Page 18 of Crow’s Shadow

I hit him. Not hard. Hard enough. He spits red on the concrete and the crying starts up again. Whatever part of me might care is forty miles north in a dead cannery with Shadow. Until she’s out Marchetti gets nothing from me.

“Renner’s got her there. I know that already.” I crouch so we are eye to eye. “What I want is what’s under it. Why the show. Why a fortress for one girl who files paperwork.”

“I’m nobody, man. I move boxes. I don’t sit in on the— on the thinking.”

“You move boxes for a man who took what’s mine. That makes you a road between me and her.”

“I got a kid,” he says, and it is the wrong thing to say to me tonight, and something in my face tells him so, because he goes gray and tries again. “I’m just saying I’ll tell you what I know, I will, but you gotta—”

“I don’t gotta do anything. That’s the part you’re not hearing.” I let the quiet do the rest.

Grim shifts his weight by the door, and the small sound of it is enough, and Marchetti breaks like a cheap latch.

“Because she’s not— she’s not just a girl, man.” He is shaking, and it is not all fear now. “You want it, you make it quick after. You give me that much.”

I do not give him anything. But I go still, and he reads the still as close enough.

“He collects them.” Marchetti’s voice drops like the words weigh something. “Years. A long fucking time. He’s looking for a certain kind of woman. Special ones. He finds one, he takes her, keeps her a while.” A wet breath. “Most of them don’t last.”

“Don’t last?”

“They break. Or he breaks them. Or they just go out. Like a light going out. I seen a couple, up at the mountain place, and they were there but there was nothing home, you know? Like he’d used something up.” He shudders. “I stopped going up there. Didn’t want to be around it.”

The furnace ticks. I keep my face shut, my hands loose and I let him talk, because he is talking now, and a man who is talking will tell you the thing he does not mean to if you only wait for it.

“Her, though.” He swallows. “Her he’s been chasing the whole time. Says she’s the one that got away. Slipped him when she was a kid, five, six years old. Says he finally found Maren’s—”

“I know whose girl she is.” It comes out wrong and he flinches off it.

“Okay. Okay, man.”

“The mountain place. Where?”

“Past the line. Up in the hills, off every map there is. Private road, gate, the whole thing. That’s the real one. The cannery’s just the front.” His eyes come up to me, wet, urgent, as if he wants me to feel the size of it. “He’s gonna move her up there, man. That’s the plan. Cannery’s the flypaper, keeps you looking the wrong way while he gets what he wants out of her, then he takes her up the mountain and you never see her again. Nobody comes back off that mountain.”

“How long?”

“Days, maybe. Depends how fast she gives him what he’s after.”

“And what is he after?”

“I don’t know!” It tears out of him. “Above me, I swear to Christ, above me. Nobody knows but him and the ones he keeps, and the ones he keeps don’t come back to say. All I know is he wants it given, not taken. He’s real particular on that. Said it more than once. It’s got to be given.”

Given, not taken. I file it with the rest of what I do not understand about the man who has my Shadow, and I stand up, and Marchetti sags in the chair thinking it is over.

That is when I ask the last one. Easy. Like it is nothing.

“How’d Renner use our book?”

“What?”

“My club keeps a book. Renner used what was in it to walk her out the gate on her own two feet. You can’t do that from the outside. Somebody him fed what we needed..” I look down at him. “You want quick? This is how you buy it. Who’s the rat.”

“I don’t have a name.” He sees my face and rushes it, words falling over each other. “I don’t, he keeps that tight, only Renner knows who it is, but I heard him. On a call. Laughing about it. Said the best part, the best part was the rat didn’t even know he was ratting. Said he got everything he needed out of your record-keeper and the old man never felt a thing. Said it like it was the funniest thing in the world.”

The room goes very quiet.

“Say that again.”