Split Knuckles

You wake up on Saturday with your phone on your chest and the conversation from last night still glowing on the screen.

You read it again in the grey light. Her texts are short and level, like a voice reading instructions on an airplane. You don't remember falling asleep. You remember the deadbolt. You remember the sound of it sliding home, and her answer: Good.

You still don't know what she meant through the wall. She's not a job. She's a mistake. You lie there and turn the words over like a coin and they come up different every time.

At eight there's a knock. You look through the peephole.

A man in coveralls with a toolbox, and behind him, Verena, holding two coffees.

"Gas company," she says through the door. "Friend of a friend. He's going to look at your stove. Then I'm going to look at your face and decide whether you slept."

The man is quiet and fast and doesn't say a word. He takes the front off your stove, looks at something, puts it back, and leaves. On the way out he gives Verena a single nod, like a soldier.

"Well?" you say.

"Nothing wrong with it." She hands you the coffee. Oat milk, cinnamon. "Which means someone turned it on."

"Verena." You hold the cup in both hands. "What did you mean last night? On the phone? I heard you through the wall."

Her face doesn't change. That's what scares you. A normal person would flush, or laugh, or say what phone call.

"I was talking to a client," she says. "About a contract I took on that I shouldn't have."

"You said 'she.'"

"The contract is with a woman."

"And she's a mistake."

"Taking it was the mistake." She looks at you steadily. "Drink your coffee, Ava. You're going into the office, aren't you? On a Saturday."

"How do you..."

"You're wearing your work shoes with your weekend coat. Take the stairs when you come home."

Hazelton Quigg on a Saturday is a ghost ship. The lights on the thirty-first floor are on motion sensors, so you walk through the dark office lighting your own path, desk by desk.

Fi is already there, cross-legged in your chair with her laptop, because when you texted her someone was in my apartment at 1 a.m., Fi texted back im coming over and then, when you said no, fine then im going to the office at 7 and finding out who logged into your machine and you can't stop me.

"So," she says when you walk in. "Bad news, worse news, and weird news."

"Bad first."

"The Radley Point folder is gone." She turns the screen. "Not moved. Deleted. Every workpaper, every bank pull, your notes, all of it. From the server and from your machine. Hard delete. Somebody knew what they were doing."

The floor tilts. Weeks of work. Forty-one million dollars of receipts.

"Worse?"

"It was deleted under Nanette's login. Thursday night, 11:56."

You sit down on the edge of the desk. "Nanette asked me to send it all to her. She said she wanted to keep it under her own login."

"Well, she kept it all right. Kept it right into the void." Fi pushes her glasses up. "And the weird news is that I'm a genius."

She holds up a thumb drive. Silver, cheap, the kind they give out at conferences.

"The backup server takes snapshots every six hours, and only three people know where the snapshot from Thursday at 6 p.m. lives. Me, the guy who quit, and God." She presses it into your palm. "It's all there. Every page."

You close your fingers over it. It feels heavier than it should.

"Fi. I think someone's trying to hurt me."

You tell her everything. The gas, the roof, the phone call through the wall. Fi listens with her mouth getting tighter and tighter.

"Okay," she says finally. "Option one, your boss deleted evidence and someone turned your stove on. Option two, your hot neighbor is a lunatic. Option three, both."

"She saved me. Twice."

"Serial killers can be helpful, Ava. It's called grooming."

You take a car home because you don't want to stand on a platform. The driver plays sports radio. Somewhere on Lake Shore Drive you notice a white van in the side mirror.

It's a plain van. No logo. No windows in the back. It's behind you at Fullerton. It's behind you at Belmont. When your driver changes lanes at Irving Park, the van changes lanes too.

"Can you take Broadway instead?" you ask.

The driver shrugs and exits. The van exits.

Your phone buzzes.

White van, three cars back. I see it. Have him pull into the garage, not the front. Don't get out until I'm there. V.

You stare at the text. Then out the back window. Then at the text.

How do you know where I am?

Later. Garage. Please.

The please does it.

Your driver pulls down the ramp into the building's garage, two levels under the street, fluorescent lights buzzing over rows of cars. The van does not follow you down the ramp. You breathe out.

Then you see it in the side mirror: the van, nosing slowly down the ramp behind you, headlights off.

The back door of your car opens.

"Out," says Verena. She's in a black jacket, hair tucked back, gloves on. Her voice is completely calm. "Stairwell, straight up. Don't stop on the way. Don't come back down. Go."

"What about you?"

"I'll be right behind you." She puts her hand on your shoulder, warm through the leather. "Ava. Go."

You go. You run for the stairwell, your heels slapping concrete, and you hit the door and the stairs and you're on the first landing when you hear it.

A thud. Heavy. Like a sack of something dropped from a height. Then a second, smaller sound, sharp. Then nothing.

You stand on the landing with your heart slamming. You count to sixty. You count to sixty again.

The stairwell door opens below.

Verena climbs the stairs toward you at a perfectly normal pace, unzipping her jacket. She stops one step below you, so for once you're looking down at her.

The knuckles of her right hand are split and bleeding through a tear in her glove.

"What happened?" you whisper.

"I slipped," she says. "Oil on the floor. These old garages."

"Where's the van?"

"Gone."

"Where's the driver?"

"Also gone." She meets your eyes. "Go upstairs. Lock the deadbolt. I'll be up in a while."

"Verena..."

"Please."

You go upstairs. You lock the deadbolt. You sit on your kitchen floor for an hour with your back against the cabinets and the thumb drive in your fist.

Then you get up, because you're an auditor, and auditors look at things.

You take the stairs back down to the garage.

The van is gone. Your car is gone. The fluorescent light over the space where the van stopped flickers on and off. There's a dark smear on the concrete that could be oil.

And beside it, face down, a photograph.

You pick it up. It's you. A long-lens shot of you leaving your office on LaSalle Street last week, coffee in hand, looking at your phone.

You turn it over.

On the back, in neat black ballpoint, someone has written: before 11/14.

November 14 is your thirtieth birthday.