In Summertime Saga

The frozen peas were the first thing I saw.

Debbie was at the kitchen table holding a bag of Green Giant frozen peas against her left wrist. She was still in the white blouse she'd been wearing when I left for the gym and the blouse had a button undone at the collar and her hair was pulled back tight and the bag of peas was sweating condensation onto the table surface. She looked up when I came through the back door and her face tried to do the smile.

"Hi, sweetie. How was the gym?"

I dropped my bag on the floor.

"What happened."

"It's nothing. I just-"

I was across the kitchen in three steps. Sat down next to her. Took her wrist, the one without the peas, and she flinched and pulled it back and then stopped pulling and let me lift the bag away.

Four bruises. Finger-shaped. Dark red turning purple, pressed into the skin of her inner wrist in a grip pattern that was clear enough to read. Someone had grabbed her and squeezed hard enough to leave prints and the prints were fresh enough that the skin around them was still swollen.

"Who."

"Two men. They came to the door. One of them was the big one from before, the slow one." Igor. "The other one I'd never seen. Younger. Dark hair. He did the talking."

"What did they want?"

"Five thousand." The same number. The same demand. The interest is five thousand. Debbie's voice was steady and flat and she was looking at the peas, not at me. "I told them I had three hundred. He took the three hundred out of my purse and said it wasn't enough and then the big one grabbed my arm."

She said it like she was reading a receipt. Item, item, item. The flatness was worse than if she'd been crying.

"He grabbed my arm and I dropped the purse. The money fell out. He let go. They picked it up and left."

"When."

"Around two. You were at the gym. I tried calling but it went to voicemail."

I'd had my phone in the locker. In a Ziploc bag because the lockers at Planet Thiccness didn't have locks and I didn't want someone walking off with it. It had been in there for an hour and a half while Kevin ran me through chest day and Igor had been in this kitchen gripping Debbie's wrist hard enough to mark bone.

I took the peas from her. They were half-thawed and the bag was soft. I went to the freezer, pulled out a proper ice pack from the door shelf, wrapped it in the dish towel that was hanging from the oven handle, came back, and pressed it against her wrist.

She flinched.

"Hold still."

"It's fine, Arthur, it's just-"

"Hold still."

She went quiet. I held the ice against the bruises and her hand was in mine and her fingers were cold from the peas and the ice was cold through the towel and neither of us said anything for a minute. The fridge hummed. A car went by outside. The kitchen clock ticked, the second hand jerking forward in those sharp little movements that made you aware of each one.

"Where's Jenny?"

"Living room."

I found Jenny on the couch. She was sitting upright with her arms crossed and her jaw set and she was staring at the blank TV screen. She was wearing gym shorts and a pink tank top and her hair was down and her phone was on the cushion next to her and she wasn't looking at it.

"Hey."

She turned her head. Her eyes were dry. No tears. Her mouth was a line.

"They took three hundred dollars and left bruises on mom's arm and you were at the fucking gym."

"I know."

"She screamed. I was upstairs and I heard her scream and by the time I got to the stairs they were already leaving and she was on the floor picking up money."

I sat on the arm of the couch. Jenny's jaw was working, the muscle flexing and releasing, and her hands were in fists on her thighs.

"This can't keep happening," she said.

"It won't."

"You keep saying that. You said that last time. 'I'm going to fix this.' It's been three weeks and they came back and grabbed her and you were doing bench press."

She was right. The anger hit me because she was right and because I'd been doing exactly that. Chest press, actually, flat on the bench, staring at the ceiling of Planet Thiccness while Kevin counted reps, and thirty minutes into the session Igor had been here. In this kitchen. Grabbing Debbie by the wrist while she tried to hand over three hundred dollars that wasn't enough.

"What are you going to do?" Jenny said. Her voice was stripped down to the bone.

"I'm working on it."

"Work faster."

She picked up her phone. Pulled up an app. Put it down again. Picked it back up. Her hands needed to be busy and there was nothing to do.

"She's in there holding frozen vegetables against her arm like it's a sprained ankle. It's not a sprained ankle. Someone grabbed her." Jenny's voice cracked on the word grabbed and she caught it and pulled it back and her eyes went harder. "I want to call the cops."

"Harold knows."

"Then why aren't they doing anything?"

"Because the cops can't move on the Russians without evidence and the evidence chain is-" I stopped. I was about to explain a conspiracy that I only half-understood using facts I'd gotten from a video game wiki. "It's complicated. Harold is working it. Tony's involved. I have a lead I'm following."

"A lead." Jenny looked at me. The look was stripped of everything except the question underneath. "You're eighteen. What lead do you have?"

I didn't have an answer for that. The key to lockbox 11082 was in my desk drawer upstairs and the code was in my phone and I was going to take them to Saga Financial and open a box I'd never seen in person and hope the contents matched what a walkthrough I barely remembered said they'd be.

"Give me a week," I said.

Jenny stared at me for a long time. Then she stood up and walked past me toward the stairs. She stopped in the doorway.

"If they come back and touch her again I'm calling Harold myself. I don't care about your lead."

She went upstairs. Her door closed. Bass started through the floor a minute later, heavy and loud, the wall she put between herself and everything else.

I went back to the kitchen. Debbie was still at the table, holding the ice pack against her wrist. She looked up.

"She's upset," Debbie said.

"Yeah."

"She saw them leaving. She saw me on the floor." Debbie shifted the ice pack. "I shouldn't have let her see that."

"You didn't let anything. They came to the door."

Debbie looked at the ice pack. Her thumb traced the edge of the dish towel wrapped around it. "Frank would've known what to do."

"Frank's not here."

It came out harder than I meant. Her eyes went to mine, startled, and the flinch crossed her face before she covered it.

"I know," she said. Quiet.

I pulled out the chair next to her and sat. Took her hand. The one with the bruises. Held it gently, the ice pack balanced between our palms.

"I'm going to the bank this week," I said. "Frank left something. I'm following it."

She looked at me. The question was there, in her eyes, in the slight pull of her eyebrows, but she didn't ask it.

"Be careful, sweetie."

"I will."

We sat there. The clock ticked. The ice melted slowly through the towel and her fingers were cold in mine and the bruises were darkening.

She came to my room at one in the morning.

I wasn't asleep. I'd been lying in the dark staring at the ceiling and running the walkthrough in my head, trying to remember the sequence, trying to piece together what came after the lockbox. Bank. Evidence. Harold. Rump's mansion. A recording. A heist. A warehouse. Debbie and Jenny taken. The fight with Dimitri. The pieces were there but the order was wrong and some of them were missing and I was trying to fill the gaps when the door opened.

Debbie. In the bathrobe. Hair down. Barefoot.

She stood in the doorway for a second. The hallway light behind her made her a silhouette, the same way she'd been a silhouette through the shower glass yesterday. Different context. Different woman. The woman in the shower had wanted. This woman was afraid.

"Can I-" She stopped. Started again. "I can't sleep in that room. It's too-" She stopped again. "Can I stay here?"

"Yeah."

She came in. Closed the door. The room went dark again except for the streetlight coming through my window, cutting a stripe across the foot of the bed. She walked to the bed and lay down on top of the covers, fully clothed in the bathrobe, on her side, facing me.

I put my arm across her waist.

She moved into me. Turned so her back was against my chest. My arm tightened around her and she pulled it closer, wrapping both her hands around my forearm, pressing my arm against her ribs like she was using me as a seatbelt. Her bruised wrist was against my skin, the swelling warm under the cold of the ice she'd kept on it.

She was trembling. Small, fast, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than cold.

Her hair smelled like her shampoo and her back was warm against my chest and her breathing was fast and shallow and scared.

"I keep hearing the door," she said. "Every time the house creaks I think they're back."

I didn't say anything. I held her tighter. My mouth was close to the back of her neck and I breathed and she felt my breath there and her trembling slowed.

The room was dark. The streetlight stripe crossed the foot of the bed. Jenny's music had stopped an hour ago and the house was quiet.

Her breathing changed. The shallow fast scared breathing turned longer. Deeper. Her grip on my forearm loosened by degrees, her fingers going slack and then tightening and then going slack again, the rhythm of someone fighting sleep and losing.

She fell asleep with her bruised wrist pressed against my heartbeat.

I stayed awake.

Strength 4. Dexterity 1. I ran the numbers in the dark. Igor was big and slow and I could probably take him now, one-on-one, if I caught him right, if I used what Somrak was teaching me. Probably. The new guy I hadn't seen and couldn't calculate. Two on one was a loss at any stat level I was going to reach in the next month.

I needed the evidence chain more than I needed the muscles. The muscles kept me alive in the warehouse at the end. The evidence chain was what stopped them from coming to this door.

Debbie's breathing was slow and deep and even. Her body was warm and still against mine. Her heartbeat was steady through the bathrobe and my arm was around her and she was asleep and safe and I was looking at the ceiling running a walkthrough I should have read when it was a game and didn't.

Step one. The bank. Tomorrow.