Page 61 of Emerald

“My father kept me in the house a lot,” I tell him. “He was paranoid about me going out anywhere. But there’s no limit to where you can go online.”

I write the address out on a scrap of paper from Ivan’s desk.

“You want to take my plumber’s van?” I ask him.

I’m mostly joking, but Ivan shrugs and says, “Might as well. It blends in.”

I let Ivan drive so I can plug the address into the van’s ancient GPS. I’m amazed how easily he handles the stubborn gear shift. When I was driving, the van jerked along like a go-cart. Ivan manages to pull smoothly through the gates, and down the long, shady drive back to the main road.

“You like living out of the city?” I ask him.

Ivan nods.

“I’d live all the way out in the country, if it wasn’t bad for business.”

This man is such a paradox to me. A scholar and a gangster. Retiring and ambitious.

I should have realized that from the start. What he’s supposed to do and what he actually wants to do are different. Or else Ivan would have just killed me the moment we met.

Before long, we’ve arrived at the street where Zima supposedly lives. However, the address I’ve tracked down isn’t a house at all—it’s a restaurant. Ivan and I take a quick walk around the exterior of the building to see if there’s an apartment attached, but it appears to simply be a normal cafe, closed for the night.

“You think he works out of this place?” Ivan asks, eyeing the turned-over chairs atop the tables, visible through the plate-glass windows of the cafe. “Or is the address just wrong?”

“I’m not sure . . .” I say.

I walk around the side of the building once more, and that’s when I spot it—an Ethernet cable hard-wired into the box on the side of the building. It’s hidden in the jumble of gas and electric meters, behind the large garbage bins overflowing with bags of trash.

The cable stretches across the alleyway, into the building next door.

“See.” I point it out to Ivan. “He’s tapping into their internet.”

“And look at this,” Ivan says. He’s followed the cable to the basement apartment of the building next door. “Somebody already broke the lock.”

I can see that the deadbolt has shattered through the wood. The door has been hastily repaired and a new lock added, but the damage to the doorframe remains.

“Should I knock?” I say to Ivan in a low voice.

“No, I think whoever was here before had the right idea,” Ivan says.

He turns his shoulder to the door and barrels toward it like a bull. There’s a sharp snap as the doorframe breaks again, and Ivan’s momentum carries him inside.

I follow after him into the dank little apartment.

It’s dingy and crowded, and it stinks of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes. Considering that Zima takes a fifteen percent commission for brokering hits, I’m surprised he can’t afford a nicer place. Or a maid.

Half-eaten fast-food containers are scattered everywhere. I can see his computer rig in the middle of the living room—there, at least, he’s spent some money. He’s got half a dozen monitors and all the fanciest accessories for gaming set up around a nicely padded chair that looks like the captain’s seat in a spacecraft.

But Zima himself is nowhere to be seen. I’m thinking he must have fled after Remizov’s men paid him a visit. Until I hear Ivan’s bemused voice saying, “Is this him?”

I follow Ivan into the bedroom. I see a towel tacked up over the window in place of curtains. A mattress on the floor, with no bed frame. And a teenage boy tangled up in a blanket.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I say.

Ivan pokes the kid with the toe of his boot.

The kid startles awake, his eyes red and bleary, his hair sticking up in all directions.

“What?” he says, and then when he sees us, “Oh, shit.”

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