Chapter 12 The Brother

“To meet my brother,” Marcus said, and left Jake sitting at his own kitchen table with the expression of a man who had just been asked to step off a ledge and had said yes before he could talk himself out of it.

The West Side address was a six-flat on Kildare Avenue, the kind of building that had been subdivided and re-subdivided until every apartment was slightly too small for the number of people living in it. Marcus buzzed unit 3B at one-forty-seven in the morning and stood back from the intercom because he understood that buzzing someone’s apartment at two AM looked a specific way and he didn’t want the first impression to be alarming.

The intercom crackled. “Who is it?”

A young man’s voice. Guarded but not panicked , the voice of someone accustomed to unexpected late visitors, which was its own piece of information.

“My name is Marcus Caldwell,” Marcus said. “I’m…” He paused, because there was no version of the next sentence that didn’t sound insane. “I knew your mother. I need five minutes. I’m alone.”

A long silence. Marcus counted to fifteen. He was preparing to buzz again when the door clicked open.

The hallway smelled like other people’s cooking and old carpet. Third floor, the door at the end of the hall. It was already open when Marcus reached it , just barely, six inches, enough for one eye and part of a face to look at him through the gap.

Dark eyes, like his mother’s. A jawline Marcus would have recognized in a lineup because he saw some version of it every morning in his bathroom mirror. Younger than twenty-four looked in Marcus’s imagination , taller, though, and with a coiled, watchful quality that hadn’t fully become wariness yet but was most of the way there.

“You said you knew my mother,” Darius said. “My mother’s dead.”

Marcus’s chest did something complicated. “She told you that?”

“She’s been dead since I was four.” Darius’s eyes moved over Marcus with the quick, comprehensive scan of someone who had learned early to evaluate threats. “Who are you?”

“My name is Marcus. Marcus Caldwell. My mother’s name is Gloria Rivers. She changed it to Caldwell when she married my father, and before that she was, ”

Darius opened the door the rest of the way.

He was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants and holding a phone loosely in one hand, and he looked at Marcus with an expression that was half suspicion and half something that was trying very hard not to become something else.

“Come in,” he said. His voice was carefully neutral. “But I want you to know I’ve got your face on camera from the buzzer and if you’re , if this is something I need to be worried about, I’ve got people I can call.”

“I know,” Marcus said. He stepped inside. “I’m not here to threaten you. I’m here because I found out about you six hours ago and I have about, ” he checked his watch , “four hours before some very dangerous and impatient people start making decisions about your future without consulting either of us. So.”

Darius closed the door. Leaned against it. Folded his arms.

“She’s alive.” It wasn’t quite a question.

“She’s alive. She’s been in federal protection for twenty years. She works with the DEA. She has been, ” Marcus paused, because there was a version of this speech that was gentle and a version that was direct and he’d made a decision on the bus over that Darius deserved the direct version. “She has been running an operation for the last five years to try to build you a path out of the situation you’re in with Riverton Consulting.”

Whatever Darius had expected him to say, it wasn’t that. The composure cracked, fast, and for about three seconds Marcus could see exactly how young twenty-four was.

“She’s… she knows about Riverton?”

“She’s known for five years.”

“She’s been , ” Darius stopped. Pressed the back of his hand to his mouth for a second. “She’s been watching me.”

“Yes.”

“For five years.”

“Yes.”

Darius laughed , short, slightly cracked, the laugh of someone who had just received information they didn’t have the architecture to process yet. “Okay. Okay. And you are , you’re what, my, ”

“Half-brother. We have the same mother. Different fathers.”

“Different fathers,” Darius said. “Right. Of course.” He unfolded his arms, turned, walked to the small kitchen that opened off the living room, and stood in front of the open refrigerator for a moment doing absolutely nothing before closing it again. “You want water?”

“Sure,” Marcus said.

Darius got two glasses of water, handed one to Marcus, and sat on the arm of his couch. He held his glass with both hands like he was deciding whether it was real or not.

“The situation with Riverton,” he said finally. “How bad is it? How much does your DEA mother actually know?”

“She knows everything,” Marcus said. “And she’s not the only one. There’s a full ledger , fifteen years of the Moretti family’s accounts, including every transaction that runs through Riverton Consulting. Every transfer, every account number, every date.”

Darius set the glass down on the coffee table very carefully. “Where is this ledger?”

“Right now? It’s under my arm.”

Darius looked at the music box. Then back at Marcus. “You walked in here with it.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re on it. Because in about four hours a man named Rafael Moretti is going to start making very bad decisions, and one of those decisions is going to involve tying up loose ends before a federal investigation gets to him. And Darius , ” Marcus leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at this young man who had his mother’s eyes and had no idea what the morning was about to bring him. “I need to know if you want to be a loose end or if you want to be something else.”

“Something else like what?”

“Like someone who made a bad call at twenty-one who cooperates fully and walks away from this with something left. That’s not a guarantee , I can’t make you that guarantee tonight. But our mother has been building toward it for five years, and I’m willing to spend the next forty-eight hours trying to make it real. If you want that.”

Darius looked at him for a long time. The apartment was quiet except for street noise through an imperfectly sealed window and the hum of a refrigerator that needed its coils cleaned.

“She really’s alive,” Darius said, not for the first time.

“She really is.”

“Is she…” He stopped. Started again. “Is she okay?”

Marcus thought about the woman in the storage unit, with the folding chair and the camping lantern and twenty years of a choice she’d never been able to fully justify.

“She’s… complicated,” he said. “But she’s okay. Yeah.”

Darius nodded. Something in his face settled, slightly, like a calculation that had been running a long time had just been given one of its missing variables.

“What do I need to do?” he asked.

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