Page 24 of Crow’s Shadow

“Or he’s better at it than you.”

“Nobody’s that good,” Buck says, still looking at the little notebook he keeps tucked against his ribs, the one where he tracks every dollar. “I’ve been following the payments since the cannery, and I’ve got three of them spread across four months. Somebody sitting at this table has been taking Renner’s money since spring, but it isn’t Loki.” He taps the page with his pencil. “Loki can barely work his fucking phone, and whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing. They ran the money through a card game, a bait shop and a used boat dealer, with three different people between them and Renner. That takes someone who knows how to move money without leaving their name all over it, and Loki sure as fuck doesn’t.”

The room goes still around the shape of what Buck did not say.

“Byte.” Loco does not look away from Loki. “Where’s the money end at.”

“Cash.” Byte has the laptop open in front of him, working through the same shit he’s been digging into since the cannery. “Every trail ends in cash, and once it does, I lose whoever’s behind it. I can get you as far as the pickup, sometimes down to the exact place and time, but I can’t give you a fucking name.”

“Then put Loki somewhere he can think.” Loco straightens. “Bones, Mercy, take him to the chapel. Sit with him. He does not leave that room, he does not touch a phone, and nobody in this club puts a hand on him until I say so.” His eyes cut to me, hard. “Nobody. You hear the words I’m saying, Crow?”

The words are a leash. Every cell in me wants to snap it.

Down the county road, in a dead cannery, my Shadow is on her third day of belonging to a man who keeps women until the light goes out of them, and this table wants to sit with an old man in a room and wait for his memory to work.

But I have buried enough brothers who moved fast and buried the wrong one.

“I hear it,” I ground out through gritted teeth.

I do not mean it, and Loco knows I don’t, and he lets it stand anyway, because a leash you both pretend to believe in holds longer than one you fight over.

Loki cracks it himself, an hour before dawn.

Mercy comes to find me in the shop, where I have been building a box I do not have a body for, running my hands over joinery in the dark because the work is the only thing that keeps the top of my skull on. He stands in the doorway with sawdust catching the low light.

“He wants you,” Mercy says. “Both of you. He’s got it.”

The chapel smells of cold coffee, old paper and the faint stink of the crematory that gets into everything around here. Loki sits at the small table Shadow uses for the club accounts, with a single sheet of paper spread out in front of him I’ve never seen before. It’s old and brittle, brown along the folds, with a column of marks written down one side in faded ink.

The cipher.

The original version Loki made before he ever handed Shadow a pen and taught her how to use it.

He does not look up when we come in. His finger rests on the page.

“When I was a boy in Virginia,” Loki says, “Cannon’s man taught me this out of his own head. Made me copy it till my hand bled. Then he burned his copy in front of me and said the letters live in one place now, son, and that place is you.” His finger trembles on the brown page. “I never had the nerve. Kept mine. For years I kept it, in the lockbox with the dead records, because I was afraid of dying with the whole book locked up inside one old man’s failing head. Afraid the club would lose its memory the day my heart quit.” He finally lifts his eyes, and they are wet and full of a horror that has nothing to do with the knife he thought was coming. “I kept the key to the whole thing in a box, and last spring I let a prospect help me haul the old records when my back went. Told myself he couldn’t read a lick of it. Told myself the marks were safe because only two people alive can read the whole library.” A wet breath. “But you don’t need the library to forge one line, Crow. You told the table that yourself. You only need the alphabet. And I left the alphabet in a box with a boy.”

Loco has gone very still. “Which boy.”

“Look at the folds.” Loki turns the sheet and runs a finger beside one of the old creases. “This thing’s been folded the same way for forty years, but somebody opened it all the way and smoothed it flat. See here? The crease has been pressed back the wrong way.” He shifts the page. “Probably photographed it. Phone would’ve been easiest. Then he folded it up, put it back and figured nobody would notice. He was almost right.” His voice drops as he stares at the paper in front of him. “I taught that girl her letters. I put the key around her neck, then I handed the one thing that could destroy her to the boy who sold her, and I never fucking knew.”

He shakes his head once. “Marchetti was right. The old fool never felt a thing.”

Buck found the money. Loki found proof someone had opened the cipher and put it back wrong. Different evidence, same fucking answer.

“Say his name,” Loco says, his voice hard even though the hurt is written all over his face.

Loki stares down at the cipher for a long moment before he looks up. “Lash.”

Lash is already gone.

Byte confirms it before the sun clears the tree line. Empty bunk, blankets cold. The prospect’s junk bike is not in the row. His phone pinged one tower going north out of Grimstone at three, the exact hour a chair went over backward in the chapel and a room full of men turned to stare at an innocent old man, and then it went dark and stayed dark. A rat feels the floor shift before anyone names him. Lash felt church turn, and he ran.

“North,” I say. “Toward Darkwater.”

“Toward Renner.” Byte turns the laptop so Loco can see the dead red dot hanging on the county road. “He’s running to the only man who’ll hide him from us. Which means Renner’s going to know we made him inside a couple hours, if he doesn’t already.”

“Then Renner moves faster.” Storm rubs a hand down his face. “He’s got Shadow, and the second he knows we’re closing in, he won’t sit in that fucking cannery waiting for us. He’ll take her up the mountain Marchetti told us about, and once he does, we might never find her.”