Wind scours the roof until my teeth taste iron. The red water tower hunches above me like a watchman with bad posture, legs braced, ladder cinched with a sun-cracked bike cable exactly where Ravi said. My knees hum with the climb. Tar paper ridges tick under my boots. The skyline throws a thousand glittering lies at me and I catch every one.
“Check your comm,” Jonah says through his scarf, voice pulled thin by the gusts. His curls whip, then flatten, then try again. He palms a small roll of gaffer tape and splits the core with a thumbnail, revealing the coin-sized tracker nested in the cardboard like a yolk.
I tap my earpiece and the world compresses to a cone: wind, his breath, my own. “Live,” I say. “No open broadcast.”
“No broadcast,” he echoes. He grins with his eyes because his mouth is busy being a mask. “Egg number one.”
He slides the tape under the tower’s catwalk lip, adhesive down, camouflage perfect. The little cylinder looks like nothing and carries our whole plan. Two more eggs ride in his pocket, flush and patient. I think of Tessa’s folder and Alina’s voice saying don’t make this a show, and I press my tongue to my molars until the urge to narrate dies.
“North ledge,” I whisper, pointing. “If he brings a case, he’ll rest it there to text.”
“You know his choreography too well,” Jonah says.
“He taught me,” I say, and the wind lifts the answer and tears it into ribbons.
We scatter the eggs with a rhythm I hate for how good it feels: five paces, crouch, slide, press. Jonah hums under his breath the way he does when wiring a board—three notes, pause, three again. The factory’s burnt-sugar air drifts even up here, syrup over the city’s cold metal. Somewhere below, the tidal creek has climbed into the gutter mouths, turning sidewalks into mirrors. The Night Choir will be photographing their reflections in those shimmered puddles right now, vinyl pins catching streetlight like tiny moons. I owe them quiet. I owe them safety.
“Last egg,” Jonah says. He palms it, then fakes a toss and tucks it instead into a shallow dent in the tar—an old anchor point, maybe. “Camera?”
I lift my phone, lens swap to tele. The iso eats the grain but not all of it; I don’t need pretty, I need proof. Across the block, the second candidate tower sulks on a bakery roof. Farther, a third smudges the sky above a storage building with a pigeon ring of guano. Which red tower will be his tonight? The wind laughs at the question and makes no promises.
“Positions,” I say.
Jonah nods and jogs low along the parapet until a vent and a crate of broken tile hide him. I slope the other way, sliding behind the tower’s shadow until I can see the ladder, the hatch, and the south parapet. A piece of chipped cherub plaster has been wedged between two bricks—a relic from the Orpheum carried like a talisman. I want to throw it, and I want to pocket it. Instead, I set it where the light won’t catch it and watch the door.
Footsteps. Not dramatic—careful. The rooftop door eases open without the squeal I expected, which means he oiled it or someone else did. A figure slips out, hood up, shoulders close, and keeps to the parapet. The wind tries to lift the hem of a long coat and fails. My throat does the thing it does when a caller says I was there.
“Eyes,” I murmur. Jonah gives a double-click on comms. We are a little aquarium up here—pumps humming, delicate ecosystem, one hard bang away from a shatter.
The silhouette moves to our north ledge and pauses. A second figure rises from behind the bakery bulkhead on the neighboring building—smaller, faster. A soft shape crosses the gap between roofs by way of a plank I swear wasn’t there five minutes ago. I track with the phone and the city blurs; the figures stay sharp, a private performance in a theater made of frost.
“Runner,” Jonah whispers. “Hand off.”
The first figure taps a finger ring against the parapet—three ticks, the same tiny metronome he loves. The second figure produces a hard-case the size of a violin coffin, matte black, corner-scuffed, sticker ghost where a brand once was. The exchange lasts one breath. Two. The case trades hands, weight transfers, muscle memory. No faces turn. No words carry. My mic only drinks wind and the far clatter of the bridge.
“Got it,” I whisper, tracking, zoomed. “Keep low.”
The first figure pivots, tucks the case behind the tower’s leg, then lifts it again, making a show for any lens that might be watching—a flourish of look at me putting it here before the lift that becomes but actually I’m gone. I learned that move in Season Two filming doorbell cams. The wind laughs again. I don’t.
“Egg wakes in three… two…” Jonah says, eyes on his phone. “One.”
My phone chirps a notification, small and polite for what it means. A dot blinks awake near the tower leg and begins to drift like a slow fish toward the hatch. The anonymous silhouette—Lyle or his mirror—disappears into the stairwell with the case. Our dot keeps pace. I breathe for the first time since the door opened.
“We’re on,” I say. “Down and out.”
“You first,” Jonah says. “I’ll ghost the plank.”
I don’t ask how he plans to move a board without being seen. I trust the same wrists that can make a subwoofer purr like a cat. I sling my phone with its gimbal harness to my chest and take the stairs two at a time, swallowing the taste of dust and old rainwater that lives in every city stairwell. The door spits me into the hallway. The bakery’s sugar ghost rides the HVAC down here and sweetens the concrete.
Street. The roof door above bangs again and then goes quiet. Jonah slips next to me, breath steady, hands empty. “Plank’s on their side now,” he says, half proud, half rueful. “Let them carry the sin.”
“Dot?” I ask.
He tilts his screen toward me and we pace with it, me adjusting stride to the pulsing blink. The tracker falls south, then east, then stutter-drifts as if caught in a pocket of poor service. “Elevator,” Jonah says. “Basement to alley.”
We surface into the alley’s throat. The creek has stretched itself down this far and curled against the curb, a restless cat of water. Night Choir kids hover at the corner with their pins dimmed; they see me and wipe their faces clean of fandom. I touch my chest where their pledge—quiet first—took root last week. “Safe,” I tell them, the one word that costs the least and buys the most, and I move.
On the map the dot slides to the mouth of the alley, then to the crosswalk, then accelerates. A rideshare? A bike? I raise my phone and catch only the back of a long coat, a cap pulled low, the case bumping a knee. “Got you,” I breathe. The case climbs into a hatchback that parks like a question mark and flows away like it answered itself.
“Plate?” Jonah asks.
“Ghosted,” I say. The cover reads MNY—ugly dealer frame, unreadable tag. Lyle prefers masks with edges.
We tuck into the Switchboard Van like a pair of lungs finding their rib cage. The boards glow. The small refrigeration hum gives me the aquarium comfort again. Jonah jacks his phone into the console and the tracker dot jumps to the van’s central display, a tiny planet with a tiny satellite. I watch it carve through the grid, indifferent to our wanting.
“He’s not going home,” Jonah says. “He’s doing a river run.”
The bridge line on the map looms. Traffic beads and un-beads. The dot kisses the approach road and slides under the trestle where every teenager has ever made a promise with a Sharpie. I taste rain in pipes and the city’s damp iron. The burnt-sugar smell thins to cold and diesel. Something big moans upriver—a barge or a throat.
“You have ten minutes to be smug,” I tell Jonah. “After that, you have to be humble again.”
He barks a single laugh. “Put it on my calendar.”
The dot slows, then tucks itself beside a blue patch on the map that knows how to lie. It stops.
“He stalled,” Jonah says.
“Or he arrived,” I say. “Zoom.”
He pinches the screen. Asphalt becomes concrete, concrete becomes a smear with rivets, then resolves as the underbelly of a bridge. The dot sits not on the road but slightly beyond it, where a narrow bank pinches into shadows and stacked pilings. A filament of water light, barely-there, tracks movement.
I kill our interior lights. The van becomes a cave with instruments. “He’s beneath,” I say. “Not on.”
Jonah nods, the grin dying into focus. “Boat?”
We creep the van along parallel streets, circling for a vantage where the camera can see without telling the world look where we are. The détente with Elena’s people sits in my pocket like a warm rock—no email, no leaks, dumplings traded later if we live through this. I text her a breadcrumb anyway: Ping at bridge underdeck. No faces. Case in play.
She returns a single check, then: Hold distance. Units rerouting.
Hold distance used to make me itch. Tonight it makes me breathe.
We find the angle: a service road that dead-ends at a chain and a sign that offers four different kinds of warning and no alternative. I kill the engine. The river presses night against the pilings. Somewhere a gull forgets the hour and argues with the dark.
I slide out, hands deep in my jacket, and let the cold bite any places fear missed. The creek’s outrider water meets the river here and the skin of the city has gooseflesh. Down below, a skiff bobs. Not a dinghy—longer, with stage-black paint and a low canopy that used to be canvas and is now patched vinyl. A hand-lettered name, barely visible: The Proscenium. I swallow hard.
“He made a theater,” I say softly, and I hate how right it feels.
“You’re filming,” Jonah reminds me, and I realize I already am. The phone captures a silhouette on the skiff—hat, coat, the case lifted with care. Another shape unties a painter line, motions small and practiced. A third shape, or is that the canopy buckling? My lungs miscount the beats.
“Airtag holding?” I ask.
“Forty-one percent signal,” Jonah says. “If they go under steel, it’ll bounce. If they go under water, we pray.”
The case disappears beneath the canopy. My dot slides with it—one step, two—then settles. Jonah exhales a sound that could be a laugh or a swear and decides on neither.
“Boat moored under the bridge,” I whisper for my own record. “Small theater conversion. He named it. Of course he named it.”
A single LED flickers within the canopy and dies. A motor coughs like a smoker waking. The skiff’s nose pulls away from the piling by inches, then inches again. The river grips it gently and decides the direction like a stage manager with notes.
“We can call Harbor,” Jonah says.
“We will,” I say, because I’m done playing cop on the radio. “But first I need one more shot.”
I step to the chain and lift the phone just high enough to frame the skiff’s stripe of light between two pilings. Wind claws at my sleeves and slides fingers down the collar of my shirt. The camera stutters, corrects, breathes. The skiff passes through the slender window of view I’ve given it. For exactly one beat the case blocks the LED and I see the sticker ghost on its lid again: the shape of a cherub mask peeled away. I don’t know whether he did that to taunt me or forgive himself.
“Got it,” I say, and lower the phone.
Jonah is already dialing Elena. His voice goes clipped and professional: location, movement, vessel type, no sirens, contain downriver. He ends the call and meets my eyes in the dark. “He thinks he’s in the wings.”
“He lives there,” I say. “We make the wings smaller.”
The skiff noses into the slow lane of the river and our dot begins to travel on the console map, a tiny stubborn pulse that insists on being seen. I want to cradle it in my mouth and keep it warm like a coal. I want to shove it down his throat.
“We move?” Jonah asks.
“Parallel,” I say. “No headlong.”
The van stirs, lights still dead, engine a whisper. The bridge’s undercarriage groans an old song. Far up the avenue, a set of blue lights winks and fades, playing at restraint. I think of dumplings, chopsticks tapping paper boxes while Elena tells me what an affidavit needs and I tell her what a crowd shouldn’t know. I think of the creek’s habit of flooding the honest edges of the city and leaving everything shinier and sadder. I think of the gull that won’t go to bed.
The dot takes a slow bend toward a darker span where a smaller bridge squats over a maintenance ramp. The map’s text thins and breaks. The signal spits once, then once more. Jonah tightens his grip on the wheel and not on me.
“Come on,” he says to the dot, “don’t let him direct you.”
The tracker blinks out for two heartbeats. Three. The phone tries to draw a line across a blank space and fails. My pulse throws itself against my throat like it wants to climb out and do the job itself.
Then the dot returns—half a block south of the first angle, tucked into a pocket eddy where two pilings make a V. I taste copper and relief. “He docked again,” I say. “Or he scraped. Or he wanted us to think—”
“Don’t give him pages,” Jonah says gently.
He’s right. I clamp my jaw. The skiff vanishes beyond our angle, swallowed by the bridge ribs, then becomes a new shape: the outline of a mooring tucked up under the arch, a private little cove for a private little show. The theater boat kisses the piling and holds.
I text Elena: Boat moored under south arch. Name: The Proscenium. Case aboard. We’re shadowing, no approach.
Her response arrives blunt and blessed: Harbor en route. Do not engage.
I nod to the phone like a person who finally learned. Wind lifts my hair and presses a salt damp against my lip. Down there, someone laughs in a low register I know too well. The sound carries through the metal the way grief does—choosing its own path, refusing to be cued.
“He’s home,” I say.
The dot blinks steady now, stubborn and bright. The river slides on. The city waits for me to choose a volume I can live with. I grip the dash and leave the question in the air where it can sting:
How long can our little tape-egg sing before he finds it—and cuts the scene?