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It’s a few days before anyone notices that Anton’s “sugar daddy” has been surprisingly absent for nearly a week. Rumors get passed around: that he’s skipped town, that he’s dead, that he’s finally been caught and sent to prison.
Given that the CIA’s been in town hunting for someone and “they sure left in a hurry,” Brent suggests that the guy in the suit’s been taken off to some hole somewhere to be interrogated before he’s killed.
Anton’s gut clenches over that one, and he’s left unsettled for days. At least if he saw the guy get killed, he’d know what happened, and maybe he could relax; like this, it seems he’ll spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder and waiting for the guy to show up again, like that first time he strolled right into Seamus’s shop and smiled… right before he turned Anton’s life into a living nightmare.
Other rumors are flying, too, most notably about how shifty Detective Carter has been acting lately. Nobody knows quite what to make of it; Carter’s way too clean to be into anything all that dark, and if she finally had gone to the dark side, she’s smart enough to hide it better.
Comments about Carter are often crude posturing (“I’d show her how to put that pretty mouth to work”), but now the speculation’s more about what sort of sting she might be trying to pull. It’s gotta be a sting, right?
It’s almost a relief when the guy in the suit shows up again, in typical over-the-top form: Had a fight outside a gym, ran a guy straight into traffic. Guy got hit by a truck and was dead before the cops got there.
And he can’t worry too much about getting caught, since he didn’t even leave Long Island before beating up Dominic Galuska—right out front of Spark’s Deli, happy home of the guys fresh from prison who can’t get work anywhere else.
People are pleased that Galuska got what’s coming to him, but they’re also wondering what he must’ve done to piss off the guy in the suit.
Then all the headlines are covering Congressman Delancey’s murder—and the word on the street is about the guy in the suit smashing his car straight into an FBI van and running off with the main suspect.
A few hours later, the suspect walks straight into the police station and turns himself in. And it turns out he’s been framed; the next day, he’s back with his family and firmly in all the headlines.
That one throws Anton for a loop. It keeps replaying itself in his head, trying to find a way of making all the puzzle pieces fit. Was the suspect really guilty, and the guy in the suit somehow made it all go away? If innocent, what was the point of rescuing him from the feds? Or did the guy kidnap him from the feds? If so, why? And how did the suspect win free?
Why was the guy in the suit even involved?
One night, when he can’t sleep, Anton takes it in his head to start writing down what he knows about the guy. Maybe it’ll make more sense on paper.
What he’s seen in person:
The guy waltzed into Seamus’s shop, casually kneecapped a room full of people who’d been holding him at gunpoint, and waltzed out with a bag full of firearms.
The guy drug a body out of an apartment and tossed it in the trunk of a car. (Was it really a body? Maybe whoever it was was still alive.)
(That might not make it better.)
Anton saw him dragging some poor schmo toward the Double D’s, and both of those incidents were preceded by gunfire, though Anton didn’t see the shootouts (for which he’s glad).
Now that he’s not in the grip of terror, Anton can stop to wonder who that guy was. Didn’t look like a fighter, wasn’t holding a gun. He’d been wounded and seemed disoriented. Why was the guy in the suit bringing him along? Leverage for a deal with the Bulgarians?
Far more questions than answers, there. What else?
Blew up the entrance to Hector’s chop shop, and stole Hector’s car.
(Who crosses Hector Alvarez and gets away with it?)
(The same kinda guy who kidnaps a suspect from the feds.)
He thinks it’s the same guy who was harassing a skateboarder, and he thinks it’s the bum from the subway. Those, he saw in person, but he might be mistaken.
(He’s not mistaken.)
Okay. Things he hasn’t seen in person:
The guy in the suit tasered a guy in broad daylight. Used a huge gun to shoot down a consulate car. Stole an ambulance with a dying man inside. Chased a guy into traffic, beat up Galuska, stole a suspect straight from the feds.
Any of that might be someone talking out of their ass, or it might be so distorted by the time it reached Anton that it’s nowhere near as bad as it sounds.
But there’s no reason to think that the guy can’t do that sort of thing.
(Who crosses Hector Alvarez and gets away with it?)
No matter how he moves the pieces around in his head, he can’t make sense of it or glean any sort of information that he didn’t already know.
Just questions:
Why was Carter nosing around after the guy in the suit? And what, if anything, has she found? Is that why she’s been acting all shifty lately?
The day this all started: Why would a hardened killer like the guy in the suit leave a room full of witnesses alive? Why kneecap instead of kill?
And why dress up as a bum? Maybe he’d been working undercover. Or gathering information?
Maybe Anton and his little gang showed up at the wrong time and screwed up some operation he had going down, and that’s why the guy showed up to get some payback.
(Breathe. Breathe. He’s not here now, he’s not, just breathe.)
Maybe it’s thanks to the guy’s new reputation—from “locked up by the FBI” to “stole a suspect right out of their hands”—but the rumors start flying after Andre’s operation goes down, and Anton isn’t sure what to believe anymore.
The guy stole a van, took it for a joyride, “returned” it by crashing it right back into its owner and then turned him over to the cops.
By stuffing him into the back seat of a police car in broad daylight.
The guy kidnapped a kid. Or took him hostage. Or rescued him from a hostage situation. Or stopped the kid from shooting someone. Or took the kid out to eat?
Troy swears that he knows someone who knows someone who saw the guy at a diner getting the kid a meal (just the kid, nothing for himself), and the kid trying to buy his “services,” whatever those might be. And the guy refusing the money.
And when the kid asked about his name, the guy said “Reese.” (“Like Reese’s Pieces, that’s why it stuck in my head, y’know?”)
Anton had been ready to discount the diner story, but what kind of kid ends up having lunch with a guy whose name he doesn’t even know? And trying to pay him?
What kind of “services” does the guy in the suit offer, anyway?
And… “Reese”? There’s no way a guy old enough to be that well-trained is actually named Reese. If Troy’s friend-of-a-friend even overheard him right to begin with.
Then there’s the rumor that the guy stole Carter’s car right next to Carter, while kidnapping the kid, and Anton almost has to laugh at how outlandish these rumors are getting.
And according to the rumor mill, the guy in the suit strolled right into Andre’s comic book shop and took out every last guy. Except, of course, that they’re all still alive, which doesn’t seem plausible; how do you take out a group that well-armed without killing anyone?
(How do you take out a room full of people holding you at gunpoint, and leave them in the hospital instead of the morgue? The guy’s got skills. Maybe he got kicked out of the Seals or something.)
Anton’s little gang shares quite a chortle over Fusco getting shot in the ass—“Only wish I could’ve been the guy to pop him one”—and then they’re pulling out rumors of what he’s been up to and whether it could have anything to do with the guy in the suit.
Anton basically ignores the chatter.
“Hey, Keith,” Troy says, “didn’t you say you saw him trailing some guy in a suit—taking photos?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t the same guy. Had a fancy suit, not a plain black suit like the other guy. Didn’t even notice that he had a tail. And he was shorter, and older. And he had a limp.”
Anton freezes, but not, for once, in fear.
Getting hit by a bomb blast can cement a few things in your memory. And Anton recalls, right before the bomb went off, that the guy beside him (the guy in the fancy suit) had realized what was going to happen—“I have to warn him!”—and had rushed toward the bomb, just a few steps before the explosion.
Limping.
So… why is Fusco following him?