Not Him

"Not him," I said again, because nobody had heard me the first time.

It was the most important sentence of my life, and I said it to a street full of people who were not listening. There were four fire trucks by then, parked at angles with their lights going, and a long hose lay across the pavement like the shed skin of an enormous snake. There were uniformed cops on every corner, waving back the crowd, and plainclothes officers sprinting in twos, and a knot of onlookers in office clothes had gathered on the far sidewalk with their phones held up, recording. Somewhere inside the bank a siren was still braying. A paramedic crouched over my mother with a blood pressure cuff. Mr. Adeyemi sat on the curb with a bandage on his head and a cup of water in his hand, shaking so hard that it slopped.

I got down from the van. My legs were stiff as boards. The air stung my eyes and I tasted metal, and I walked across the road in my squeaking shoes, through a gap between two police cars, and went up to the first adult I saw who looked like he was listening.

It was Devon Tran.

He had come out of the van behind me. He stood in the middle of the street with a gun in his hand that I had not seen him draw, and he was looking at the side alley, and at the cloud, and at his own white knuckles, with the stunned, slightly offended look of a boy who has been playing a game with the rules he was taught and found them changed.

"Officer Tran."

He did not hear me. I took hold of the sleeve of his jacket and shook it, and he looked down.

"Not him," I said.

"June, go back to the van."

"Listen to me." I made my voice go small and clear. I have learned, over the years, that when adults panic, the way to reach them is not to shout but to say something very simple, very slowly, like giving directions to a foreigner. "It was Lyle. I know it was. The nose is his. The cough is his, and the smell. The hand is the same hand."

"I know. We all saw—"

"But it wasn't the man who kicked the door."

He stopped.

"Last time," I said. "In the apartment. When the door broke. It was a different man. He was taller than this one. A foot taller. I only saw his legs, and his shoes, and his shadow on the floor. But he was big, and his voice was low, and he didn't cough. This one doesn't kick anything. This one—" My throat tightened. I swallowed. "This one only came for the key. He came for the envelope. He was told to get it, and he's a person who does what he's told, and the man who tells him is somewhere else."

Devon's face was doing a terrible thing. It was slowly un-learning something.

"That's what you meant," he said. "Last time."

"Yes."

"You mean that you actually—" He broke off. He looked around, quickly, at the street, at the other officers, and I watched him decide not to finish the sentence. He holstered his gun and said, in a low voice, "Say that again for the Sergeant. As slowly as you can."

…

I never saw the car start.

I heard it. It was a roar, a harsh, sudden, mechanical bellow, from the lot behind the bank, on the far side of the side street where the staff parked. Then a screech of tires, and a hollow bang as of a bumper striking a post. A gray sedan, a wide plain boxy car the color of dishwater, came barreling out of the narrow gap between the bank and the dry cleaner, with its engine howling and one wheel up on the curb. It clipped the guardrail. A shower of sparks flew up off the steel. It fishtailed, righted itself, and shot across the intersection against the light, and onto the side road, a narrow lane that led down toward the river.

The cops on the corner were shouting. Two of them broke into a run. Someone yelled, "That's the car! Go! Go!" and a patrol cruiser lurched out from the curb with its siren whooping and its lights going and gave chase, tires smoking on the wet pavement.

"Don't chase too far."

It was Dunleavy, on the radio on Devon's shoulder, with a voice like a hand on a bridle. "Do you hear me? Don't go far. He wants us out of position. Break off at the river road. Protect Maren and the kid. Protect the kid."

"Copy," said a voice.

The sound of the engine faded. The siren rose and dwindled. And I stood in the street in the bitter smoky wind, holding Devon Tran's sleeve, and listened to a car I could not see speeding away from me, and I thought: it was the wrong car.

I don't know how I knew. I just did.

…

It took ten minutes for the smoke to thin.

They cleared the corridor with fans, big yellow electric ones on wheels, bellowing and roaring. They went in with masks and flashlights, six officers, two firemen, a dog, and nobody was in the vault. The staff door at the end of the corridor opened into a passage, and the passage into the alley, and in the alley, behind the dumpster, they found the uniform.

I saw it later. They laid it out on a plastic sheet on the pavement behind the bank for the photographer, piece by piece, like a body: the gray trousers, the gray shirt, the cap. The cloth patch on the breast that said ACME BUILDING SERVICES. A pair of rubber-soled boots, size eleven, caked with mud, and a wad of newspaper stuffed up in the toes.

"He climbed the wall," said Dunleavy. "At the back. The fence. There's a drainpipe." He stood over the clothes with his hands in his coat pockets and his toothpick in the corner of his mouth, and he looked ten years older than he had that morning. "He went over, into the old blocks behind the rail yard. Row houses, dead ends. Half of them are empty. We'll put a dog in there, but I wouldn't give you a nickel."

"And the car?"

"Abandoned on Pierce Avenue. Four minutes. Door open, keys in it. Nobody inside. A decoy." He moved the toothpick. "He had two plans, and the second one was for us to chase the first."

I looked at the uniform on the plastic sheet. I looked at the boots, and the newspaper in the toes, and I did not like what I thought.

"The glove," I said.

Dunleavy turned his head.

"The right glove. The one with the empty finger. Where is it?"

He looked at me for a moment, and then he lifted his hand and made a small gesture, and a technician in a white suit came forward with a clear evidence bag. In it lay a black rubber glove, limp and wet, with a streak of soot along the cuff. The technician had laid it flat. He turned it over for me with a pair of tweezers, and held the open mouth of it up to the light.

I leaned in.

I saw the inside of the rubber, damp and gray, like the lining of a boot. I saw the shape of the fingers, five of them, pressed by the shape of a living hand. I saw the thumb. I saw the first finger, and the second, and the third, and the fourth.

And I saw the little finger, at the end, and it was whole.

The glove had been made with five fingers. The rubber had been worn to the shape of five bones. But the very tip of the last one had been cut off with a pair of scissors and rolled back on itself, a neat circle of black, an inch and a half of empty rubber, folded and glued with a dot of adhesive so that it would hang loose and limp, a thing that looked like a missing finger and was not.

"It's a costume," said the technician, with a note of reluctant admiration.

"Yes," I said.

"The man's pinky is fine. He cut the glove to look like the other guy's." He frowned. "Why would a man do that?"

"So we'd look at the glove," said my mother.

…

She was standing behind me.

She had come across the street from the ambulance with a blanket over her shoulders and an oxygen tube still looped around her ear. There was a purple bruise already rising on her left wrist where the fingers had been, five dark ovals like pressed grapes. She had a cut on her forehead. She was walking slowly and stiffly, like someone twice her age, and when she reached me she put one hand on my shoulder and kept it there, as if to make sure that I was solid.

She looked at the glove.

I watched her face, and I watched her understand. It came slowly. The color left her cheeks.

"He wore it for us," she said. "For the camera. For the lens on my collar. He wanted us to think—" She pressed her lips. "The man in the photograph. The guard. He wanted us to see an empty finger and think of that man. To chase a ghost."

"Yes."

"But he couldn't have known." She turned to Dunleavy. Her voice was hoarse from the smoke but quite steady. "He couldn't have known what was in the photograph. Not before we opened the box. We hadn't opened it. Nobody had. And he came in already wearing it. He had the glove ready. He'd cut it. He did it days ago, or this morning." She wet her lips. "He knew there was a picture of a one-fingered man in that box before I did. He knew what I'd see."

"Yes," said Dunleavy.

"And he knew you'd be listening."

Dunleavy said nothing.

"He saw the van," my mother said. "He didn't need to. He knew which cars, and which doors. He walked in through the one door that nobody was watching, the one my daughter told you to watch—"

"Maren."

"—which she told you at nine o'clock this morning in a conference room with no windows, where there were nine people, and a radio, and a poster of a police car. Who was in that room?"

Dunleavy took the toothpick out of his mouth.

I had never seen him do that. He held it between two fingers and studied it, a splinter of wood, like a man looking at an ant. Behind him the fans bellowed. A radio crackled a code. I saw Devon Tran, standing a little apart with his hands at his sides, go a very slow, careful shade of white.

"Eleven people," said Dunleavy at last. "Counting the janitor."

"And the plan, the whole plan, from the bank to the van to the earpiece."

"Yes."

"Did you tell anyone outside the room?"

"No."

"Did you put it in writing?"

"No." He closed his eyes. "Not a word."

There was a long silence. It stretched thin over the noise of the street. In it I felt my mother's hand tighten on my shoulder, and I felt something deep in my own chest turn over and go cold, and begin to count. The glove on the plastic sheet lay open, its little cut finger folded back. And I thought of the man's voice on the phone in the hotel. I know the young man in the doorway is holding coffee.

"I'll tell you what I think," said Dunleavy.

He put the toothpick back in his mouth. He looked down the length of the street, past the fire engines and the yellow tape and the pale faces of the onlookers, to the far end, where the city rose into a gray cloud of afternoon.

"I think it's one of two things," he said slowly. "Either someone in that room is talking.

"Or something in it's listening."