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No. They aren’t that stupid. If they do something so vicious, so quickly, their plans might backfire. All we’d have to do is get word out that it was the Greek mob who orchestrated the massacre and they would be fucked.
Of course, we would be fucked too. But I don’t see the Greeks resorting to mutually assured destruction. Not yet.
“Want a coffee?” Ray asks.
“Yes,” I reply, looking out of the window. My leg is starting to act up again.
It’s all of this stress. Usually, it only starts to ache when something personal is bothering me.
After all, I’m used to dealing with all of the pressures of my dark and violent work life, but when people I care about are at risk? That’s a different story. My body reacts in a specific way. My old traumas come out.
Ray leaves me in the car as I twirl the dusty note between my fingers, grimacing away the increasingly sharp pangs that distract me from finding the answers I so desperately crave.
Why are you acting up now?
Grabbing onto my thigh, I try to massage away the pain. All of my life, I’ve had to deal with the consequences of being born into this world. This is just another reminder that there’s no escaping its grip.
Still, I know that the pain isn’t coming from the fact that I’m staring down a dead end scribbled in Latin gibberish.
No. It’s not even coming from the threat of being partly responsible for the possible upcoming deaths of innocent civilians. Hell, it doesn’t even have anything to do with the thought of kids dying.
It has to do with Sophia.
But unlike earlier, when my leg ached because I connected my treatment of her with the dead girls in the shipping container, the pain I’m feeling now has no relation to the case I’m working on.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I know where the pain is coming from. Guilt. Guilt that I’m out on the streets trying to decipher a nursery rhyme, and not back at the brownstone with her.
She’s still locked up in that room. Just like those poor girls in that shipping container…
Last night, when I left, I said I’d be right back. She knew before me that I was lying. Now, it’s looking like she’ll spend another day in her cage, all alone.
When I get back, I’ll give her some of the old books we keep in the basement, I promise myself. Hopefully, she’ll like that.
She’d probably like some freedom better.
“Any luck?” Ray asks. Opening the driver side door, he slips into his seat and hands me a cup of coffee.
It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about the riddle and not about Sophia.
“No. I think you’re right that it has to do with kids—or at least students, but I’m not convinced that the Greeks would blow up a school.”
“Maybe another landmark then?”
“What kind of landmark?”
Ray shrugs. “One where old and new come together,” he says, before taking a sip of his coffee.
“And one where you learn from the dead…” I add, only half concentrating. The other half of my mind is still stuck on Sophia.
Then suddenly, those two halves click together.
“Maybe a library?” That’s where you find books, after all. Both old and anew.
“Shit,” Ray mumbles. “That could be it.”
Suddenly, the pain in my leg is less of a distraction and more of a wakeup call. Maybe these two halves of me aren’t so opposite. Hell, maybe they can even work together.
“Fuck. That would be a perfect spot. Depending on the time of day, a bomb going off at a library could kill anywhere from half a dozen to hundreds of people.”
