Page 15 of A Favor Owed

When I’m in my car, I stare at my phone and the new contact that readsAngela Pines. I call my dad.

“How you doing, kid?” he says.

“Doing all right. How about you?”

“Everything’s good. Can’t complain.” He pauses for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is quiet and somber. “What you’re doing, Brady…”

“I’d do it a thousand times, Dad.”

“I know.” I hear him take a deep breath. We’re not big on declarations. “How’s that school?”

“It’s good. It’s a lot of work.”

“Columbia would have been better, though, huh?” The guilt in his voice is like a punch to the gut.

Columbia is ranked the fourth best law school in the entire country. The California state school I’m stuck at for now is ranked around a hundred and twelve. And I’m pretty sure the year-round sunshine counts for a lot of those points.

“It’s just for one semester,” I say to my dad. “I’ll be at Columbia in January. In the meantime, it’s nice not to have any distractions. Not having to listen to Siobhan run her life from her phone is nirvana. Not to mention Mikey and his partying.” The last thing I need is my dad feeling all guilt-tripped.

When he was younger, he got himself a little bit of a reputation as a forger. Fake IDs and stuff like that for the rich Fordham University kids. But by the time he married my mom, that was behind him. He didn’t do anything like that again until after 9/11, when a friend he’d known his whole life, a guy from the Dominican Republic with a U.S. citizen wife and kids, revealed that he was undocumented and wasn’t eligible for a green card unless he left the United States for ten years. My dad took the guy’s expired work permit, made him a new one, and that was that. Word got around our church, and every now and then he does the same for a family who needs that kind of help.

Everything went to hell a few months ago, when a Fordham student turned up asking for some serious documents so she could ditch her family. The only reason my dad agreed to help her was because she was going to tip off the feds about her father’s human trafficking business. Next thing he knew, my dad was being arrested, hauled into FBI headquarters, and questioned about his connections to organized crime. I’m here to find the Fordham girl and get her to give up the information the feds want about her old man in exchange for them dropping the charges against my dad.

“This isn’t what I wanted for you, Brady. To get mixed up in this. You and your ma have been through enough for two lifetimes.”

“Stop getting your panties in a bunch over there, Dad,” I say, drawing more of an authentic laugh from him. “I’m in law school, there’re palm trees outside my window, and there’s Guinness in my fridge. Do I sound all down in the dumps and shit?”

“No, you don’t,” he admits. “You were always a good kid, Brady. Now, Mikey, on the other hand…” I picture him shaking his head. My younger brother is kind of a handful. And that’s saying something in my family.

“See what I mean?” I say. “I don’t need to get woken up by Mikey dragging his ass home at three o’clock in the morning the day I need to take an exam, right? Has he tried to sneak a girl in again, by the way?”

“Not after your mother ripped him a new one the last time.” He laughs. My mom has a temper like Mt. Vesuvius. “So how are things…going?” he asks.

“They’re going. I’m giving them what they need.”

“Yeah? You found her?”

“I found her.”

He exhales. “Thanks, kid.”

“How are things there?”

I sense his hesitation. “I don’t like keeping all this from your mom.”

“Lou said if you give them the names, it all goes away.”

“I can’t do that, Brady. There are lives at stake.”

Our whole family is at stake.“Hey, I gotta go, okay? Tell Ma I’ll call her later.”

“She’s looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.”

“Yeah, me too.”

We hang up, and I huff out a frustrated sigh. A bunch of stuff runs through my mind. Angela’s fingers, long and beautiful and surprisingly unmanicured, as they type her number into my phone. The memory of a terrified six-year-old boy clinging to his mother as she falls to her knees and screams and screams. The feeling of a man, big and strong like the little boy’s daddy, wrapping his arms around them and making them safe. The relief in my dad’s voice just now when I assured him everything was cool.

I pull up the number with no name and call it.

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