Page 21 of Roma King
Urgh. Her tone’s airy, but the implication behind her words is weighty. If I don’t go, if Detective Holmes doesn’t go, then Corey is being abandoned. In all good conscience, can I do that to a five-year-old in need? I can’t, and Sarah knows it.
“The Petrovs are probably tearing the city apart, looking for Corey.” It’s a weak attempt at trying to reason my way out of this. Yes, the Petrovs are definitely out there, looking for the boy, but does that mean I don’t have a responsibility to try, too? I’m smarter than this. The police department has experience, training, and the authority to conduct a search for a missing person. The Russian mafia has the guns, the muscle, and the righteous need for vengeance. What do I have, besides a seriously guilty fucking conscience?
I have a nail technician from Poughkeepsie, and a bus driver who hasn’t spoken a single word to me since the day I met him. It’d be rude to say that I had nothing, but I’m seriously ill-equipped to start up a private investigation. Still, Sarah’s aware of my bleeding heart. The pay phone might have stopped ringing now, but she knows I won’t get a wink of sleep until I’ve done everything in my power to make sure Corey is safe. Heading down to Rochester Parkisin my power.
“Fine. Fair enough. We’ll go,” I groan. “But you have to ask Garrett. And we’re taking your car.”
8
ZARA
ROCHESTER PARK
Rochester Park during the day is a hub for old Persian tea houses, Irish bars, and cheap hotels. At night, it’s the place you go when you’re looking to score a fix, the place you go if you’re trying to hawk stolen goods. It’s the kind of place married men still dressed in their mid-priced office attire visit, half drunk, looking for someone to suck their dicks.
Garrett parks Sarah’s Volvo in the parking lot of a brightly lit convenience store, making unhappy, guttural sounds at the back of his throat, while Sarah hums Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ under her breath. She stops humming when we get out of the car. The night air is brisk and carries on it a complex combination of grilled street food and urine as the wind tugs at our jackets. “We should ask around. See if anyone’s seen the boy,” she announces.
Garrett’s dark eyes, quick and suspicious, flash as he takes in the three men leaning against the wall of the convenience store. He obviously doesn’t like being here; clicking the Volvo’s key fob, he makes the car alarm beep twice before he checks the driver’s door to ensure that it’s locked.
Sarah tucks her arm through mine. “You have the picture?”
It wasn’t difficult to find a photo of Corey Petrov. The internet makes everything too easy these days. All I had to do was find Jamie Petrov’s Facebook account—he’d been a daily poster. Obviously hadn’t posted anything over the past week, him being dead and all, but that didn’t matter. There were a number of family shots on his wall, some containing his well-dressed, strangely respectable looking parents. More than half of the photos featured his little brother. Shots of Jamie and Corey in the pool. Shots of Jamie and Corey sitting side by side on a leather sofa. Shots of the brothers wearing Yankees hats, Corey proudly holding up a signed baseball. The two boys were clearly close, despite the considerable age gap between then.
Corey is dark-haired and dark-eyed, a gangly little boy with a missing front tooth. Cute and full of beaming smiles. My throat had started to ache the moment I’d laid eyes on him, and it hasn’t stopped since. Having the little boy’s voice rattling around inside my head was hard enough, but now, having put a face to that voice, the worry I feel in the yawning pit of my stomach has increased a million-fold.
I take the print-out of his photo—a shot of Corey standing at the foot of a Christmas tree, holding a gift packaged in Star Wars wrapping paper—and flash it at Sarah. “Right here. I doubt we’re going to get anywhere, though. The Petrov’s must have done this already.”
Sarah takes the picture from me and sets off down the busy street, pulling me along with her. Garrett follows closer than a wary shadow on our heels. “If they have, then they have. Doesn’t matter. It’s worth a shot, right?”
We spend an hour trawling the streets of Rochester Park, asking business owners and men standing outside bars, smoking cigarettes if they’ve seen Corey, but we’re met with blank stares. When we aren’t met with blank stares, we’re spat at and told in no uncertain terms to go fuck ourselves. Twice Garrett squares up to guys, looming over them, the threat silent but very, very obvious, and twice Sarah and I have to grab him by either arm and drag him away.
At eleven, we enter Gilbert’s All-Night Diner, our bodies stiff from the cold, and order ourselves three coffees. The seats are sticky, the walls shining with a patina of grease, and the waitress is surly, but at least the place is warm, and the coffee isn’t terrible.
I rap my fingernails against the salt shaker, groaning. “This is pointless. We’re wasting our time.”
“At least we’re trying.” Sarah grabs hold of my hand, staring at my fingernails. “Christ, girl. Have you been chewing these? You really need to let me give you a manicure.” She’s been trying to do my nails for years.
“No, I don’t bite my nails. If we could focus on the task at hand…”
“How am I supposed to focus whenyouhave the hands of a manual laborer?”
“They’re not that bad.” I check anyway, just to be sure. Sarah’s probably just disgusted that I’m not sporting inch-long zebra print talons like she is. Garrett sips his coffee, watching us in that way of his, taking everything in as if we’re characters on a soap opera or something. I’ve wondered a thousand times before why Garrett never speaks. His silence is just an accepted part of everyday life at the Bakers’. No one ever mentions it. The one time I asked Sarah about it, she simply replied, “He’s just thinking about things. He’ll speak when he has something to say,” and that was that.
I pick up the photo of Corey and hold it up, studying the boy. Wherever he is now, he probably isn’t smiling like he is in the picture. He’s probably alone, and scared, and frightened. Ihopehe’s still all of those things, because the alternative, if he isn’t alone, scared and frightened, is that he’s dead, and I can’t…I just can’t…
The waitress comes over and refills our coffee. Her mood hasn’t improved much—she has the look of a woman who’s been working since dawn and started to need her bed five hours ago—but her frown eases when she sees the photo of Corey. “That your boy?” she asks, placing a hand on her hip and craning her head to one side in order to get a better look. “He ain’t a speck like you. Bet you’re glad he didn’t get all that red hair.”
Well, fuck, lady. I open my mouth, pivoting in my seat. “No, he’s not mine. But for the record, I like having red hair.”
The waitress pouts like she doesn’t give a shit what I like. “Kids are mean, s’all I’m saying. Weren’t you picked on in school because of it?”
“Of course. But if I hadn’t had red hair, it would have been something else. I wore glasses. I had braces. I was terrible at sport. They would have just chosen something else to give me a hard time about.”
“Fuck. You were one unlucky child.”
I’m lining up a string of insults, ready to hurl them at her, when Sarah jumps in and defuses the building tension. “He’s not her son, but we’re looking for him. He’s missing. Have you seen him?” she asks.
The waitress, Lea, according to her name tag, sniffs as she leans in closer, squinting at the photo. “Nope. I ain’t seen him. When did he go missing?”
