Night Film

10

I raced around the corner back to 9 Mott Street, fully expecting to find the entrance unsealed.

But the police tape remained intact, the door still padlocked.

How had he gotten in? And who the hell was it? A Cordovite? Some death-scene gawker? I checked the windows — every one nailed shut. The only other possibility was a narrow alleyway blocked with mountains of garbage. I pushed some of it aside, trying not to inhale, squeezing through. Sure enough, in the very back was an open window casting light on the opposite wall.

Whoever he was, he’d used a crowbar — lying on the ground — to pry away the old boards, leaving a space just wide enough to crawl through.

I stepped over, looking inside.

It was a brightly lit construction site, bare white neon bulbs dangling from an unfinished ceiling, plastic barrels and tarps piled by the front entrance. Hundreds of studs for building walls lined the expanse. Toward the back, on the right-hand side, a band of yellow POLICE LINE tape was strung across the elevator’s entrance.

There was no sign of the man.

“Hello?” I called out.

Silence. The only noise was the insect buzz of the lights. I grabbed the crowbar—just in case—and scrambled through, falling into a pile of concrete bags.

It was a wide-open expanse. Along the back wall there was just a stack of metal beams and mixing barrels, a plastic tarp covering something.

I stepped cautiously toward it and yanked it aside.

It was a wheelbarrow.

“Anyone here?” I called out, looking around.

There was no answer, no movement.

The guy probably got scared off.

I stepped toward the police tape, was about to duck it, when suddenly a hand seized my shoulder and something hard hit me on the side of the head. I wheeled around but was shoved to the ground, dropping the crowbar.

My eyes went white, blinded, though I managed to make out a man staring down at me. He shoved his foot onto my chest.

“Who the fuck are you?” he shouted. It was a young voice, slurred with rage. Bending over me again, he reached out as if to grab my throat, though I wrenched free, pushing him off balance, grabbed the crowbar, and socked him with it in the shoulder.

It wouldn’t exactly have made Muhammad Ali proud, but it worked. He tried to grab a metal stud for support, missed, and stumbled backward.

I staggered over to him. To my surprise, he was too wasted to stand. He reeked of booze and cigarettes, and he was just a punk—mid-twenties, shaggy hair, dirty white Converse sneakers, a faded green T-shirt that read HAS-BEEN. His eyes were watery and bloodshot, seemingly unable to focus as they stared up at me.

“My turn,” I said. “Who the fuck are you?”

He closed his eyes and appeared to pass out cold.

My first impulse was to strangle the kid. Touching the spot where he’d cracked me on the head, I could feel blood. He wasn’t a cop, so that left random derelict or a Cordovite. Or, he knew Ashley.

I pulled his gray tweed coat out from under him, checking his pockets. There was a pack of Marlboros, three cigarettes left, a lighter, a set of apartment keys. I put them back. In the other, I pulled out an iPhone, the screen cracked, locked with a security code, the background a snapshot of a half-naked blonde.

I checked the inside pocket. It was empty. Yet, I felt something else and realized there was another compartment sewn into the ripped lining.

I reached inside, pulling out two tiny Ziploc bags. Both contained pills, one set yellow, the other green, letters and numbers stamped on the sides — OC 40 and 80. OxyContin.

So, he was a drug dealer—and pretty small-time, given the fact that he was snoozing through a body search. I returned the pills to the pocket and stood up.

“Can you hear me, Scarface?”

He didn’t answer.

“Hands in the air. FBI raid!” I shouted.

Nothing.

As gently as I could — though I don’t know why I bothered; he’d siesta through an apocalypse — I rolled him onto his side, removing his wallet from his back pocket. No driver’s license, no credit cards, only cash—seven hundred and forty bucks, mostly twenties.

I put the money and wallet back, but zipped his iPhone into my own pocket. Then I stepped around him to inspect the elevator.

There was nothing there but the dark pools of dried blood, a few tendrils spreading into the cracks of the concrete.

I took a few shots and then moved back to the kid, checking his breathing. He appeared to be only drunk—not on anything else. I pushed him deeper onto his side, so he wouldn’t suffocate if he got sick, and headed back to the window and climbed out, darting through the alley and back onto Mott Street.

I assumed I’d learn nothing more about him until tomorrow, when he discovered his phone missing. Yet during the cab ride home and even hours later, after I’d taken a shower, downed two Tylenol (given the immense pain from Beckman’s vodka and getting cracked in the side of the head, I should have swiped an OxyContin) — the kid’s phone was bombarded with texts.

That was Chloe. She wrote again six minutes later.

Then it was Reinking (I couldn’t help but visualize her: Nordic, legs like ice picks):

Two minutes later:

Twelve minutes later:

Then she appeared to sext a picture, which I couldn’t open. It was followed with:

Then a text from Arden:

Interspersed with all of this, a highly obsessive girl named Jessica called eleven times. I let her go to voicemail.

Then Arden again:

It had to be his name. Hopper.

Small-time drug dealer in a faded coat, crouched in the corner of that freight elevator — he’d have something to tell me about Ashley, whoever he was.