Chapter 6: Off the Record

Off the Record

The car was nine steps from the door and the block was still full.

“What’s the sound on this record?”

“Rhys — is the single still coming this year?”

“There’s talk you’ve got nothing written. Do you want to say anything to that?”

Two of the guards had their arms out at the elbows, and the metal barrier at the gate did the rest of the work. Past the barrier it was phones — held up, tilted in, blocking one another — a wall of them with faces behind it, and further back the ones who had been standing on that corner since eleven.

“Rhys. You and Sloane Adler were seen leaving Solstice at four this morning. Are you two—”

He kept walking. The questions came in the same order as always — the record, the rumor, the woman — and none of them got an answer.

Then a man at the back of the pack said it loud enough to carry over the rest of them: “The cap.”

The front row leaned in.

“At the club. Who’d you give the cap to?”

He stopped.

He turned his head — not all the way. Enough.

It got quieter in front of him and closer at the same time. The shoulder light on the man who’d asked swung in and stayed on him, and the man was already talking again, fast, riding it. Two more lights came off the pack and settled on him.

“You know him? Did you know him before tonight?”

He looked at him for about a second.

“Get home safe,” he said. “All of you.”

Somewhere at the back a girl screamed, and then the whole back of the crowd screamed, and the sound went up the storefronts and came down off the building across the street.

He got in the car and the door shut. One question out of that whole sidewalk had gotten a sentence out of him, and it was the one about the cap. The sentence had been about going home.

The car got moving at about the speed of a person walking. Two of them came along the sidewalk with it, shooting through the glass and asking anyway. The glass was dark. They stayed level with it to the end of the block, and then the light changed.

-

A block up from Nightingale, Mina had her phone in both hands and the app open. “Three hundred and forty.” She read it out again a block later. “Four hundred and nine.”

The noise behind them had come down by degrees and hadn’t gone away.

“There’ll be cars at the avenue,” Wes said. “It’s a mile.”

“I could have the car come,” Mina said.

“We’re walking.”

“Both your parents are teachers,” Mina said, “which is why we walk a mile instead of taking my car.”

“Yes,” Wes said.

At the top of the block he reached back and got a hand on Halliday’s sleeve and turned him out of the stream of people going the other way, up a side street with three dark storefronts and one bar still open.

“It’s the long way,” Halliday said.

“It’s closer for you and Mina both.”

“Noted,” Halliday said. “Very thorough. Come work for me.”

“Doing what?”

“Assistant,” Halliday said. “For me. No interview.”

“I’m getting a doctorate,” Wes said.

“In astrophysics,” Mina said. “Take the job.”

“You’d take it yourself,” Wes said. “For free. You’d thank him for it.”

Mina took Halliday’s arm.

“Somebody got a video of tonight,” she said.

“Somebody always does.”

“Text Bernie,” Mina said.

“I will.”

“Tonight,” she said.

“Tonight,” Wes said, from his other side.

“I’ll do it tonight,” Halliday said.

They came out on his street and kept walking, because Mina’s building was a block down and one over. He hadn’t looked at his phone since the club and he didn’t look at it now. At the corner he got his keys out.

“Night,” he said.

Mina and Wes went around the corner.

-

The gate took a card. The lobby was a desk, a wall of mailboxes, and a man at the desk watching something on a tablet with the sound off. He looked up, saw who it was, and buzzed him through without saying anything.

The agency had most of the building, and two of its smaller names rode up in the elevator with him. He knew one by sight and had said maybe ten words to her in two years. They didn’t say anything on the way up.

His apartment was one bedroom with the windows on the back of the building instead of the street, which he had asked for. Nobody else had.

The jacket he’d borrowed from Wes went over the back of a chair, and the cap came out of the pocket when he did it, folded in half. He put it on the dresser and went to shower.

It was a quarter to four when he sat down on the edge of the bed with his hair still wet and wrote it out.

“Something happened tonight at Nightingale. Some guy wouldn’t take no, and Calloway got in the middle of it. It got loud. There may be video. Nothing else happened. I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow.”

He read it twice and sent it to his manager, Bernie Salas.

Nothing came back. He looked at the phone twice more anyway, then put it face up on the nightstand and lay back.

After a while the screen dimmed, and then it went out.