Chapter 11 The Kitchen Window

He took two buses and a ten-minute walk to get to Jake’s building. Jake’s apartment was on the third floor. Marcus knew this because he’d been here a hundred times.

The window to Jake’s kitchen was unlocked. It was always unlocked. Jake had a theory about fire escapes and locked windows that Marcus had argued with him about no fewer than five times, and right now he was grateful they’d never resolved the argument.

He was through the window and standing in Jake’s kitchen before the question of what exactly he was going to say had fully resolved itself.

Jake was asleep on the couch exactly as the photo had shown him , same position, jacket still on, one boot half-off, the TV running low in the corner. He looked, in sleep, exactly the same as he had always looked: open-faced, slightly younger than thirty, the easy sprawl of someone with a clear conscience.

Marcus turned the kitchen light on.

Jake came awake fast , combat-trained fast, sitting up and reaching before his eyes had fully opened, hand going to a position on his hip that Marcus now understood differently than he had yesterday.

“It’s me,” Marcus said.

Jake’s hand dropped. He blinked, processed, ran a hand over his face. “Dude. What the , how did you get in?”

“Your window.”

“I keep telling you, one day someone’s going to , ” Jake stopped. He was fully awake now, reading Marcus’s face, and whatever he found there made the easy tone drop away. “Hey. What’s going on?”

“That’s actually what I came to ask you,” Marcus said. He set the music box on the kitchen counter, pulled out the chair at the small kitchen table, and sat down. “Sit down, Jake.”

“You’re sitting at my table like it’s your apartment. You know that’s, ”

“Sit. Down.”

Jake sat. He looked at Marcus across the table the way someone looked at a person they cared about when they understood the conversation was about to go somewhere neither of them could take back. “Marcus. Whatever you’ve heard , ”

“Jacob Michael Torres,” Marcus said. “Former specialist, 10th Mountain Division. Recruited by the DEA eighteen months ago at Fort Carson after a charge that got buried in exchange for cooperation. Assigned to the Moretti family’s Chicago operation nine months later. Assigned to me specifically to determine whether my father had passed me anything before he died.”

The room was very quiet.

“Where did you , ” Jake started.

“Does it matter?”

“Marcus , ”

“Does it matter where I heard it?”

Jake looked at the table. He pressed both hands flat against it, and Marcus watched him cycle through what looked like four or five different responses before settling on the only one that was actually available to him.

“No,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Okay.” Marcus leaned back. “So talk to me. Not as your asset or your subject or whatever the operational term is. Talk to me as , ” he stopped, because the word friend was there and he didn’t know yet if it still applied, “as someone who’s known you for six years and is trying to figure out which parts of that were real.”

Jake looked up. Something in his face was raw in a way Marcus had not seen from him before , not even overseas, not even in the moments that were supposed to break people.

“All of it was real,” Jake said. “Every bit of it. Kandahar, the deployment, everything before. That wasn’t , I didn’t go back and manufacture six years of history, Marcus. They recruited me after. The friendship came first.”

“But you took the assignment. You got close to me on purpose, for eighteen months, to watch me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they had leverage,” Jake said. “Because the charge they buried was not small and I was twenty-eight years old and I was not going to federal prison. And because , ” he stopped. “Because they told me you weren’t a target. That I was just watching, that nothing was going to happen to you, that I was just a tripwire in case your dad had passed something along. And when your dad died I thought that was it , I thought the operation was over, that there was nothing to find and nothing to watch for and I was going to get out clean.”

“But then I opened the music box,” Marcus said.

“Yeah.” Jake’s jaw worked. “Yeah, and then everything , everything went sideways very fast, and I’ve been trying to, ”

“Trying to what? Keep me alive or run your operation?”

“Both,” Jake said. “I have been trying to do both at the same time. When Sal called me the night he went to your dad’s house, I didn’t tell him you were there. When Rafael was asking where you went after the warehouse, I covered. When the photo came through , the one of me asleep, ” he paused. “Who sent that?”

“My mother,” Marcus said.

Jake blinked. “Your… I thought your mother was , ”

“So did I. It’s been a very long night, Jake.”

“Apparently.” Jake rubbed his face again. “Marcus. I need you to understand something. My handler has been telling me since yesterday that the moment you surface with the ledger, I’m supposed to bring you in. Formally. That’s the operation now , you’re not a surveillance subject anymore, you’re a material witness in an active federal investigation and if I don’t bring you in, I am in breach and everything they’ve been holding over me comes back.”

“So why haven’t you called your handler?” Marcus said. “You’ve been awake for about forty-five seconds. Your phone’s right there.”

Jake looked at the phone on the cushion beside him. Looked back at Marcus.

“Because you came in through my kitchen window at one in the morning instead of knocking, which means you’re not here to turn yourself in, and you’re not running scared, and that means you’ve got something figured out. And I’d rather hear what it is before I make any calls.”

Marcus studied him for a long moment. Then: “I need forty-eight hours. And I need you to not call your handler for forty-eight hours.”

“Marcus…”

“I know what I’m asking.”

“Do you? Because what you’re asking me to do is blow my cover, breach my agreement, and hand the DEA a reason to charge me with obstruction, all on the basis of , what? Trust?” Jake said it without bitterness, which made it worse.

“Yes,” Marcus said. “On the basis of trust. The same trust you told me was real.”

Jake looked at him for a long time. The TV murmured in the corner. Somewhere outside a truck was backing up, beeping its slow metronome into the night.

“Twenty-four hours,” Jake said. “Not forty-eight. I can manage twenty-four before it gets impossible to explain. After that I have to make a call.”

“Twenty-four hours,” Marcus agreed. He stood up. “Stay home tonight. Don’t tell anyone I was here.”

“Where are you going?”