“No, wait—my what?”

  But he darted back into his apartment, and a moment later, he reappeared with a foil-wrapped foam plate. On top of the foil, he’d stuck a red bow.

  “Merry Christmas if you celebrate,” he said. “Happy holidays if you don’t.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said reflexively, taking the plate because my other option was, what? Knock it out of his hand? “Uh, thank you. I didn’t—”

  “They’re kisses, Luka.” He must have seen my confusion because he said, “Christmas kisses. They’re cookies.”

  “Right.”

  His voice changed. “You don’t eat sugar.”

  “No, no.”

  “You don’t celebrate winter holidays.”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “God, I’m so sorry, Luka. I made them for everyone in the building, and I didn’t even think about asking.”

  I laughed, and suddenly, I could talk. “I eat sugar. Plenty of it. I pour it on top of my Lucky Charms every morning. And I celebrate Christmas. Well, I mean, the tree and the presents and stuff. I’m not religious. Thank you for the kisses.”

  The next smile only touched the corner of his mouth. Then he frowned, and I could hear the unasked question.

  “So,” I said, “this is kind of awkward.”

  “Oh no.”

  “A couple of people asked me if I’d talk to you about, um, your guests.”

  “Oh my God,” Jude said, rocking his head against the door jamb. “This is so embarrassing.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I hurried to say. “But, you know, I thought you should know.”

  See what I mean? Being able to swallow your own bullshit is the key to all happiness.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jude said.

  “Don’t be.”

  “I’m embarrassed.”

  “Seriously, don’t be.”

  “I promise it won’t be before seven,” Jude said, “or after eleven. I know quiet hours are important when you share a space.”

  “Uh, it’s not so much the time as it is the—” What was the polite expression, when holding freshly baked Christmas cookies that were a gift from your dreamy new neighbor, for parade of dicks? “—quantity?”

  Jude groaned again. Color rose in his cheeks—clear, bright spots of red. When I’d met him, the first time, I’d thought about how his skin was the exact color of starlight.

  I snipped that line of thought and said, “The neighbors are super sweet, and nobody cares that you’re gay.”

  “Well, no, obviously. I mean, they don’t care that you’re gay.”

  “I—” Well, I mean, I was. But I wasn’t sure how he’d read me that easily. His honey-dark eyebrows quirked in amusement, as though he’d heard my wondering. “Anyway, nobody cares if you have hookups.” I wanted the next part to sound like a joke, to break the tension. “And you’re clearly having way more success than I am on Grindr and Prowler and whatever.”

  “Are you on Prowler, Luka?” The question was strangely earnest. “I haven’t seen you there.”

  Which meant what? He’d looked? I laughed, and I heard the crazy again. “But, you know, if you could, uh, ask your hookups to keep it down. If that’s possible. Just, you know, a little. Not that it bothers me.”

  Jude’s smile was a little puzzled and a little amused. “They’re not hookups, Luka. They’re clients.”

  It took a few seconds for that to sink in.

  “I’m a sex surrogate,” Jude said, like someone explaining something.

  “Oh.” I had no idea what that meant, but I latched on to it. “Oh. Okay. Like—yeah. Gotcha.” And then, an out-of-body, gut-wrenching humiliation as I heard myself say, “Cool beans.” My mouth kept moving as my brain looked for an escape hatch. “I thought you meant like sex work or something.”

  “I did. Sex surrogacy is a kind of sex work.”

  And now, of course, my mouth stopped working.

  “Is that a problem, Luka?”

  I stood there.

  Jude reached for the door. “I’ll ask them to try to be quieter.”

  “No, I’m sorry.” I held out the cookies. For some reason, right then, the cookies seemed vitally important. All I could think about was the cookies. “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry. And you made me these, and I was a jerk, and—you should take these back.”

  “They were a gift, Luka. Merry Christmas.”

  “Wait—”

  He shut the door. The deadbolt slammed home.

  I put the cookies in my apartment and trudged downstairs.

  “You made him feel bad,” Mr. Weimann stage-whispered from his door. “This is not what we asked you to do.”

  “You,” Mrs. Konig pronounced from her doorway, “have a soft head.”

  “This is your fault,” I whispered back. Furiously. “And yours.”

  Mr. Weimann shook his head gravely and shut his door. Mrs. Konig sniffed and shut hers a little harder.

  I did, I thought as I let myself out of the building. I did indeed have a soft head.

  Caught up in my thoughts, I didn’t notice the man coming toward me until he was only a few feet away. He was probably my height, carried a hundred pounds more than me, and was mostly ear hair and neck hair and knuckle hair. I didn’t think anybody had given him Christmas kisses this year.

  “You have something that belongs to me,” he said.

  I thought, for a minute, he was talking about the Christmas kisses. Buddy, you can have them. The apartment too. And good luck.

  But he said, “An envelope was delivered to the wrong address. You have it.”

  A vague recollection rose of the manila envelope in my mailbox. “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “I want it.”

  “How do you know I have it?”

  “I just know.”

  “Uh huh. And how am I supposed to know it’s yours?”

  “I’m telling you.” He didn’t look like a smiler, but he did have big, yellow teeth.

  “Right,” I said. “But what if it’s not yours? What if it’s somebody else’s, and you’re saying it’s yours?”

  “He even talks like a fag,” he said.

  I heard the footstep a moment too late, and then someone kicked my legs out from under me. I went down hard, but I knew how to take a fall. The only problem was that something caught me before I hit the ground. I hung for a moment, suspended by the straps of the backpack. And then the same somebody shook me out of the backpack like I was a bug.

  This time, I hit the ground, and I rolled. I got a glimpse of the second man—he looked identical to the first one, only not so petite—and then a fist screamed down toward my eye. My vision went white. My last coherent thought was that it looked like snow, and everybody loved a white Christmas.

  2

  When my brain reconnected, I had drooled on my coat, and my head was killing me. I got to my feet. I steadied myself on a fire hydrant. Only, it turned out, there were two hydrants, and I picked the one that wasn’t there. On my second try, I got a grip on it, and I stayed upright. Mostly.

  Then I puked a lot.

  I felt better after, and I took stock. Keys and wallet were still in my pockets. Backpack—including phone—was gone. I went back inside and got the HK out of the safe. I grabbed a can of pepper spray, in case the great detective decided to be merciful. Then I limped downstairs and got into the Hellcat. I considered puking again. When I felt better, I blew myself a kiss in the mirror. I thought the red, swollen eye made me look tough. Nobody can resist a tough guy.

  My office is on Cherokee Street. It’s a little storefront across from Tacos and Ice Cream (if it has another name, nobody knows it, but at least we all know what they sell). I’ve got a waiting room with blue carpet that makes me think of a Prince of Wales check. Not the actual prince, the pattern. Although I guess the prince too. It’s like somebody saying, Don’t think about a pink elephant. The waiting room has a desk that nobody uses (the prince is welcome to use it if he ever stops by) and a few chairs (he can use those too), and I’ve got a plastic ficus that Kris gave me when I moved in, after he told me the place was so cheery it made him want to blow his brains out.

  Behind the waiting room is my office, where I sat at my desk (no princes allowed) and helped myself liberally to Tylenol and ibuprofen. I opened up my laptop, which I was now glad I’d left at the office. I don’t have a landline, so I used Skype to call Kris. He didn’t pick up.

  I left a message: “It’s me.”

  I called again, and he still didn’t answer. Maybe he’d found something fun to do. Maybe he was knitting me a sweater.

  The nice thing about modern technology is that lots of dumb people doing lots of dumb things has yielded a lot of convenient features. For example, if you lose your phone—if you’re Kris, say, and you’re so smart in so many ways, but one time you put your phone in your glove box for some unknown reason—you can go on your computer, or even your watch, and you can track it down.

  My phone—and, presumably, my backpack—was near the Mississippi river, at a wharf owned by a stevedoring company called Laclede Terminals. I tried Kris one more time, and when he didn’t pick up, I thought about calling the police. But if I called the police, eventually, it would get back to Kris. So, I got in the Hellcat and drove east.

  It wasn’t far. Less than twenty minutes later, I was parked on a built-up shoulder, looking down at the operations of Laclede Terminals. The outer ring of structures were large buildings that I took for warehouses, interspersed with semi-permanent trailers that I decided had to be for management. Access roads wove between them. Moving inward, the buildings gave way to forklift paths and conveyors belts and open storage areas. One enormous white pile made me think of salt, and it seemed like a bad idea to store it outside when it looked like it was about to snow. Another pile was black. Coal. Maybe Santa had to stop and restock if kids were especially naughty. I knew what Kristijan would be getting in his stocking. A long central pier bristled with cranes, and even on Christmas Eve, the whole place swarmed like an ant hive. The river was the brown of a copperhead under the cloudy half-light of the incoming storm.

  According to the wonders of global positioning, my phone was in the southernmost trailer, so I got back in the Hellcat and drove down there. I parked in a small paved lot and made my way to the trailer. In the distance, metal creaked and banged, and forklifts beeped, and the breeze pushed icy fingers through my hair, bringing the smell of mud and water. Instead of knocking, I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  I’d been in trailers like this before, and it was about what I’d expected: cheap desks, cheap chairs, cheap carpet. Cheap windows that let in the cold, and what I guessed, from the smell, to be a kerosene heater. A middle-aged woman with sausage curls was working at one of the desks, and she raised her head now to stare at me. Seated against the wall, like they were waiting outside the principal’s office, were the two I’d seen before—Tiny and Not-So-Tiny. Tiny was playing on his phone. Not-So-Tiny was staring off into space. Philosophizing, probably. Like Descartes.

  “Can I help—” the woman began.

  Not-So-Tiny looked over at me, blinked away the beauties of mind-body dualism, and said, “Hey!”

  That was when I saw my backpack next to Sausage Curls.

  “That’s mine,” I said. “I want it back.”

  She clutched the backpack to her chest and said, “Mutt! Butch!”

  “If you say, ‘Seize him,’” I said as I started across the trailer, “I’m going to ask for a do-over. I didn’t know they were called Mutt and Butch. Do you know how—”

  That was when Not-So-Tiny came within range. I brought the pepper spray up and let him have it, right in the face. He bellowed. And then the bellow became a shriek as he wiped at his face. I brought one size-ten Skechers up between his legs, and he made a hyuck noise and dropped.

  The problem, though, with using pepper spray inside—even a pepper gel like the one I used, which had less blowback—is that there’s inevitably a bit of spread. Sausage Curls started coughing. I started coughing. Tiny started coughing. He was still trying to put away his phone. I blinked my eyes and fanned the air in front of me as I stepped forward. Tiny got the second blast of the pepper gel, and then I was hacking. He squealed and clawed at his eyes. Sausage Curls sneezed and then sneezed again. I wondered if I should open a window.

  When I turned my attention to her, she pushed her chair back, and I said, “No.”

  She sank back into her seat. I held out my hand, and a moment later, she pushed the backpack across the desk. I opened it. My phone was still in there. The dry cleaning coupons, check. But—

  “Where’s the envelope?”

  Sausage Curls put on a tough face, but the tears and snot and constant coughing ruined it.

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll call the police. Assault, armed robbery—let’s see, receiving stolen goods.”

  “They weren’t supposed to hurt you!”

  Sausage Curls directed a dark look at the two men, both of whom were crawling blindly across the trailer, crying and calling out to each other. If you’ve never heard two grown men whimper, “Butch” and “Mutt” while choking on their own snot, it’s pretty pathetic. I think they were going for the water cooler, presumably to rinse out their eyes, but Tiny had gotten his head caught in the arm of a chair, and Not-So-Tiny was wedged between a pair of desks.

  “They were supposed to get the envelope. Once she had the envelope—” Sausage Curls cut off.

  I waited.

  Wiping red eyes, Sausage Curls finally said, “Dana Parkman. Her name is Dana Parkman. There was this woman she needed to talk to. That was supposed to be it. But then she said she needed the envelope.”

  “What woman?”

  Sausage Curls compressed her lips.

  “You know what?” I said. “Let’s call your boss.”

  “Butch and Mutt took a woman out there. They didn’t hurt her.”

  “Sure. Like they weren’t supposed to hurt me.”

  And this was where it came down to it. I had my backpack. I had my phone. I didn’t know anything about this mystery woman. I didn’t know anyone named Dana Parkman. The smart thing to do, said a voice in my head that sounded a lot like Kris, would be to walk away, clean yourself up, and have a nice steak dinner. I could call the police from the car. Sure, I thought with low-wattage amusement. And they wouldn’t take it seriously, or not seriously enough. And I’d have to call Kris.

  Instead, I asked, “Where is she?”

  3

  I stopped at a Starbucks and used the facilities. My eye was turning into one hell of a shiner, and my nose was still a little congested from the pepper gel, and I was worried that I was on a slow slide from rakish tough guy to looking like someone had beat the stuffing out of me. I straightened my sweatshirt and ran a wet hand through my hair. Presto chango, back to rakish.

  It only took me a few minutes to get a latte that tasted like sugar cookies and to learn, via the interwebz, that Dana Parkman was (according to LinkedIn) a city comptroller for one of the tiny municipalities around St. Louis—a place called Cassaview. And because, in spite of Kris’s best efforts, I’d been an A student, I knew comptrollers did something with money. See, Kris? All that studying paid off.

  I plugged the address Sausage Curls had given me into my phone and drove. My route took me across the river into Illinois. Traffic was light on the bridge, and below me, chunks of ice drifted along the snakeback river. The storm settled in, and snow began to fall. I turned on my headlights. Sam Spade, the conscientious driver.

  Another forty minutes of driving took me through the winter stubble of corn fields now dusted with fresh snow, and then, springing up out of nowhere, was the house. It was set back from the road at the end of a long, winding drive, and it had a dollhouse perfection that made me want to roll my eyes (but I didn’t, on account of the fact that one of them felt like it might pop out). Through the thickening snowfall, I could make out the general idea of the place: farmhouse style, with white clapboard and a wrapround porch complete with rockers and a swing. Lights glowed in the windows. Barbie Dreamhouse, but the Southern Living edition. A shadowy outbuilding must have been a barn. And somewhere in there, a woman whose name I didn’t know had been taken.

  I cut the engine, pulled up my hood, and got out of the car. I checked the HK. The wind batted at me, cat-and-mouse style. For about five seconds, the cold felt great on my face. By the time I’d started down the drive, though, I was wishing this was the Barbie Malibu edition.

  The closer I got, the more I started to wonder. Nobody was standing sentry at the windows, waiting for the great Luka Meer to come nosing about. True, I’d warned Sausage Curls against giving her friend a call, but I’d still expected some degree of vigilance from kidnappers. But I saw nothing. I turned my head, checking side to side because the hood cut my peripheral vision. Nothing except brown lawn. Amateurs, I decided. Any kidnapping situation is highly charged, and things can go wrong so many ways. But amateurs were worse, if only because they were liable to do something stupid (and dangerous) that you didn’t expect. At least with pros, you knew what they wanted, and you knew when they’d cut their losses. With amateurs, you didn’t know anything. Usually because they were batshit crazy.

  The wind picked up, drowning out the sound of my steps, but I could feel the crunch of fresh powder with every step. The house gained definition, and the second building coalesced into a white barn. A picket fence, already furred with snow, marked the edge of what had to be a pasture. I’d learned all the barnyard animals in preschool (take that, Kris), and so I recognized the shapes of huddled horses.

  I stood there for a minute, trying to decide what to do while the tip of my nose froze. If anybody looked out a window, they’d see me. But nobody looked. I thought again about calling the police, but what would I tell them? A big kid took my bookbag? And I think a city comptroller is involved in a kidnapping plot, and she’s somewhere inside that house, but I’m a little shaky on the details? Oh, and even though this is Illinois, the people you need to talk to (if you want any evidence) are across the river in Missouri, so enjoy the interjurisdictional cluster fuck. Kris might have an idea. I took out my phone and saw that I had no signal. Maybe it was the storm. Maybe it was being out in the corn-stubbled-asshole of nowhere. It was, weirdly, kind of a relief.

 

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