The Wall in the Lobby
Wren Ashby had a plan, and the plan was simple. Walk into the K-Corp tower. Find the man who owned it. Put the brick on his desk.
The brick was in her canvas tote, wrapped in a dish towel, next to her tuning lever, a roll of felt, and a half-eaten granola bar. It was an old Chicago brick, dark red, with a chip missing from one corner. Two nights ago it had come through the front window of Ashby Pianos at three in the morning and landed on the keyboard of a 1926 upright she had spent all summer restoring. It had cracked two ivory keys. Middle C and the D beside it.
Tied around the brick with a rubber band had been a note on white paper. Five typed words.
K-Corp wants you gone. Leave.
So here she was, on a grey Tuesday at the end of October, standing in a lobby made of black stone and glass, dripping rain onto a floor so polished she could see her own angry face in it.
The lobby was enormous. It was built to make people feel small, and it worked. The ceiling was three floors high. A wall of water ran down one side, silent and smooth. People in dark coats moved past her with badges clipped to their belts, and none of them looked at her twice. She was a short woman in a yellow raincoat with wet red-brown curls stuck to her cheeks. She did not look like someone who had business here.
She did not care.
She walked straight to the security desk. There were two guards behind it, young and bored. Behind them, beside a private elevator with brass doors, stood a third man.
He was the largest human being she had ever seen in a suit.
He was not tall the way basketball players were tall. He was tall and wide, built like a wall someone had decided to dress for a funeral. His shoulders strained the dark wool of his jacket. His neck was thick, his dark hair cut short, his jaw shadowed with stubble that looked like it had grown back since breakfast. A thin wire curled from his collar to his ear. He was eating an apple. He was eating it with a small folding knife, cutting off one neat slice at a time and putting it in his mouth, and he was watching her.
Not the way men in bars watched her. He was watching her the way a cat watched a door.
Wren ignored him. She put both hands on the security desk.
“I’m here to see Soren Kincaid,” she said.
The younger guard blinked. “Do you have an appointment, ma’am?”
“No.”
“Then I’m sorry, but Mr. Kincaid doesn’t—”
“Mr. Kincaid’s company is trying to buy my building,” Wren said. “And somebody threw a brick through my window with his company’s name on it. So I think he can find five minutes.”
The guard looked over his shoulder at the giant with the apple.
The giant cut another slice. He did not hurry. He chewed it, swallowed, folded the knife with one thumb, and walked over. He moved more quietly than any man that size had a right to.
“Name,” he said. His voice was low and rough, like gravel under a slow tire.
“Wren Ashby. Ashby Pianos. Ravenswood, by the train tracks.”
“Pianos,” he repeated, as if it were a foreign word.
“Pianos. Big wooden things. Black and white keys. You hit them and music comes out.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was gone before she could call it a smile.
“I know what a piano is, lady.”
“Then you know what it costs to fix two ivory keys from 1926.” She pulled the brick out of her bag, unwrapped the towel, and set it on the desk with a heavy clunk. The two young guards leaned back. The giant did not. “Somebody threw this through my window. With a note. It said K-Corp wants me gone. I have a lease for fourteen more months, and I’m not leaving, and I want to hear your boss say to my face that he sent this.”
The giant looked down at the brick. Then he looked at the note, still under its rubber band. He did not touch either one.
“Mr. Kincaid doesn’t throw bricks,” he said.
“Maybe he pays someone to throw them.”
“He doesn’t do that either.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I’m the guy he’d pay.” He said it flatly, with no pride and no threat. Just a fact. “And I’ve been busy.”
Wren stared up at him. She had to tip her head back to do it. Up close, his eyes were very dark, almost black, and there were small lines at their corners. Not laugh lines. Squint lines. Lines from looking at bright, dangerous places for a long time.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Jax Priest. I run security for Mr. Kincaid.” He nodded toward the glass doors behind her, where the rain was sheeting down onto the street. “And I’m going to walk you outside now, Miss Ashby. Leave me the brick. I’ll look into it.”
“You’ll look into it,” she said. “That’s what the police said. They wrote my name on a piece of paper, and then one of them asked if I could tune his mother’s piano for free.”
“I’m not the police.”
“No. You’re the man who keeps people like me away from people like him.”
He did not deny it. He simply stepped to one side and held out an arm toward the doors, polite and immovable.
Wren looked at that arm. Then she looked past it, at the private elevator with the brass doors. It was standing open. A woman with a tablet had just stepped out, and the doors were sliding slowly closed.
She did not think. She ran.
She got three steps. Maybe four. Her wet sneakers squeaked on the stone. She had her hand out for the closing gap in the brass doors when a wall moved in front of her, and she ran straight into it.
The wall was warm. It smelled like rain and green apple and something clean, like soap. A big hand closed around her upper arm, not hard, just completely. She bounced back half a step and he held her up so she did not fall.
The elevator doors closed with a soft chime behind his back.
“Nice try,” Jax Priest said.
Wren was breathing hard. She did the only thing she could think of. She reached into her tote, pulled out her tuning lever, and pointed it at his chest.
It was a steel tool about the length of her forearm, with a wooden handle and a star-shaped socket at the end. Her grandfather had used it for forty years. It was not a weapon. It looked a little like one if you did not know better.
Jax looked down at it.
“What is that?”
“A tuning lever.”
“Are you going to tune me?”
“If I have to.”
This time the corner of his mouth definitely moved. He did not let go of her arm. He did not take the lever. He just looked at her, and for one strange second Wren felt the lobby go quiet around them, as if the whole building had paused to see what she would do next.
Then the lobby really did go quiet.
The main doors had opened. A man walked in out of the rain, and every person in the lobby straightened like a string pulled tight.
He was tall and lean, in a long black coat with the collar turned up. His dark hair was wet. He was younger than Wren had expected, early thirties at most, with a face so hard and still it looked carved. His eyes were a pale, cold blue, the color of the lake in January. A thin white scar ran from the corner of his jaw down toward his neck. He walked as if the rain had been arranged for him.
Two assistants hurried at his sides. He did not look at either of them.
He looked at the brick on the security desk. Then he looked at Wren, at the tuning lever in her hand, and at the giant holding her arm.
“Jax,” he said. His voice was smooth and quiet, and it carried across the whole lobby without trying.
“Boss.”
“Why is there a brick in my lobby?”
“It’s her brick,” Jax said. “She says somebody threw it through her window with a note. Says K-Corp wants her gone.”
Soren Kincaid’s cold eyes moved back to Wren. She made herself stand straight. She was aware, suddenly, of her yellow raincoat, her soaked sneakers, the granola bar sticking out of her bag.
“Your company is buying my block,” she said. Her voice shook only a little. “The old brick buildings by the Ravenswood tracks. Mine is the one with the piano shop. My grandfather opened it in 1971. I don’t want to sell, and I don’t have to sell, because I have a lease. And now someone is breaking my windows and using your name.”
Soren reached into his coat and took out a silver lighter. He flicked the lid open with his thumb. Click. He did not light it. He snapped it shut. Clack.
“K-Corp doesn’t break windows, Miss—”
“Ashby.”
“Miss Ashby. K-Corp buys them.” He turned the lighter over once in his long fingers. “If someone is using my name to frighten tenants, they are stealing from me. I don’t like thieves.”
“So you’ll stop them?”
He looked at her for a long moment. Wren had the uncomfortable feeling that he was adding her up like a column of numbers, and that the total did not interest him very much.
Then something shifted in his face. It was very small. She would not have noticed it if she had not been staring so hard. His eyes went to her hands. They were rough hands, nicked and calloused, with felt fuzz stuck to one knuckle. Working hands.
“Jax,” Soren said. “Drive Miss Ashby home.”
Jax’s grip on her arm tightened a fraction. “Boss, I’ve got the board walk-through at four.”
“Then you’ll be late. Look at her window. Look at her street. Find out if she’s telling the truth.” Soren put the lighter away. “And if she is, find out who’s lying.”
He walked past them into the private elevator. The brass doors closed on his cold, carved face.
Wren let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
Jax Priest let go of her arm. He looked down at her, and then at the tuning lever, which was still pointed at his stomach.
“You can put that away now,” he said. “I think you won.”
The car was a black SUV that smelled of leather and nothing else. Jax drove it the way he did everything, without hurry and without wasted motion. The rain made long silver lines on the windows. The wipers beat a steady rhythm.
His passenger had not stopped talking for nine minutes.
She talked about the brick. She talked about the police. She talked about middle C and the D beside it, and how real ivory was impossible to find now, and how she would have to use a plastic key top that would never feel right under a player’s finger. She talked with her hands, and her hands were small and quick and never still.
Jax let it wash over him. He was used to noise. He had spent four years as an Army medic, and after that six years at Soren Kincaid’s back, and in both jobs the people who talked the most were usually the ones who were most afraid. He did not mind it. Fear that talked was easier than fear that went quiet.
“You’re not listening,” she said.
“I’m listening.”
“What did I just say?”
“You can’t buy new ivory anymore, so you save old keys from dead pianos in a cigar box. Your grandfather started the box. You call it the boneyard.”
She closed her mouth. He felt her look at him.
“Okay,” she said. “You were listening.”
“It’s my job.”
“I thought your job was keeping people away from your boss.”
“That’s part of it.” He turned onto a narrower street. Old brick buildings, three floors each, leaning against each other like tired friends. The elevated train tracks ran behind them, black iron against the grey sky. “The other part is noticing things before they happen.”
“And what do you notice about me?”
He thought about it.
“You didn’t eat lunch,” he said. “You have felt on your knuckle and sawdust on your left sleeve. You haven’t slept much since the brick. And you’re scared, but you came downtown anyway, alone, in the rain, to yell at one of the most dangerous men in Chicago.” He glanced at her. “That’s either very brave or very stupid.”
“Which do you think?”
“Haven’t decided.”
She laughed. It surprised him. It was a real laugh, short and bright, and it filled up the quiet car in a way that made something in his chest go still.
He looked back at the road.
“That one,” she said, pointing. “With the green door.”
Ashby Pianos sat in the middle of the block. Three floors of dark red brick, a green wooden door, and one big front window that was now a sheet of plywood. Someone had painted the shop’s name in gold on the glass once. Only the curve of an H was left, on a jagged piece still stuck in the frame.
Jax pulled to the curb. He did not get out right away. He sat with the engine running and looked at the street.
He looked at the buildings on either side. Both dark. Both empty. A FOR SALE sign hung crooked on one door. He looked at the alley that ran behind the block, under the tracks. He looked at the lamppost with the broken bulb. He looked at the cars parked along the curb, one by one.
There. Across the street, three doors down.
A grey sedan. Engine off. Windows fogged. Someone inside.
“What?” Wren said. “What is it?”
“How long have the other buildings been empty?”
“Since the summer. The landlord bought out everyone else’s leases. Mr. Tolliver. He offered me money too. I said no. Twice.” She followed his gaze out the windshield. “Why?”
Jax did not answer. He watched the grey sedan.
As if it could feel him watching, its engine started. The fog on its windshield began to clear in two slow half-moons. Through the glass, he saw the shape of a man in a dark cap. The man looked straight at the black SUV for one long second.
Then the sedan pulled out, rolled past them without hurry, and turned the corner under the train tracks.
Jax had the plate memorized before it was gone.
He reached over, unlocked his door, and turned to the small, wet, furious woman in the passenger seat.
“Miss Ashby,” he said. “I’ve decided.”
“Decided what?”
“You’re telling the truth.” He opened the door, and the sound of the rain came in. “And somebody is very interested in your window.”
Rules for a Bodyguard
Inside, Ashby Pianos smelled like cedar shavings, lemon oil, and old felt. It was one long room with a high tin ceiling. Pianos stood everywhere, like large, patient animals waiting to be fed. Uprights against the walls. Two baby grands near the back. A player piano with its front panel off, showing a roll of paper full of tiny holes. Workbenches covered in tools, wire, glue pots, and small labeled jars.
In the middle of the room, under a hanging lamp, stood a grand piano bigger than all the others. Its black lid was closed. Someone had polished it until it shone like a still lake.
Jax walked the room once, slowly. He checked the plywood on the front window. He checked the back door, which opened onto the alley under the tracks. It had one old lock and a chain a child could break. He checked the narrow stairs that went up to her apartment on the second floor. He checked the window by the back workbench, which had no bars.
Wren followed him the whole time, still in her yellow raincoat, watching him the way he had watched her in the lobby.
“Well?” she said.
“Your back door is a joke.”
“It’s a hundred years old.”
“So is the joke.” He stopped beside the big grand piano. Up close, he could see a brass plate above the keys. Mason & Hamlin, Boston. “This one yours?”
Her face changed. It softened, the way people’s faces softened when you asked about a person they loved.
“It was my grandfather’s. He found it in a church basement in 1980, full of mice and rainwater. It took him three years to bring it back. He called it the Duchess.” She laid her palm flat on the shining lid, very gently, as if the piano could feel it. “He died in April. I’ve been running the shop alone since then. The Duchess isn’t for sale. Nothing in this building is for sale.”
Jax nodded. He took out his phone, stepped toward the back of the room, and called his boss.
Soren answered on the first ring. He always did.
“Well?”
“She’s telling the truth,” Jax said quietly. “The rest of the block is empty. Landlord bought everyone out this summer. A guy named Tolliver. She’s the last one. And there was a car on the street watching the shop when we pulled up. Grey sedan. I’ve got the plate.”
There was a pause. Jax could hear the faint click and clack of the silver lighter on the other end.
“The purchase of that block closes in five weeks,” Soren said. “Ms. Vance wrote the contract. I’ll have her read it to me tonight, line by line.” Another pause. “Stay on it.”
“Boss, I run your security. Two hundred people. I don’t babysit.”
“Then think of it as security,” Soren said. “Someone is using my name to scare a woman out of her home. If they get away with it, the next person uses my name for something worse. Find out who. Until you do, nothing happens to her.”
“And if I say no?”
“You won’t,” Soren said, and hung up.
Jax looked at the phone for a moment. Then he put it away and turned around.
Wren had taken off her raincoat. Under it she wore a faded green sweater with the sleeves pushed up and a pair of jeans with a hole in one knee. Her curls were drying wild around her face. She had freckles. A lot of them. Across her nose, across her cheeks, down the side of her neck, where they disappeared under the collar of the sweater.
He made himself stop looking at her neck.
“Okay, Miss Ashby,” he said. “There are going to be some rules.”
The rules, Wren learned, were not suggestions.
Rule one: she did not open the door after dark unless she knew who was on the other side.
Rule two: she did not go out alone at night. Not for milk. Not for a walk. Not to see a client.
Rule three: when Jax Priest said move, she moved. She did not ask why. She did not argue. She could argue afterward, as much as she wanted.
“Is that all?” she asked, when he had finished. They were standing at the workbench. A man from K-Corp was already outside in a van, unloading boxes with small black cameras in them.
“For now.”
“Good. Because I have rules too.”
He folded his big arms across his chest and waited.
“Rule one,” Wren said. “You don’t touch the pianos without asking. Rule two: no food near the keys. Not even apple slices. Especially not apple slices. Rule three: Tuesdays and Thursdays at four, I teach a piano lesson to an eight-year-old named Toby, and you will not scare him.”
“I don’t scare kids.”
“You scare doors.”
He looked at her for a long, flat moment. Then he unfolded his arms.
“Deal,” he said.
That night, alone in the car outside her green door, Jax thought about the fourth rule. The one he had not told her, because it was not a rule for her. The one that was only for him. It had kept him alive and clean since the desert, through his last year in uniform and six years of standing behind Soren Kincaid while men tried to buy him, threaten him, and once shoot him.
Never touch the job.
Toby came on Thursday at four.
He was small for eight, with big glasses and a red winter hat he refused to take off. He walked into the shop, saw the giant sitting on a wooden chair by the door, and stopped so fast his sneakers squeaked.
Jax looked at him. Toby looked at Jax.
“Are you a bear?” Toby asked.
“No,” Jax said.
“You look like a bear.”
“I get that a lot.”
Toby thought about this. Then he walked over, very carefully, and held out his hand. Jax shook it. His hand swallowed the boy’s whole hand and half his wrist.
“I’m Toby. I’m learning a song about a train.”
“I’m Jax. I’m learning to sit in a very small chair.”
Toby laughed so hard he snorted. Wren, who had been ready to rescue him, let out her breath and went to get the music.
The lesson was forty-five minutes. For forty-five minutes Wren sat beside Toby on the bench of the old upright near the door and counted, and corrected his small, stiff fingers, and played the train song with him, and tried very hard not to look at the man by the door.
It was difficult.
He had taken off his jacket. Under it he wore a plain white shirt and a black leather holster across his shoulders, which she also tried not to look at. He had rolled his sleeves up. His forearms were thick and brown and dusted with dark hair, and he sat completely still with them resting on his knees, and he was listening.
Not just watching the door. Listening to the music. She could tell. When Toby got the hard part right for the first time, Jax’s head came up, just a little, the way a dog’s ears lift at its name.
After Toby left, Wren picked up a tuning fork from the workbench and walked over to him.
“Hold out your hand.”
He gave her a suspicious look, but he held it out. She tapped the fork against her knee, and it began to sing, a clear thin note. She pressed the base of it gently against the back of his hand.
He went very still.
“Feel that?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s A. Four hundred and forty vibrations every second. Every piano in the world starts from that one note. You tune the A first, and then everything else is measured against it. If the A is wrong, the whole piano is wrong.” She took the fork away. “My grandfather used to say that every person has an A. One true thing that everything else is measured against.”
Jax was looking at the back of his hand, where the fork had been.
“What’s yours?” he asked.
She had not expected him to ask. She thought about it.
“This place,” she said finally. “The Duchess. Keeping his shop alive.” She tilted her head. “What’s yours?”
He looked up at her. His dark eyes were unreadable.
“The job,” he said.
“That’s sad.”
“It’s simple,” he said. “Simple keeps people alive.”
She noticed his hands then, properly. They were huge, and scarred across the knuckles, but there was nothing clumsy about them. When the man from the van had cut his thumb on a box that morning, Jax had cleaned it and closed it with three small strips of tape so fast and so neatly that Wren had stared.
“You were a doctor?” she said.
“Medic. Army. Four years.”
“So you kept people alive.”
“I tried to.” He stood up. The small chair creaked with relief. “Some days I was better at it than others.”
He walked away to check the back door. She watched him go and did not ask anything else. Not because she was not curious. Because she had heard the sound in his voice, and she knew that sound. It was the sound she made when people asked about her grandfather.
It rained again on Saturday night.
Jax sat in the black SUV across the street from the green door. It was eleven-thirty. The lights in her apartment upstairs had gone out an hour ago. The small black cameras he had put up on Wednesday showed him the front of the building, the alley in back, and the dark stairs inside.
Nothing moved. It had been quiet for four nights.
He had run the plate from the grey sedan. A rental, paid in cash, under a name that turned out to belong to a man who had died in 2019. Somebody had been careful. Leland Tolliver, the landlord, was not answering his phone. His office said he was in Florida until the middle of the month.
Jax did not believe in Florida.
Someone knocked on his window.
He had his hand on his gun before his brain caught up with his eyes. Then it did. A small figure in a yellow raincoat stood beside the car, holding two paper cups and squinting against the rain.
He let go of the gun and rolled the window down.
“Rule two,” he said. “You don’t go out alone at night.”
“I didn’t go out. I crossed the street. You can see me the whole time.” She held out a cup. “Coffee. Cream, no sugar. You looked like a cream-no-sugar person.”
He took it. It was hot and very good. He did not tell her she had guessed right.
“Go back inside, Miss Ashby.”
“Wren,” she said. “You’ve been sleeping in your car outside my house for four nights. I think you can call me Wren.”
“I don’t sleep in the car.”
“Do you sleep at all?”
He did not answer that either. She stood in the rain and drank her coffee and looked at him through the open window, and he looked back at her, and for a while neither of them said anything.
Then she said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For believing me. Nobody else did.”
Jax looked down into his cup. The thing in his chest that had gone still in the car on Tuesday was doing it again. He did not like it. It was the feeling of standing on ice and hearing it crack somewhere far away.
“Go inside, Wren,” he said. “Lock the door. Put the chain on.”
She smiled at him. It was a small, tired, sweet smile, and it went straight through him like the note from the tuning fork.
“Goodnight, Jax.”
He watched her cross the street. He watched her unlock the green door and go in. He watched the light come on upstairs, and go off again a few minutes later.
He finished the coffee. He checked the cameras. Front, quiet. Stairs, quiet. Alley—
The alley camera was black.
Not dark. Black. Dead.
Jax was out of the car before the empty cup hit the floor. He ran across the street and down the narrow gap between Wren’s building and the next one, toward the alley, gun in his hand. The rain hammered on his head and shoulders. Under the train tracks, the alley was a tunnel of shadow.
A figure was standing at the back of Ashby Pianos.
Dark cap. Dark coat. Something in his hand, with a small orange flame at the top.
“Hey!” Jax roared.
The man turned. For half a second, in the flicker of the flame, Jax saw a crooked jaw and a flash of teeth.
Then the man threw the bottle.
It went through the window beside the back workbench with a crash of glass. There was a soft, hungry whump. Orange light bloomed inside the shop, bright and sudden, like a door opening onto the sun.
The man ran.
Jax took two steps after him. Every instinct he had trained into his body said chase. The man was right there. The man was slow. The man had a crooked jaw and a face Jax would never forget.
Then he looked back at the window.
The fire was spreading across the workbench, over the glue pots and the jars and the rags soaked in lemon oil. It was climbing the wall. It was crawling toward the foot of the narrow wooden stairs.
The stairs that led up to the apartment where Wren had just turned off her light.
