My hands are steady on the wheel.
They have been steady since the moment I stepped off Hadley's porch boards an hour ago.
They'll stay steady until I've got my boy in this truck next to me.
* * *
The drive is ninety-three minutes.
I think about Hadley on a stretcher in an ambulance with Marlena beside her.
The CT scanner. The fluorescent hospital light.
I think about my mother.
*Mama, I came back to this work one time. I'm goin' back one last time. I'm comin' home in this cut. I'm comin' home as the man you knew in the kitchen at suppertime, not the man you watched walk out the door at twenty-two.*
I think about Nash. The boy who called me partner the first day I met him.
The boy I held against my chest in his own bedroom three nights ago when he had a bad dream about something he wouldn't tell me about.
The boy I'm going to put back in his mama's arms in a hospital bed before this day ends.
I think about Hartley.
The man who taught a generation of operators the work, who went independent and started carving an empire out of contracts.
Who shot Marlena in the chest, Banshee in the shoulder, and an innocent dog. The same man hit my woman in the head with a pistol, and put a bullet in Thunder for getting in the way of him taking my boy.
He's a dead man. He just doesn't know it yet.
Bullseye texts me when twenty minutes out:
*Two operators outside. North and south corners of the loading dock. One walks a perimeter every six minutes. Hartley's SUV in the loading dock area. Boy not visible but the SUV has been here for a bit. We're inside, brother. We came in through the southwest door during the perimeter walk. We're behind the stacked pallets at the back of the loading dock. Hartley doesn't know we're here. Come in the front like he expects.*
I read the text twice.
I type back:
*Copy. Eight minutes.*
I take the off-ramp into Brady, my speedometer hitting 120.
* * *
Commerce Street is empty in the heat of the afternoon.
The old wool warehouse is on the east side of the street. Two stories. Loading docks on the north side.
The roof has a hole in it from a fire ten years ago that the firm let burn through because it gave them a sight line they wanted.
I park the Ford a hundred yards down the street.
I get out.
I check the sidearm on my hip under the cut. I've got the second pistol in the small of my back. The knife on my belt. The cut on my shoulders.
I walk down the gravel of Commerce Street toward the loading dock.
