together.