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CHAPTER ONE

Twenty-Two Years Later

I stand behind the tree and snap photos of license plates with a long-lens camera. The lot is full, so I go in order from the most expensive car—I can’t believe there’s a Bentley parked by this toilet—and move on down the list.

I don’t know how long I have before my subject—a wealthy man named Peyton Booth—comes out. Five minutes, maybe ten. But here’s why I take the photos. I send them to my shadow partner at the DMV. Said partner will then look up all the license plates and get the corresponding emails. She’ll email the pics and threaten exposure if they don’t transfer money into this untraceable Cash App account. Only $500. No reason to be greedy. If they don’t respond—and ninety percent don’t—it goes nowhere, but we make enough to make it worthwhile.

Yeah, times are tough.

I’m positioned across the park and dressed like what we used to call a vagrant or hobo or homeless. I forget the proper euphemism they use nowadays, so I ask Debbie.

“‘Unhoused,’” Debbie tells me.

“Really?”

“‘Unsheltered’ too. They both suck.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“Goddess.”

Debbie the Goddess says she’s twenty-three, but she looks younger. She spends a lot of her days standing in front of various, uh, “gentlemen’s clubs”—talk about a euphemism—with tears in her eyes and yells “Daddy, why?” at every guy that walks in or out. She started doing it for kicks—she loves the way some guys turn white and freeze—but now a few of the regulars say hi and maybe throw her a twenty.

“I do it as an exercise in capitalism and ethics,” she tells me.

“How’s that?”

“The capitalism part is obvious.”

Debbie has good teeth. That’s rarely the case out here. Her hair is washed. She’s sleeveless and her arms are clean.

“You make money,” I say. Then: “And the ethics?”

Her lower lip quivers. “Sometimes a guy hears me and runs off. Like I knocked some sense into him. Like I reminded him who he should be. And maybe, just maybe, if some girl had yelled that at my daddy, if some girl like me did something, anything, to stop my daddy from going into a place like that…”

Her voice fades away. She looks down and blinks her eyes and keeps the lip quivering.

I study her face for a second and then I say, “Boo friggin’ hoo.”

The blinking and quivering stop as if her face is a shaken Etch A Sketch. “What?”

“You think I’m buying the Daddy Issues cliché?” I shake my head. “I expect better from you.”

Debbie laughs and punches my arm. “Damn, Kierce, you must have been an awesome cop.”

I shrug. I was. I don’t know how Debbie ended up on the streets. I don’t ask and she doesn’t volunteer, and that seems to suit us both.

I check my watch.

“Showtime?” Debbie asks.

“Has to be.”

“You remember the code?”

I do. If she yells “Daddy, why?” that means wrong guy. If she yells “But Daddy, I’m carrying your child,” that means my man Peyton just exited. Debbie came up with the code. I’m giving her fifty dollars for the job, but if I land what White Shoe needs, I’ll up that to a hundred.

Debbie heads down the path to a spot where she can see the club door. I can’t see it from my perch. Debbie saw Peyton Booth’s pic on my phone, so she knows what he looks like. You probably guessed this, but Peyton is getting divorced. My job here is simple.

Catch him cheating.

This is what I’ve been reduced to since getting chucked off the force for messing up big-time. Worse, even though I’m working for a high-end, whitest-of-white-shoe Manhattan law firm, I am not getting paid. This is a barter arrangement. I’m being sued by the family of a high school kid named PJ Dawson. According to the lawsuit, I perilously pursued PJ onto the rooftop of a three-story building. Because of my negligence, young PJ slipped and fell off the roof, plummeting those three stories and sustaining critical injuries. The White Shoe law firm (actual name is Whit Shaw but everyone calls them White Shoe) is representing me in exchange for my working jobs like this off the books.

America is grand.

Peyton is head of a major conservatively based conglomerate and reportedly, because we are all hypocrites, a big-time playah with da ladies. According to his wife’s statement to her attorney, her soon-to-be ex has a weakness for “bottled blonde skanks with giant fake cans.” The wife had been convinced that Peyton was messing around with his neighbor, but I checked it out thoroughly and yes, the neighbor matches this description, but no, he isn’t messing around with her.

Peyton made sure to leave his Lexus in a remote corner of the lot, far from prying eyes. That’s why I’m set up on this hill, in the one spot where I can position my camera and record any action that might take place. If I set up closer, I would be spotted. If I set up farther away, I would get nada. The only way to make this work is to be here and to know when my man Peyton leaves.

The parking lot is also cleverly set up so that it shares its spaces with an old-school convenience store called Get Some and a florist called—get this—Rose to the Occasion, thus giving the clientele who are visiting the “gentlemen’s club” proper cover. Point is, if I capture Peyton leaving here or parked here, it won’t be a big deal in court. But if I can capture him with a dancer (again with the euphemisms—don’t we all miss the days when you could just say what you mean?), that would be huge.

“Daddy, why…?” Debbie calls out.

I have the camera on a tripod. I check the aim. Yep, right through the windshield of the car. I’m still looking down the barrel of the lens when I hear a voice behind me.

“Where’s Debbie?”

A quick glance tells me it’s an unhoused (or unsheltered) guy.

“She’s working,” I say.

“My name is Raymond.”

“Hey, Raymond.”

“Debbie usually brings me a sandwich.”

“Give her a few, okay, Raymond?”

“She knows I hate mayo.”

“Got it.”

“Debbie tell you how jet planes stay in the air?”

“No.”

“Want me to?”

“Do I have a choice, Raymond?”

“Witches,” he says.

“Witches,” I repeat.

“Flying witches, to be more precise. Three of them per plane. One holds the right wing, one holds the left wing, the third witch, she’s in the back, holding up the tail.”

“I’ve been on planes,” I say. “Even sat by the wing a few times. I’ve never seen a witch.”

I don’t know why I say this, but I sometimes speak and act without considering all the consequences. That might explain why I’ve gone from catching murderers and hardened criminals to quasi-Peeping-Tom-ing near Rose to the Occasion.

Raymond frowns. “They’re invisible, fool.”

“Invisible flying witches?”

“Of course,” he said, as though disgusted with my stupidity. “What, you think gigantic metal tubes can just stay up in the air by themselves? I mean, come on. You just believe everything the government tells you?”

“Fair point, Raymond.”

“Your average Airbus weighs at least 150,000 pounds. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“And we’re supposed to believe something that heavy can stay up in the air all the way across an ocean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Take the blinders off, man. The Man has been gaslighting you. Ever hear of gravity? The physics don’t work.”

“Ergo, the witches,” I say.

“Right. Witches, man. And it’s all one big joke on mankind.”

I can’t help myself. “What do you mean, Raymond?”

He scowls. “Ain’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“One day,” Raymond says, rubbing his hands together and licking his lips, “when we rubes are least expecting it, all the witches, all at the same time, they’re all going to let go.”

“Of the planes?”

He nods in satisfaction. “That’s right. All the witches will just let go of the planes at the same time. Cackling. Like witches do, you know. Cackling and watching the planes, all of them, plummet back to earth.”

He looks at me.

“Dark,” I say.

“Mark my words. Get right with the Lord now before that day.”

Down on the street below, I hear Debbie shout, “But Daddy, I’m carrying your child.”

Bingo.

“Can we talk about this later, Raymond?”

“Tell Debbie I’m waiting on that sandwich. And no mayo.”

“I’ll do that.”

I look through the camera lens and see Peyton in full business suit. My heart sinks when I see he’s alone. He gets in the driver’s side. I wait, hoping someone will join him. No one does. He starts up his car.

But he doesn’t back out.

I smile now as I watch through the lens. My man Peyton is waiting for someone. I know it.

Still looking through the lens, I hear Debbie shout “Daddy, why?” as a mustached guy in a business suit makes his way into the lot.

My phone rings. It’s Arthur, my young attorney-handler at White Shoe Law. “Are you on him?”

“I am.”

“Good. We sign the papers first thing tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“If we don’t get evidence he cheated, she can’t break the prenup.”

“I know.”

“Will you have something or not?”

Someone opens the passenger door of Peyton’s car and slips in. Peyton turns.

They start making out big-time.

But it’s not a chesty bottled blonde he is making out with.

It’s the mustached man in a business suit.