Come Alone

Unknown Number: Don't touch him. Call Detective Lusk. His card is in your left jacket pocket.

It is. You don't remember him putting it there.

You: did you do this

Unknown Number: He was waiting for you with a gun. Now he isn't.

You: that's not an answer

Unknown Number: It's the only one that matters at 4 a.m. Call the detective, Ava.

Lusk comes himself, twenty minutes later, with two uniforms and a look on his face like he hasn't slept since Tuesday. He crouches beside the man on the floor, checks his pulse, checks his pockets with gloved hands. The photo of you. A folded sheet of paper with your schedule on it, the booth's address, your gym, the coffee shop on Chicago Avenue where you buy the same oat latte every morning. A small black pistol in an ankle holster.

Lusk sits back on his heels and looks up at you in the flickering light.

"He was here to kill you," he says quietly. "You understand that?"

You nod. You've understood it for an hour, in the cold, clear way you understand things on air when a story suddenly clicks. You're holding a mug of tea Greer made you, because of course Greer came up the minute she saw the police lights, and you haven't drunk any of it.

"And someone stopped him," Lusk says. "Zip-tied him. Left you a note." He holds up the white square in an evidence bag. He won't bother you again. "Your friend from the phone."

"I guess."

"I'm going to be honest with you, Ms. Wilder. That scares me almost as much as this guy does." He nods at the man being lifted onto a stretcher. "Somebody who can make a phone number not exist and put a professional on the floor without a sound? That's not a fan. That's not a good Samaritan. I'd like you to stop answering him."

You look down at the phone in your hand. Dark. Silent. Waiting.

"I'll think about it," you say.

He gives you a long, unreadable look, and then his card again, a second one, as if you might have lost the first. "Day or night," he says.

You don't sleep. Neither does Greer. By the time the sun comes up gray over the rooftops, the two of you are sitting on your living-room floor surrounded by laptops, legal pads and a carton of cold pad see ew, doing the only thing you know how to do when the world stops making sense.

Research.

"Okay," Greer says, chewing on a pen. "Let's be methodical. Who did we piss off this year?"

"The Ebberly family." Episode 189: you proved their grandfather didn't fall down the stairs.

"Rich, mean, mostly dead now. Next."

"The guy in Joliet with the storage units."

"In prison. Next."

You scroll back through the season. Your own voice in your earbuds, months of it. And then you stop, because the thought arrives the way the best ones do on air, all at once, like a light turning on in a dark room.

"Forty-seven," you say.

Greer's pen stops moving.

Episode 47. The Amberline Ledger. Three weeks ago. It was supposed to be a simple cold case: Emory Ebbing, a quiet accountant for the Amberline Foundation, found dead in his car in a forest preserve four years ago, ruled a suicide. His sister wrote to you. You dug. And four months ago, an anonymous source calling himself Lanternkeeper emailed you a scanned folder of Amberline ledger pages that Emory had supposedly been carrying when he died.

You read some of those numbers on air. Payments to a shipping company. Wire transfers to accounts in places you had to look up. You didn't know what they meant. You said so on the show: I don't know what this is, but Emory Ebbing thought it was worth hiding.

"The Amberline Foundation," Greer says slowly. "As in Alistair Sallow, Mr. Children's Hospital Wing, Chicago Magazine's Most Generous Man?"

"As in."

"He sent us a nice note after that episode," Greer says. "Remember? Thanked us for our 'passion for the truth.' On cream paper."

You remember. You also remember how the note made the hair on your arms stand up, and how you laughed it off.

Your phone buzzes on the floor between you. Greer jumps so hard she knocks over the noodles.

Unknown Number: You found it.

Your heart thuds. You turn the screen so Greer can see. She mouths something extremely profane.

You: found what

Unknown Number: The reason. Greer's car hasn't moved since four. You've gone quiet. You only go quiet when you've found something.

You: how could you possibly know that

Unknown Number: Episode 160. You said silence is your process. I pay attention. I can see your street, not your living room. I want that clear.

You: is it 47? is it amberline?

A long pause. The three dots come and go twice.

Unknown Number: Not on this phone.

You: then where

Unknown Number: Nowhere yet. You've had enough for one night.

Something inside you snaps, clean as a bone. You've been shoved into a steel door by a bomb. You've stepped over an unconscious man with your face in his pocket. You've been told what to do eleven times by a man who knows the name of your radiator. You are done.

You: no. you don't get to do this. you don't get to save my life and then disappear behind a number that doesn't exist. i want to see you. in person. today. or i'm giving everything to detective lusk and i'm never answering you again

You hit send before you can lose your nerve. Greer stares at you with her mouth open.

"Did you just threaten your guardian angel?" she whispers.

"He's not an angel. He's a man on a roof."

Nothing comes back. One minute. Three. Five. You can hear the clock on your stove ticking. You start to think you've done it, you've scared him off, and you don't know if what you feel is relief or something much worse.

Then:

Unknown Number: You can't see me.

You: then we're done

Unknown Number: You can't see me. You can meet me.

You read it four times.

You: what's the difference

Unknown Number: The lights stay off.

You: that's insane

Unknown Number: That's the deal. What you don't know can't be taken from you.

Greer grabs your wrist. "Absolutely not," she says. "No. Hard no. This is how women end up as episodes."

She's right. You know she's right. You've told a hundred stories that started exactly like this.

You type anyway.

You: fine. when

Unknown Number: Tonight. Come alone.

"He said alone," Greer says, reading over your shoulder. "Alone, Ava. Like a serial killer. Like a literal serial killer."

"If he wanted me dead," you say quietly, "he could've let me get in the cab."

That shuts her up. For about four seconds.

"Then I'm sitting in the car outside," she says. "With Gloria."

You look down at the phone. Your thumb hovers. You want to ask where. You want to ask why. You want to ask what his voice sounds like, which is a ridiculous thing to want, and you hate that you want it.

Before you can type anything, the screen lights up in your hand.

He's already texting.