“Where’s your badge?”
“I’m undercover right now. Come on, we don’t have much time. You need to come with me.”
“I’ll get in trouble.”
“No, only way you’ll get in trouble is by not obeying a police officer when he tells you to do something.” Mitchell noticed the boy’s hands trembling. His were, too. “Come on, son.”
He put his hand on the boy’s small shoulder and guided him out of the alcove toward his car, where he opened the front passenger door and motioned for Joel to get in.
Mitchell brushed the snow off the windows and the windshield, and as he climbed in and started the engine, he saw the door to 113 swing open in the rearview mirror.
“You eaten yet?”
“No.”
Main Street empty and the newly scraped pavement already frosting again, the reflection of the high beams blinding against the wall of pouring snow.
“Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.”
He turned right off Main, drove slow down a snow-packed side street that sloped past little Victorians, inns and motels, Joel buckled into the passenger seat, the can of Sprite still unopened between his legs, tears rolling down his cheeks.
Mitchell unlocked the door and opened it.
“Go on in, Joel.”
The boy entered and Mitchell hit the light, closing and locking the door after them, wondering if Joel could reach the brass chain near the top.
It wasn’t much of a room—single bed, table, cabinet housing a refrigerator on one side, hangers on the other. He’d lived out of it for the last month and it smelled like stale pizza crust and cardboard and clothes soured with sweat.
Mitchell closed the blinds.
“You wanna watch TV?”
The boy shrugged.
Mitchell picked the remote control off the bedside table and turned it on.
“Come sit on the bed, Joel.”
As the boy climbed onto the bed, Mitchell started flipping. “You tell me to stop when you see something you wanna watch.”
Mitchell surfed through all thirty stations twice and the boy said nothing. He settled on the Discovery Channel, set the remote control down.
“I want my dad,” the boy said, trying not to cry.
“Calm down, Joel.”
Mitchell sat on the bed and unlaced his sneakers. His socks were damp and cold. He balled them up and tossed them into the open bathroom, staring now at his pale feet, toes shriveled with moisture.
Joel had settled back into one of the pillows, momentarily entranced by the television program where a man caked in mud wrestled with a crocodile.
Mitchell turned up the volume.
“You like crocodiles?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You aren’t scared of them?”
The boy shook his head. “I got a snake.”
“Nuh-uh.”
The boy looked up. “Uh-huh.”
“What kind?”
“It’s black and scaly and it lives in a glass box.”
“A terrarium?”
“Yeah. Daddy catches mice for it.”
“It eats them?”
“Uh-huh. Slinky’s belly gets real big.”
Mitchell smiled. “I bet that’s something to see.”
They sat watching the Discovery Channel for twenty minutes, Joel engrossed now, Mitchell with his head tilted back against the headboard, eyes closed, a half grin where none had been for twelve months.
At 8:24 p.m., the cell vibrated against Mitchell’s hip. He opened the case and pulled out the phone.
“Hi, Lisa.”
“Mitch.”
“Listen, I want you to call me back in five minutes and do exactly what I say.”
“Okay.”
Mitchell closed the phone and slid off the bed.
The boy looked up, still half watching the program on the world’s deadliest spiders.
He said, “I’m hungry.”
“I know, sport. I know. Give me just a minute here and I’ll order a pizza.”
Mitchell crossed the carpet, tracking through dirty clothes he should’ve taken to the laundry a week ago.
His suitcase lay open in the space between the dresser and the baseboard heater. He knelt down, searching through wrinkled oxfords and blue jeans, khakis that had long since lost their creases.
It was a tiny, wool sweater—ice-blue with a magnified snow-flake stitched across the front.
“Hey, Joel,” he said, “it’s getting cold in here. I want you to put this on.” He tossed the sweater onto the bed.
“I’m not cold.”
“You do like I tell you now.”
As the boy reached for the sweater, Mitchell undid the buttons on his plaid shirt and worked his arms out of the sleeves. He dropped the shirt on the carpet and rifled his suitcase again until he found the badly faded T-shirt he’d bought fifteen years ago at a U2 concert.
On the way back to the bed, he stopped at the television and lifted the videotape from the top of the VCR, pushed it in.
“No, I wanna watch the—”
“We’ll turn it back on in a minute.”
He climbed under the covers beside the boy and stared at the bedside table, waiting for the phone to buzz.
“Joel, I’m gonna answer the phone. I want you to sit here beside me and watch the television and don’t say a word until I tell you.”
“I’m hungry.”
The phone vibrated itself toward the edge of the bedside table.
“I’ll buy you anything you want if you do this right for me.”
Mitchell picked up the phone.
Lisa calling.
He closed his eyes, gave himself a moment to engage. He’d written it all down months ago, the script in the bedside table drawer under the Gideon Bible he’d taken to reading every night before bed, but he didn’t need it.
“Hi, honey.”
“Mitch, I’m so glad you—”
“Stop. Don’t say anything. Just hang on a minute.” He reached for the remote control and pressed Play. The screen lit up, halfway through the episode of Seinfeld. He lowered the volume, said, “Lisa, I want you to say, ‘I’m almost asleep.’”
“What are you—”
“Just do it.”
A pause, then: “I’m almost asleep.”
“Say it like you really are.”
Mitchell closed his eyes.
“I’m almost asleep.”
“We’re