#2 · Two Scoops of Trouble

The morning came up soft and gold over the pond, and Alfonz stood at the side mirror of his ice cream truck, tying his bow tie. Yellow with white dots today—a cheerful choice for a cheerful day. He tilted his head and inspected the faint greenish smudge beneath his left eye, all that remained of the shiner he'd earned on Pier 19 the week before. Nearly healed. A few more days and even Emma wouldn't notice.

"You should be more careful," he told his reflection, in Emma's scolding little voice, and chuckled to himself.

He ran through the checklist. Vanilla soft-serve: restocked. Chocolate dip: warmed to a glossy shine. Sprinkles, cones, Rocket Pops, the good waffle mix. And beneath the false bottom of the freezer, cleaned and oiled and sleeping: the other inventory. He hadn't needed it in seven days. It had been a quiet week. He'd almost let himself enjoy it.

By 10 AM he was parked outside Riverside Elementary, cranking out his tinny "Entertainer," and the children came pelting across the grass like they always did, backpacks bouncing.

"Mr. Alfonz! Mr. Alfonz!" Emma Rodriguez was first, as she was always first, up on her toes at the service window. "Two scoops of mint chip, please. And your eye's all better!"

"But of course it is, mademoiselle." He rolled the French accent out warm and thick, the way she liked. "I am, how you say, a fast healer." He handed down the cone with a flourish. "Careful with the second scoop. It is a wobbler."

And then he heard it. Another jingle.

It drifted in from the far corner of the block, tinnier than his own and somehow slicker—a synthesized "Pop Goes the Weasel" with too much bass. A truck rolled to the curb across from him, and it was a beautiful thing, Alfonz had to admit: chrome-bright, wrapped in a glossy vinyl skin of cartoon sundaes, the words FROSTY'S PREMIUM ICE CREAM airbrushed down the side in dripping letters. Beside his own honest, hand-painted Chevy it looked like a spaceship parked next to a rowboat.

A few of the smaller children drifted toward the newcomer, drawn by the novelty. A man leaned out of Frosty's service window. He was broad and pink-cheeked and smiling, and the smile did not reach anywhere near his eyes.

"Morning, neighbor!" the man called across the street. "Frosty's the name. Half-price cones all week—hope you don't mind a little friendly competition."

"Not at all," Alfonz called back pleasantly, and meant none of it.

Because Frosty wasn't really working his line. He was working the block—the parked cars, the sightlines, the mouth of the alley, the exits—and, most of all, he was working Alfonz. His gaze kept drifting back the way Alfonz's own drifted over a room he intended to leave alive: counting, sorting, marking the ways in and the ways out. And when a lull came in his line, Frosty ambled over, hands in his apron, and made conversation that wasn't conversation.

"Been working this route long? You out here every day, or do you travel?" A pause, a lazy scoop of imaginary lint from his sleeve. "Seems like a fella could do real well on a route like this, if he knew the schedule."

"Oh, I am a creature of habit," Alfonz said, all sunny vagueness. "Same corner, same song."

"Habits are good." Frosty's smile widened. "Easy to find a man with habits."

Alfonz gave him a Rocket Pop on the house and watched him walk back to his gleaming truck, and somewhere beneath the bow tie and the apron, an old cold instinct uncurled and lifted its head. He told himself it was nothing. Competition made a man imagine things. He told himself that for the rest of the afternoon and did not believe a word of it.

By 7 PM the light had gone amber and the last customer was Mrs. Chen, one scoop of butter pecan, as it was every evening. She told him her grandson had passed his surgical boards, and Alfonz told her he'd always known the boy was destined for great things, and he nodded in all the right places while, across the street, Frosty's Premium Ice Cream sat dark and idling at the curb long after the last child had gone home. No lights. No customers. Just idling.

Alfonz waved Mrs. Chen down the sidewalk. Then he locked the service window, and the transformation began.

The apron came off; the tactical vest underneath. The bow tie came off; the throat mic went on, snug as a collar. He pressed the concealed switch beneath the dash, and the jingle array retracted with a hum, and the encrypted set rose in its place.

"Ribbit-7 to Base. Requesting brief."

Handler's voice arrived in his ear, dry and immediate, the only voice in the world he trusted without ever having seen its face. "Ribbit-7. Confirming your Friday tasking. Budapest."

"I remember. You told me to rest up. I have been resting."

"Intelligence has a Nightshade financier moving encrypted account keys through a dead drop at the Széchenyi thermal baths. Friday, twenty-three hundred local. You go in, you retrieve the keys, you come home. Simple retrieval." A beat. "The sourcing is—" and here she paused, one half-second longer than Handler ever paused, "—clean. Very clean."

"You say that like it is a bad thing."

"I say it like it's a thing. Wheels up at midnight. And Ribbit-7—Budapest is having a cold snap. Dress warm."

He almost mentioned the second ice cream truck. He almost said, there is a man on my route asking after my schedule, but the day-world and the night-world had never touched, not once in all his years, and to drag one into the other felt like bad luck. So he said nothing. It was the last easy mistake he would make for a while.

Budapest was a knife.

Alfonz felt it the moment he stepped off the transport—the cold reaching through the heated undervest, through his skin, down into the deep amphibian machinery of him where warmth was not a comfort but a fuel. His fingers wanted to stiffen. His thoughts came a half-beat slow, like a record dragged. He'd worked the tropics, the deserts, the humming green heat of a hundred jungles, and his body had loved him for it. His body did not love Hungary in January.

He bought a chimney cake from a street cart, less for the eating than for the warmth of it against his palms, and he wrapped both hands around a thermos of what looked like soup and was, in fact, a very expensive Agency preparation for keeping cold-blooded field agents from going sluggish at the worst possible moment. He drank half of it walking, and the world sharpened by degrees.

The Széchenyi baths at midnight were a cathedral of steam. Snow sifted down out of a black sky and vanished the instant it touched the water, and the great pools breathed a fog that hid everything more than ten feet off. The public had long gone home. Somewhere in that warm white dark waited a financier and a set of keys.

Alfonz did what no human agent could do. He slipped into the water.

And oh, it was bliss. The thermal spring wrapped around him bath-warm and mineral-thick, and every stiff, slow inch of him came singing back to life. His legs remembered their power. His mind cleared like a wiped lens. He moved through the pools without a ripple, nictitating membranes sliding down over his eyes, and the cold and the doubt and the long flight all fell away, and for a moment he was simply, purely in his element.

Which was, of course, exactly what she was counting on.

He surfaced without a sound beneath the arch of the far colonnade, where the intel had placed the drop. A figure sat at the pool's edge, wrapped in a heavy coat, hat low, motionless. Alfonz drifted closer. "The gelato," he murmured, the recognition phrase, "is best in Naples."

The figure did not answer. The figure did not answer because the figure was a mannequin, a coat stuffed with foam and a plaster face, and by the time Alfonz understood that, the great bronze doors at either end of the hall were already swinging shut with a boom that rolled across the water.

A speaker crackled to life somewhere overhead.

"Hello, Alfonz."

He knew the voice. Of course he knew the voice.

"Scorpia."

"I was so worried you wouldn't come." She sounded delighted. "I fed that intel up your own supply line myself, you know. Watched it climb, rung by rung, until your dear Handler read it off to you like a bedtime story. You walked into your own baths and locked the door behind you. Do you like the setting? I chose it especially. For you."

"It's very warm," Alfonz said. "You've been reading about me."

"I've been reading everything about you. Frogs, Alfonz. Fascinating animals. Cold-blooded. You don't make your own heat—you borrow it. Take the heat away…" There was a heavy mechanical clunk from below, and a shudder ran through the pool. "…and what's left?"

The water began to move. He felt it before he understood it—a great sucking draw at the drains, the warm spring pouring away, and behind it, gushing in through the vents, something new and merciless and cold. The temperature dropped like a stone down a well. Steam thinned to nothing. And Alfonz felt the awful slow honey begin to creep back into his limbs, felt his own heartbeat lengthen, felt the borrowed fire going out of him one degree at a time.

He hauled himself onto the tile and did not get up as fast as he should have. His hands would not quite close.

"There it is," Scorpia purred. "You know, I could have shot you at the door. But I wanted to watch it. I wanted to see the great Ribbit-7 slow down."

"Ribbit-7," said a second voice in his earpiece—Handler, sharp and low and furious—"the intel was poisoned. I caught the sourcing an hour ago and I could not raise you. Listen to me. You are standing on the recirculation floor of a 1913 bathhouse and I have the schematics. Six feet to your left, low on the wall, there is a red maintenance wheel. That is the primary spring bypass. You open that, you get your heat back."

Six feet. It might as well have been six miles. Alfonz turned his heavy head and found the wheel—rust-red, waist-high, exactly where she'd said. Too far to crawl before the cold finished the job. But not, perhaps, too far for the one part of him that never got sluggish.

His tongue shot out—eighteen inches of muscle that answered to older instincts than any chill—and wrapped the spokes of the wheel, and he pulled, and the wheel groaned and spun.

The floor shuddered. Somewhere in the guts of the old building a valve slammed, and the drains choked shut, and the vents reversed, and superheated spring water came roaring back up into the pools in a boiling white surge. Steam exploded to the ceiling. And Alfonz, lying full-length on the warm returning flood, drank the heat up through every inch of his skin and felt himself come back.

By the time the fog filled the hall again he was on his feet. He crossed to the sealed bronze doors, tongue-grabbed the pressure valve above the lintel, and vented a lance of scalding steam straight up into the ancient lock until the metal shrieked and gave. Then he gathered his legs beneath him—strong again, gloriously strong—and leapt, up and through, out into the snow.

"Doors are open," he croaked. "I'm out. Scorpia is all hat, no rabbit. There were never any keys, were there?"

"No," Handler said. "There weren't. Ribbit-7, the trap wasn't the mission. The trap was the distraction."

And then the speaker behind him crackled one last time, and Scorpia's voice followed him out into the cold, unhurried, savoring it.

"Aren't you forgetting something, Alfonz? While you were splashing in my bath…" A soft electronic chime, and a video feed bloomed on the little screen at his wrist. Daylight. Home. A school fair on the Riverside green—bunting and balloons and children everywhere—and parked in the middle of it all, gleaming and patient, FROSTY'S PREMIUM ICE CREAM. And in the front of the line, up on her toes, a small girl in a yellow shirt.

Emma.

"You can't be in two places," Scorpia said. "So choose, little frog. Choose which life you get to keep."

The cold that went through Alfonz then had nothing to do with Budapest.

There is no banter in someone racing the sun.

He did not remember most of how he got home. He remembered Handler's voice threading it together—an Agency jet held on a runway, a favor called in over the Atlantic, a car that was waiting because she had made it wait. He remembered the thermos, drained to the dregs. He remembered the feed on his wrist, the fair filling up as the morning burned away toward noon, Frosty's truck at the heart of it and his own route, his own children, arranged around it like pieces on a board.

He remembered thinking: Two lives. The day and the night. I kept them apart so the one could never touch the other. And then, colder: it happened anyway.

The car dropped him two streets back and he came the rest of the way through the yards and the hedges, and the moment he crossed into his own neighborhood he felt the last of the cold fall off him like a shed coat. Home was warm. Home was July and cut grass and the sun straight overhead, and every stiff, slow, borrowed-fire disadvantage that Scorpia had built her whole trap around simply—ceased. She had fought him where he was weak. She had, in her cleverness, chased him all the way home to where he was strongest.

He ducked into the back of his own truck, and Mr. Alfonz walked out the front.

Bow tie. Apron. Wide amphibian smile. He crossed the green calling "Ice cream! Fresh cones!" in his warmest Lyon accent, and the children swarmed to him, and if his eyes were doing that old cold sorting work behind the smile—counting, marking, three at Frosty's window and one more by the generator and Frosty himself gone tight and watchful the instant Alfonz appeared—well. Nobody suspected the friendly frog.

What followed, the children never quite saw.

They didn't see the man by the generator go down, because at that exact moment Alfonz was crouched handing twin Popsicles to the Petersen twins and asking about their pet turtle, and the man simply—wasn't standing anymore. They didn't see the second operative fold soundlessly into the open chest freezer of Frosty's own truck, because Emma had just asked Mr. Alfonz to please do the wobbly-scoop trick and everyone was watching the wobbly scoop. A grappling hook shaped like an industrial ice cream scoop sang out and back in the half-second between one child's laugh and the next. A tongue flicked a third man's radio out of his hand before he could raise the alarm, and the man turned to find a cheerful vendor offering him a free Drumstick with an expression of such friendly menace that he took the Drumstick and quietly sat down.

"Mr. Alfonz, you're so fast today!" Emma marveled, licking her cone.

"I have had," said Alfonz, "a great deal of coffee."

And then it was only him and Frosty, across the tailgates of their two trucks, the way it is always, in the end, only two.

Frosty's smile was gone. "The Baltic keys were fake," he said quietly. "The baths were fake. This was always the job. You've got a very small, very sweet little life here, ice cream man. Would've been a shame to end it a stranger."

"Yes," Alfonz agreed. "It would have been. Cone?"

He didn't wait for the answer. Frosty went for the pistol under his apron and Alfonz went up—a single explosive leap, twenty feet of it, arcing clean over the gap—and came down on the far side of everything, and when the children turned back at the sound they saw only Mr. Alfonz helping the nice competitor gentleman down into a folding chair, where he would remain, unaccountably, for some time.

Which left Scorpia.

She'd come herself. Of course she had—she could never resist the ending. She stepped out from behind the bunting at the edge of the green, out of the crowd, a coat too heavy for the day, and for a moment the two of them simply looked at each other across the summer grass, and the whole warm ordinary world went on around them, oblivious.

"You followed me home," Alfonz said.

"I wanted to see your face," she said, "when I took it from you."

But she had built her trap for a cold and sluggish frog, and there was no cold here. When she moved, he was already gone; when she turned, he was already behind her; and it was over in the time it takes a Push-Up to drip once in the sun—her weapon in his webbed hand, her back against the side of his battered little truck, her whole clever afternoon undone by the simple fact that she had chased him into the one place on earth where he could not lose.

And that was when the fourth man arrived.

He came out of the crowd without hurry, in a good gray coat, and he was not one of Frosty's, and Scorpia went very still when she saw him. He carried no weapon that Alfonz could see. He didn't need one. He looked at Scorpia the way a man looks at a line item he intends to delete, and he said, in a voice like a closing drawer, "Twice now."

"I can fix it," Scorpia said, and for the first time in two encounters, Alfonz heard something in her he'd never heard before. Fear.

"You misunderstand," said the man in gray. "There is no fixing. There is only—tidying." He smiled at Alfonz, briefly, the way one professional acknowledges another across a great distance. "She's not yours to keep, Ribbit-7. She never was. She belongs to us, and we've come to collect."

For one long breath, the three of them stood balanced on the edge of it—the frog, the mercenary, and the quiet man from the top of the dark—and Alfonz understood that he had just been shown the smallest corner of something very large, and that Scorpia had understood it long before he did.

Then a cluster of children shrieked with laughter at a popped balloon, the man in gray flinched one degree toward the sound—and Scorpia was gone.

She went between one blink and the next, the way Alfonz himself went, sliding into the crowd and the bunting and the bright confusion of the fair, and by the time either of them moved there was only her heavy coat, dropped in the grass, and no Scorpia inside it at all. From somewhere in the throng, close and then already farther, came her voice, low, meant for him alone:

"This isn't over, little frog. Not with you. Not with them." A breath of a laugh. "Save me a scoop."

The man in gray regarded the empty coat for a moment. Then he looked at Alfonz, inclined his head a precise half-inch, and walked back into the crowd, and by the time Alfonz reached the spot he too was simply—not there.

"Ribbit-7." Handler, quiet in his ear. "Talk to me."

"The cell is down," Alfonz said. "Frosty is yours to collect. Scorpia is in the wind." He watched the place where the man in gray had been. "And Handler—she isn't running from me anymore. She's running from them. There is a them. Above her. I saw him."

There was a silence on the line, and it was not Handler's usual silence.

"Yes," she said at last, and something in that single word made the warm afternoon feel briefly, distantly cold. "There is. Come home, Ribbit-7. We'll talk. There are things about Nightshade you're going to need to know."

By late afternoon the fair was winding down, and Mr. Alfonz was doing a brisk trade in the golden light, because a man who's just saved his whole small world tends to be generous with the sprinkles.

Emma came back for one last cone, and she peered up at him, and her small face went suddenly serious.

"Mr. Alfonz? The other ice cream man left. And you've got a new mark on your arm."

He looked down. A scrape, from the leap, that he hadn't felt. He touched it and gave her his very best, very widest, most reassuring frog smile.

"This? I slipped, chérie. On some spilled sprinkles." He handed down the cone—two scoops of mint chip, the second one wobbling just so. "You know how it is. It's a dangerous business, ice cream."

Emma giggled and took her cone and ran off across the grass to her mother, and Alfonz watched her go, and the watching had a new weight in it now that it had never had before. She was so easy to reach. They all were. He'd spent his whole double life believing the day belonged to the day and the night belonged to the night, and that the two would never, could never, meet—and Scorpia had reached across that line as easily as passing a cone through a window, and only luck and a warm afternoon and a prehensile tongue had kept it from costing him everything.

He'd protect it now differently. Not as a place he escaped to. As a place worth escaping for.

The last of the balloons drifted up into the blue, and Alfonz locked his service window, and somewhere out in the wide dark a man in a gray coat was filing a report, and a woman he'd chased across two encounters was disappearing into a life without a side that owned her, and both of those things were coming back around someday. He could feel it, the way you feel weather change.

But that was tomorrow's mission. Today the sun was warm, the mint chip was holding, and both of his lives were still his own.

That's the way he liked it. Two scoops. Two lives. And, God help him, twice the trouble.