Cynthia's phone was still buzzing on the bathroom floor, and Cynthia was gone. Sophie Vincenzo stood in the doorway of the empty restroom with her heart beating in her throat. Cynthia's purse lay on its side by the sink with its lipstick and keys spilled across the wet tiles. The  screen lit up with Vine's name, then went dark, then lit up again. Ten minutes ago, Cynthia had walked into this bathroom laughing and saying the lights were doing a thing.  Sophie picked up the phone. She was seventeen, in a green dress her friend had chosen for her, at a nightclub she had only agreed to visit because saying no to her friends a fourth time would have meant explaining why. Tonight was supposed to be the night she acted like an ordinary girl. She should have trusted the feeling she'd had at the door, when the bouncer had waved them through without checking a single ID. He had looked at the three of them the way a man counts boxes on a truck and said one word into his radio. Three. She had noticed it, the way she noticed everything. It was the one habit she had kept from the night she stopped being a child. At the far end of the corridor, a door marked STAFF ONLY stood slightly open. A strip of white light spilled through the gap, and voices came with it. She ought to have run for the front exit. She knew that even as she walked toward the light. She needed to know what happened to Cynthia.  Through the gap she saw a loading bay lit by bare bulbs. Two men were carrying Cynthia between them, her head lolling against one man's shoulder and her braids swinging. A woman in a black dress stood beside them with a clipboard and ticked something off with a pen, as calmly as if she were counting groceries. "That's the first," the woman said. "Table nine had three. Where are the other two?" "Dario's bringing one." The man's voice was bored. "The third girl, the quiet one, isn't on the list. The boss only wanted two from that table. But she's been watching the room all night, and she followed this one back here." The pen clicked. "Then she's on the list now." Sophie's elbow struck the door. It swung open with a quick creak, and every head in the loading bay turned toward her. She ran. She made it four steps before a hand clamped around her arm and hauled her backward so hard her teeth clacked. It was the man in the gray shirt who had stared at their table all night. "There you are," he said, almost kindly. "We were just coming to find you." Sophie screamed. The music in the main club room swallowed the sound. His palm slammed over her mouth, and he dragged her toward the loading bay while she kicked struggling to be free, yet too weak. "Let go of her, Dario." The voice came from behind them, low and even and without a trace of heat. Dario stopped. Sophie twisted her head and saw a tall man standing at the mouth of the corridor with his hands loose at his sides. He wore a dark jacket, and he had the tired eyes of someone who had not slept properly in years. A scar split his left eyebrow. He was looking at Dario and not at her. "Graham." Dario's grip loosened a little. "This isn't your night. Go back to your drinking." "The girl is Victor's." The man said it as if he were reading the weather. "He asked for her himself. Take it up with him tonight, or let her go and I won't mention you put your hands on his property." Sophie had no idea what any of that meant, but she felt Dario's fingers twitch against her jaw. Doubt crossed his face, then greed, then the stubborn pride that makes stupid men do stupid things. "You're lying." "Maybe." The man stepped closer. "Do you want to bet your hand on it?" Dario pulled a small ugly knife from his belt, and he never got to use it. The man called Graham moved so fast that Sophie barely saw it. There was a crack, a gasp, a noise like a wet bag hitting concrete, and Dario was on the floor clutching his wrist and making a sound like a kettle. The knife skidded across the tiles and stopped against Sophie's shoe. Graham took her by the elbow, gently this time, and did not look at her face. "Walk with me. Right now." "My friends." Her voice cracked. "They have my friends." "I know." "Cynthia is back there, and Vine is still at the table. We have to..." She broke off, because the double doors at the end of the corridor banged open and two more men came through, and between them walked a girl in a silver jacket. Vine was not fighting. She was looking at nothing, and her feet dragged along the floor. One of the men glanced down the corridor and saw Sophie, and he made the other look. They turned, pulled Vine into the loading bay, and the door slammed behind them with a flat, final sound. "No!" Sophie lunged forward, and Graham caught her around the waist and lifted her clean off the ground. She clawed at his arms, bit his sleeve, "let me go." She kicked backward into his knees as hard as she could, and he held on. "Listen to me." His mouth was against her ear, and his voice was rough. "There are at least six of them behind that door, and more are coming in under a minute. If you go in there, you disappear with them, and nobody ever finds any of you. If you come with me, there's a chance. I can't promise more than a chance." "Then help them!" "Tonight I can only help you." He said it like a man swallowing broken glass. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." He carried her through a kitchen full of steam, past a row of dented bins, and out through a steel door into an alley that stank of rain and rotten waste. Somewhere along the way she stopped fighting. It was not that she had given up. Her body had simply caught up with what her mind already knew, and she was shaking so badly that her teeth rattled. A black sedan waited at the end of the alley with its engine running. He set her gently in the passenger seat, then went around and slid behind the wheel. The doors locked with a heavy click. He pulled away without headlights until they reached the corner. Sophie pressed her forehead to the cold window. The club shrank behind them into a smear of amber light, and she realized she was still holding Cynthia's phone so tightly that her fingers ached. "Who are you?" "Jackie Graham." "That's a name, not an answer." She turned to look at him, and her face was wet, and she hated that. "They knew you. You told that man I was Victor's, and he believed you. So you work for the same kind of people who took my friends. Tell me whether you just rescued me or kidnapped me." Jackie did not answer. He drove through two intersections, checked the mirror three times, and took a corner so sharply that the tires squealed. Then he pulled into the shadow of a shuttered pharmacy and cut the engine. The silence was thick enough to hear the rain ticking on the roof. He turned to face her. In the dim light she could see a muscle jumping in his jaw, and she noticed him looking at her as though he were looking at a ghost he had been expecting for a long time. "Before you ask me where your friends are," he said, "I need you to tell me something, and I need the truth." Sophie's pulse thudded in her ears. Her hand found the door handle, and it would not move. The lock was a small black button on his side of the car. The question should have made no sense. It made perfect sense, and that was what frightened her. For four years she had kept her real name in pencil and her face at the back of every room, and in a single night this stranger had walked straight up to the one secret she had never told anyone. "Does anyone know you're still alive?"

"Nobody." The word came out of Sophie before she could stop it. "I'm dead. There's a stone with my name on it. Nobody knows." "Good." Jackie let out a long breath and held out his hand, palm up. "Give me the phone." She looked down. Cynthia's phone was lit in her fist with another missed call from Vine's number. "No." "Someone will call it, and whoever picks up will tell them exactly where it is. It's a tracker now, Sophie. You're holding up a lamp." She heard her own name, and the cold reached her all at once. She had never told him. She dropped the phone into his hand and watched him snap the card in half and toss both pieces into the cup holder. "I never told you my name." "Sophie Vincenzo." For four years, no one had said it to her face. At school she used her mother's maiden name, and the only place she wrote her real one was inside her Bible, in pencil, where she could rub it out. Her hand flew to the door handle. It would not move. "Let me out." "In a minute." He was not looking at her. He was looking in the mirror. "Right now I need you to put on your seat belt." Two headlights had swung into the street behind them, high and bright. A truck, boxy and dark, rolling too fast for a road this narrow. It was not slowing down. "Dario's friends," Jackie said. "They must have seen the plates." He started the engine, and the sedan lurched out from the shadow of the pharmacy. Sophie grabbed the dashboard with both hands as he took a corner so hard the tires howled. The truck followed. Its horn blared once, long and furious, and she saw the shape of two men inside it, one pointing at her through the windshield. "Hold on." He cut through a market where the stalls were already being unloaded, scattering crates and a startled dog. A woman shrieked. The truck came on behind them, smashing through a table of fruits, and Sophie screamed when its bumper clipped their front wheel and the whole car shuddered. Jackie spun the wheel, shot through an alley barely wide enough for the mirrors, and skidded out the other side into traffic. A bus blocked the truck's path for exactly three seconds. It was enough. Jackie turned off his headlights, rolled into a loading yard, and cut the engine. They sat in the dark. The truck's roar passed on the street outside, slowed, hesitated, and left.  "That," Sophie said, her voice shaking, "was not boring." "No." He wiped sweat from his forehead with the heel of his hand. "I'm usually better at boring because boring is best." The safe house was a narrow flat above a locksmith's shop, and Sophie decided not to trust a single thing about it before she reached the top of the stairs. Jackie went in first, checked every room, and turned three locks behind them. There was a table, two chairs, a sagging couch, and a kitchen so clean it looked unused. There were no photographs anywhere. She stayed by the door with her arms wrapped around her ribs. "Who are those men? The ones at the club." "People who own more than a club. Warehouses, trucks, a few judges." He filled a glass at the sink and set it on the table, then backed away as if it might frighten her. "If I walk into a police station tonight, my report lands on a desk they pay for. By morning I'm dead and you're in the back of a van." "So Cynthia and Vine just stay gone?" "I'll find where they were taken. I can't do it loudly." "That isn't good enough." She took a step into the room. "You knew my name, and you were already in that corridor. You didn't come by accident." "No." He did not look away. "I take the long way past the market on Thursdays so I can watch you buy an arepa from the woman you tip in coins and apologize to. I know you go to the seven o'clock Mass at San Judas and leave before the last hymn. I know you avoid Calle Bolívar because of a yellow dog." Heat rose in her face, then drained away, leaving her dizzy. Scenes began to line up like cards being dealt in her head: a gray car across from her building one winter morning, a man at a bus stop who never got on any bus. She had told herself it was nerves. It had been someone. "For how long?" "Four years." "Since I was thirteen." Her voice came out scraped raw. "Why? You don't know me. Why would a man like you follow a girl like me?" Jackie's hands tightened on the back of a chair. He looked at her at last, and the tired eyes she had noticed in the club were not tired at all. They were haunted, like windows in a house where something terrible had once happened. "Because I was there," he said, "the night your parents died." For a long moment the only sound was the refrigerator humming. "There," Sophie whispered. "Where?" "Close enough to know what was done." He rubbed the scar through his eyebrow. "I belonged to the organization that gave the order. I'm not going to pretend I didn't." "Did you kill them?" "I had no part in giving that order." It was a careful sentence, built like a bridge with a few planks missing, and she could hear the gaps. "That isn't what I asked." "I know." "I saw the men who came into that house. Through a crack in a wardrobe door, I saw every one of them, and I have not forgotten a single face." Her voice cracked and she let it. "You weren't one of them. I would know." "No. I wasn't in the room." "But you know who was." "Yes." "Then tell me." "I can't do that, yet." She crossed the floor, picked up the glass of water, and threw it. It hit the wall a foot from his head and burst into bright pieces, and a splash ran along his cheek. He wiped it away without looking at his fingers. "Four years," she said. Her breath was coming in sharp pulls. "You watched me eat, and walk, and hide in a church, and you never said a word." "I couldn't." She ran. The first lock gave way, then the second, and her fingers trembled so hard on the third that the metal rattled. Behind her, Jackie didn't move. "The top one sticks. Lift while you turn." She lifted. It turned. The door swung open on a dark stairwell. "Dario will have made his calls by now," Jackie said quietly from the kitchen. "Every man between here and the valley knows there's a girl in a green dress who saw the loading bay. If you walk out, you won't be a girl who escaped. You'll be a loose end, and those people don't tolerate loose ends." Sophie stood in the doorway with the cold air on her face. Below, a car crept down the street, slowed at the corner, and moved on. Where would she go? Home was a rented room with a flimsy lock, and she had a sick feeling the man behind her already knew the address. "Give me one reason." "I don't have a good one." He sounded tired down to his bones. "But your friends need someone outside who's still breathing, and I need you alive to help me look." She shut the door and turned the locks one by one, and she hated that her hands knew how. "Until morning. I'm not staying because I trust you." "I know." He showed her to the second room, which held a narrow bed, a barred window, and a bolt on the inside of the door. "The bolt is on your side. It always was." She shut the door in his face, and he heard the bolt slide home. Jackie swept the broken glass into his palm and tipped it into the bin, then sat at the table in the dark and listened. After a while he heard what he had expected to hear through the wall, a girl crying into a pillow as quietly as she could, the way someone cries when she has learned that nobody is coming. He stayed where he was until it stopped. At 11:03 p.m, his phone buzzed against the wood. An unknown number. He opened the message, and the blood drained from his hands. The girl escaped. Scofield wants to know why. He read it three times, and the words never changed.

Sophie came out of the bedroom at first light, and the first thing she saw was Jackie's phone lying face-up on the table. She read the message upside down. By the last word, her stomach had dropped. "Who is Scofield?" Jackie slid the phone into his pocket. He looked as if he had not moved all night. "Sit down." "I'm done sitting when you tell me to. That message is about me. The girl escaped. Who wants to know why?" He let out a slow breath. "Scofield Tyrone. He doesn't run one gang, Sophie. He sits above several of them. The men who own the club, the men who guard the docks, even my own boss, they all send him a share. His name is a door, and if you say it in the wrong room, every head turns." He turned the empty glass on the table. "In his world, every favor is a debt, and every debt is paid in blood. Nobody who owes him ever finishes paying." Something cold moved at the edge of her mind. "Is he the name you wouldn't tell me last night?" "Ask me again when Cynthia and Vine are home." "That isn't an answer." "No," he said. "It isn't." She noticed that he had not said no, and the thought lodge with unrest in her chest. But the clock on the wall read 06:10 a.m, and every minute that ticked was a minute her friends were somewhere she couldn't see. "Where are you going?" "To the only man who might know where they are." He took his jacket from the chair. "Bolt the door. If it's me, I knock three times, then once." "And if you don't come back?" For a moment he looked almost amused, as if nobody had asked him that in years. "There's bread in the cupboard, and you leave by the roof." Beto Salinas ran a freight yard near the port, and he sold information the way other men sold fruit. He did not look up when Jackie walked into the office. He was counting crates on a clipboard, and he kept counting until Jackie closed the door. It was an ordinary morning in an ordinary yard, which was exactly what made the next few minutes so hard to listen to. "I wondered how long it would take you." "Two girls, taken from Ámbar last night. Seventeen. A silver jacket and long braids." Beto's pen stopped. "It isn't a club, Jackie. It's a pipeline. Girls come in from the valley towns, they sit in a house in the hills for a few days, then they cross my yard in produce trucks bound for the coast. I've watched those trucks for six years. There are no inspections, no questions, and the paperwork is always perfect. Somebody has the inspectors on salary." "When do the trucks move?" "Sunday. Monday at the latest. After that they're nobody's daughters." He finally looked up, and his eyes were tired. "And there's more. Table nine was booked three weeks ago, paid in cash. Whoever booked it knew exactly which three girls were coming. The woman who runs the loading bay also snapped a photograph of your girl as she ran. It went up the chain before midnight." Jackie said nothing. He did not need to ask whether the face in that picture would mean something to the man at the top. Sophie had her mother's jaw, and her mother's trick of narrowing her eyes just before she lied. He had seen that face before, years ago, on a wall in a hallway that no longer existed. "Thank you, Beto." "Don't thank me. Pay me when it's over." He was halfway across the yard when he noticed the car. It was gray, parked nose-out beside a fence, and the driver's window was dark. It had not been there when he arrived. When Jackie turned toward the gate, its engine turned over. He walked to his own car at a normal pace and drove at a normal pace, and he watched the gray sedan move onto the road a block behind him. He took the market route, left, right, left, then drove via a fountain twice and doubled back through an alley between a bakery and a supermarket. When he came out the other side, the gray car was gone. Boring, he thought. Boring is hard to follow. But a man who had followed him all the way from the freight yard was not boring. In the second before it vanished, he had seen a pale hand on the wheel and the collar of a polo shirt. He did not like that at all. Victor Romano received visitors the way other men received the weather, from the back of a seafood restaurant, with a plate in front of him and a knife in his hand. The place was closed, chairs upside down on the tables, and the smell of bleach and old fried fish hung over the empty room. Victor sat alone beside a tank of lazy gray fish, peeling an orange in one long, unbroken ribbon. "Sit, sit. You look terrible." "Long night." "So I hear." Victor laid the peel on his plate like something he meant to keep. "Scofield's people are not happy, Jackie. One of his clubs lost a piece of inventory last night, and a man named Dario is in the hospital with his wrist hanging by a thread. Do you know whose name he said when he woke up?" Jackie kept his hands loose on his knees. "He put his hands on a girl I was watching. I didn't like it." "A girl you were watching." Victor split the orange and offered him half. Jackie shook his head. "Why would you be watching a girl? Huh?" "She works the coat check at Ámbar. Your share from that club has been coming up short for a month, and I think she saw who was skimming. I was going to ask her quietly." Jackie shrugged as if the whole thing bored him. "When they grabbed her, I lost my temper. She's nobody, boss. Just a witness." "A witness." Victor chewed slowly. His eyes were small and friendly and never left Jackie's face. "You know what's fragile? This." He waved his knife at the empty room, the tank, the upturned chairs. "Everything we have stands on Scofield's good mood. I let you work because you're careful, and last night wasn't careful. If you start a war with him over a coat-check girl, I won't be able to protect you, and I'll be sorry about it for almost an entire afternoon." "It won't happen again." "Bring her to me. I want to hear what she saw." "She's terrified. She won't say a word in front of you. Give me a few days, and I'll get it out of her." Victor smiled, and it was the smile that made grown men check their pockets. "Do you know what I admire about you, Jackie? You have never lied to me. That's why I'm confused, because this sounds exactly like a lie." "It isn't." "Of course not." He wiped the knife on a napkin. "Three days. After that I meet your witness, or I start asking questions of the people who love you. Your mother's hospital sends me a Christmas card every year, did you know? Such lovely handwriting." Jackie stood. He did not let his face change, but the room felt colder when he left it. Outside, the sun hit him like a slap, and he stood by his car until his hands stopped wanting to shake. Victor had given him three days. Victor had also, without once raising his voice, reminded him exactly where the strings were tied. He was in the car, with the key in the ignition and his hands still not quite steady, when his phone buzzed. It was a text from Beto, and it was short. Change of plan. They're moving the girls tonight, not Sunday. Eleven o'clock, the produce depot on Ruta 4. Somebody's in a hurry. Jackie stared at it for a long time. In ten hours, Cynthia and Vine would be gone for good, and the only person he trusted to help him stop it was a seventeen-year-old girl who thought he might have helped kill her parents. He could go alone. He could tell himself that was kinder. But he thought of Sophie behind three locks with her chin lifted and her fists closed, and he knew exactly what she would say if he came back with the news after the trucks were gone. In a split seconds, he recalled he'd been followed after meeting Beto.  He started the engine and drove back toward the flat, and for once he did not check the mirror, because the only thing he could not afford to lose was ahead of him.