Chapter 4: Keys

Lule Gjoka stood on the landing in her black coat, with a green duffel bag at her feet.

She looked me up and down.

I was wearing Luan's undershirt and nothing under it.

"Good," she said in Albanian. "You're alive."

"Did you walk up?"

"Three flights, at my age, at this hour. Let me in before the neighbor sees your legs."

I let her in.

She set the duffel on the kitchen table and unzipped it with a snap.

My jeans, my work shirts, my mother's gold earrings, my phone charger, a pair of sneakers.

"Ermal's men boxed the flat on Pelham Parkway at midnight," she said. "I took what I could before they did."

"The flat was Ardian's."

"The flat belongs to my brother. It always did."

She looked at Luan, who stood in the bedroom doorway buttoning a clean shirt.

"You look like a man who didn't sleep," she said.

"I slept."

"On the floor?"

He said nothing.

She made a small, dry noise in her throat that could have meant anything.

Then she turned to the stove and began to make coffee.

I put on my jeans in the bathroom and came out with my hair wet from the tap.

At seven a car stopped on Hone Avenue.

Luan went to the front window, and I stood behind him and looked down.

A black sedan idled at the curb.

Ermal's driver got out, a thick young man in a leather coat.

He stood on the sidewalk with his hand held out.

"Stay here," Luan said.

He went downstairs.

I watched from the window as he crossed the sidewalk in his shirtsleeves, in the cold.

He took a ring of keys out of his pocket, heavy with brass, and put it in the driver's palm.

The card rooms.

Then a second set, the family truck, which stood at the curb with its engine ticking.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.