"When do I link up with you?" I asked.
"We're still running damage control. It's—" He stopped. "It's a lot, Brock. I'll come to you inside twenty-four hours, soon as I can do it clean. You got what you need to stay dark till then? Resources?"
I almost smiled. "I'm my father's son. Aren't I?"
It was the kind of line that should've gotten something back. A snort, athat you are,some piece of the old shorthand. Tommy didn't laugh.
The quiet on the line stretched out, and in it, I heard everything he wasn't saying. The cold finger pressed down harder.
"Yeah," he said finally. "You are." Tired. "I'll be in touch soon. Stay safe."
The call ended.
I stood there and looked at the dead screen and thought,what in the hell have you stepped in, little brother?
Because here's the math on me, plain. Terrorists, cartels, men who do for money what I do for—whatever it is I do it for—those, I understand. Those, I can put a sight on without my pulse moving off resting. You point me at a bad man in a far place and I will go and the world will be one bad man lighter and I will sleep that night like a baby. That's the work. That's the only thing I've ever been sure I was for.
But the FBI. My own government's dogs, with badges and warrants and a hundred years of practice making men disappear inside the law instead of outside it. That was a different country. You can't shoot your way clear of a federal building. And if my unspookable, light-hearted brother had gone quiet andstopped laughing at our oldest joke, then whatever was loose in Charleston was worse than the wordbadhad any right to carry.
I put the cell away and made myself a promise I'd kept ten thousand times: deal with it when it's in front of you. Not before.
So, I spent the rest of the day learning the ground the way I'd started that morning.
Bought a fresh ballcap and a new pair of sunglasses off a rack on King Street, swapped out the ones the Atlantic had taken, paid cash. Then I walked. Mile after mile of old brick and older money, and I let the town teach me itself. I marked the cameras—and there were more than this pretty place wanted you to think, doorbell eyes on half the historic homes, the slick municipal kind bolted high on the government buildings and the bank corners, the ones that pan.
I clocked the lines of sight and the dead spots between them, mapped the streets a man could move down unseen and the ones that would burn you. I watched my own back the whole way, doubling lanes, glassing reflections in shop windows, and picked up no tail. If somebody was on me, they were better than me, and there aren't many of those.
But mostly—and this is the part that surprised me—I just took the place in.
The light changed over the harbor. The heat broke into something soft. Bells from a dozen steeples laying the hours down over the rooftops. The smell of the marsh coming up with the tide, that pluff-mud rot the locals loved, mixed with frying shrimp and somebody's cigar and the sweet green of all those gardens behind all those walls. Horse hooves on cobblestone. A street musician working a horn down by the market, slow and blue. People out walking, easy, like the world wasn't a thing that came for you in the night.
It was a good town. I could see how a person built a whole life inside its ten square miles and called it enough.
By the time it edged toward midnight, I'd more or less made my peace with the likely outcome, which was that Mary Catherine Donovan would not show. Of course, she wouldn't.
The woman had detonated her entire life that morning; she'd have come back to her senses, called whatever this was a fever, and gone to sleep in her own bed with the whole stranger-in-an-alley business filed underwhat was I thinking.That was the sane move. I half hoped she'd make it, for her sake.
I'd hedged it, anyway. Booked a cheap motel out on the edge of things, cash, a name that wasn't mine, a room with a door I could watch. If she was a no-show I'd hole up there and wait on Tommy's call and be no worse off.
I came up on the corner twenty minutes early, out of habit. You scout the meet before the meet.
She was already there.
Standing under the same big oak in the dark, hands wrapped around her own elbows. When my headlights found her, she lifted her chin and gave me a smile—shy, a little uncertain, nothing like the reckless thing she'd worn on that pier. I pulled up and leaned across and got the door. She got in, and I checked my watch.
"I get the time wrong?"
"No." She pulled the door shut. "I've been here a while." A small breath.
That's when I saw the bag. Sitting on the ground, packed full and zipped.
So. She'd decided.
"How'd it go?" I asked. "With your family."
She looked out the windshield at the dark street, and something moved across her face that I wasn't going to push on.
"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "Not yet."
