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Davie’s eyes are to the table again.
“But trust me, pal, this is going to stop. I promise.”
Davie’s eyes bounce up. He believes Chaz. He knows his grandfather will never let him down.
A text pings. Chaz takes out his reading glasses, scans the phone. “You mind coming on an errand with me?” he asks Davie.
Davie is wiping the table with the miniature ice-cream-store napkins, smearing chocolate over the tabletop. “Sure.”
“The stuff I ordered from the gardening center is ready for pickup.”
At City Planter on North Fourth, Chaz finds some sharp shears, a pair of gardening gloves, a bucket.
“Ooh, I’ve been wanting one of these,” he says, scooping up a plastic rain poncho. “It’s supposed to rain tonight.” At the register, there’s a refrigerator filled with soft drinks and bottled water.
“Want a soda, buddy?”
Davie shakes his head. “Mom doesn’t like me to drink soda.”
“Smart. Especially after ice cream. Can you grab me two of those waters? The big ones.”
Afterward, he pulls up to the curb of Davie’s house. Sylvia waves to them from the front door.
Davie says, “Thanks for the ice cream. See you next week?”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
Davie opens the car door.
“Hey, buddy,” Chaz says.
Davie turns.
“Don’t you worry about this Funkney kid, okay? It’s gonna work out, I promise.”
Davie offers a fleeting smile and heads to the door.
After two quick beeps of the horn, Chaz heads out.
He checks his phone for the address again. Twenty minutes later, he pulls in front of the place. It’s a boarded-up row house in Tioga-Nicetown.
He gets out of the car, taking his garden-center purchases with him.
At the front door, he knocks, and a small-framed man answers. Inside, Chaz opens the bag for the rain poncho and puts it over his suit. “Is he talking yet?”
The other man—his name is O (yes, the guy’s full name is the letter O)—shakes his head. O is what, back in Chaz’s day, they’d call a mute. Chaz suspects there are more politically correct terms now.
Before Chaz retired, O’Leary had him train the guy. Every organization has a succession plan. O’Leary always had a thing for picking up neighborhood strays. Rumor was that O got his name from the tag on his crib at the Russian orphanage—the American adoption agency labeled the cribs from A to Z.
Shane O’Leary called Chaz out of retirement for this job. Chaz doesn’t mind, it’s not merely business. As they say in movie trailers, this time it’s personal.
O looks at Chaz with his scary ice-blue eyes through large protective glasses that are speckled with red. He leads Chaz to the man who is tied to a chair that sits on top of a sheet of plastic. Chaz removes the pruning shears from the bag. He peers at O.
“I see you already got to work.” The man tied to the chair has bloody stumps for hands. He’d taught O well.
But this is one tough dude. Before O grabbed the guy last night, Chaz researched the sheriff of Leavenworth and learned that he’d been in the military. Two tours in Iraq. Probably had torture training. Name, rank, serial number, and all that.
O is good, but he looks tired. Understandably: The guy gets off an international flight from the UK, grabs up this guy in Kansas, and drives all night to bring him to Philly.