Chapter 3 - The Fifteen Percent
I went back into the kitchen, the business card hidden inside the waistband of my scrubs, my hand reaching for the black iPhone that lay on the counter beside the microwave.
The screen had illuminated again. A small, white battery icon in the top right corner was flashing red, the text below it reading:
The list of missed calls was a single, unbroken column of black ink across the display.
The last call had been logged at 10:12 PM—exactly five minutes ago.
As I watched the glass, the phone began to vibrate again, the heavy internal motor causing the aluminum casing to slide an inch across the formica counter until it struck the edge of my tin sugar bowl with a sharp, metallic clink.
The caller ID didn't have a picture. It just had that single, heavy word: DAD.
"Mommy," Emma said, her voice dropping into that low, mysterious whisper she used when she thought she was participating in an adult secret. "The phone is shaking. Is it the man with the blue hat?"
Oliver laid his spoon down in the bowl. He looked at the screen, his blue-gray eyes widening until I could see the tiny white flecks in the center of his irises—the exact same flecks Dante Moretti had in his eyes when he stood under the streetlamps by the Astoria ferry terminal, watching the water turn black in the dusk.
"It's my dad," Oliver whispered. His lower lip began to tremble, the composure he had maintained since he walked through the storm finally dissolving under the weight of that vibrating piece of black glass. "Is he going to be mad at me because I got out of the window? The man with the hat told me to stay under the seat, but the fire was coming through the little holes."
I crouched down beside his chair, my hand coming around his small shoulder. The cashmere of his sweater was damp from the rain, cold against my palm. "He's not going to be mad, Oliver. He's very worried about you. He's been looking for you since the car stopped."
I lifted the phone from the counter. The glass was cold against my fingers, the vibration traveling up my forearm until I could feel it in the bone of my elbow.
I didn't want to press the green button. If I pressed it, the six years of silence—the six years of being Sophia Bennett, the six years of paying forty dollars a month to an internet service in Panama to keep my social security number from appearing on any credit registry in the state of New York—would disappear into the copper wires of the Queens network. He would have my voice. He would have the tower location from the Elmhurst switching station. He would have the coordinates of the blue house at the end of Elm Street within ninety seconds of the call being routed through the central trunk.
But I looked at Oliver’s face. He was four years old. His mother was in heaven—which meant old Silvio’s people or the rival crews from New Jersey had already taken her out, or she had died in some clean private room in Manhattan while Dante sat by the door with his gun in his pocket. If I didn't answer that phone, Dante would turn this borough into a slaughterhouse before the sun came up over the long island expressway. He would have fifty men from the Astoria crew combing every alley from Flushing to Ridgewood, and when they found this house—and they would find it, because a four-year-old boy in a Battistoni coat doesn't disappear without leaving a trail of salt water—they wouldn't ask questions about who lived behind the brass deadbolts.
I swiped the green arrow across the cracked glass.
I didn't say hello. I didn't use my voice. I held the phone to my ear and waited, listening to the static of the line—a high, clear digital hiss that meant the call was being made from a vehicle moving at high speed through a congested cell sector.
"Oliver," the voice said.
It wasn't the voice from the Astoria social club. It wasn't the voice of the twenty-eight-year-old kid who used to laugh when his brother missed a shot at the pool table. It was a low, ragged rasp, the sound of a throat that had been scorched by smoke or stripped raw by twenty minutes of screaming into an empty steering wheel.
"Oliver, say something to me, son. Please. If you can hear me, just hit the button twice. Just tell me you're there."
I closed my eyes, my forehead pressing against the cold enamel of the refrigerator door. "He's here, Dante," I said.
The line went completely dead for three seconds. The static vanished, as if the man on the other end had stopped breathing altogether to clear the frequency for a signal he hadn't expected to receive in this lifetime.
"Who is this?" he asked. The ragged edge disappeared from his tone, replaced instantly by that old, heavy stillness—the voice of the Moretti family when they were deciding whether a name should be taken off the list of active accounts. "Where is my son?"
"He's in my kitchen," I said, looking down at the green linoleum between my feet. "He's eating tomato soup. He has a little bit of red crayon on his sleeve from my daughter, but he's not bleeding, and his fingers are warm. He got out of the car after the bridge."
"Elena?" he whispered.
The name hit the kitchen like a heavy piece of furniture dropping through the ceiling. Emma stopped her drawing, her red crayon frozen an inch above the envelope, her eyes turning toward my face with a sudden, sharp curiosity.
"My name is Sophia now, Dante," I said, my teeth catching the inside of my lip until I could taste the copper of my own blood. "And you have exactly fifteen minutes before this battery dies. Your son's phone is at twelve percent. If you want him back before the city workers find the car, you need to bring your people down to the dead end of Elm Street. The blue house by the railyards."
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"Elena, listen to me—"
I hung up the phone. I didn't give him the chance to tell me he was sorry about my mother; I didn't give him the chance to tell me that his father was dead or that the blue ledger had been burned in the furnace at the Astoria wharf. I set the iPhone down on the formica table, its screen dark once more, its black glass reflecting nothing but the red loops of the chimney Emma had drawn on the envelope.
