Page 8 of Crow’s Shadow

The Ledger does not make mistakes, because I do not make mistakes, because a mistake in this book is a body in a ditch with a name still on it. Every job gets three marks in Loki’s old cipher. What came in, what went out, where it went down. Loki taught me the marks the winter I turned nineteen, sat me in this room and made me copy the alphabet of it until my hand cramped and the shapes stopped being shapes and started being words. Then he handed me the book and never touched it again. Forty years of the club’s dead, and for the last six the hand keeping them has been mine.

I balance it the way Buck balances his money, and it has never once been off.

It is off.

A run three weeks back. Darkwater, two coffins out to a buyer coded R. Renner. I have the weight in, forty-one pounds of hardware under a dead retiree named Alvarez. I have the drop. What I do not have, what has been changed, is the went-out, the mark that says where those coffins actually landed. In place of my hand there is another one, careful, clean, writing the marks as if it was born to them, pointing the book one way when my gut screams the run went another.

My skin goes cold.

Here is the thing nobody outside this room understands about the book. The cipher can be taught. Loki taught it to me, and somebody taught it to Loki before that, a line of hands running all the way to Virginia. Learn the marks and you can read a line. Learn them well enough and you can write one.

But nobody reads my Ledger except me. Six year of my own shorthand runs through Loki’s cipher, thousands of entries deep. A stranger might understand a sentence. Only I can read the whole damn book.

But somebody forged a line. Somebody who knows the marks Loki taught. Somebody who got into a room with one lock, and the one key rides on a cord against my skin and has not left my body since Loki looped it over my head six years ago.

One lock. One cipher. And the list of people alive who could beat both at once is so short it stops my breath, because there is really only one name on it. The man who taught me the marks. The man who set the safe in the floor. The man who has been kind to me since I was a stray nobody claimed.

Loki.

I sit very still while every ugly piece slides into place. A man at the fence who knew my name, who handed me a mother out of the dark as if he had been carrying her around in his pocket for years. And now this. Three weeks back, before any of it, somebody walked into the one room I own and scratched me out of my own record. Same cold. Same wrong. And sitting between the two is a face I’ve trusted my whole life.

Loki.

I should go to Crow. That’s the rule. Something’s wrong with the book, you go to Crow, and Crow makes it not wrong, usually with his hands.

But Crow is a wall with a crack in it and my name behind the crack, and he told me to stay behind the fence like a dog. And if I say Loki’s name out loud to Crow with nothing but a bad line to stand on, I had better be right, because Crow does not ask a man twice. The book lies about where those coffins went. The only place the truth is now is the ground at the end of that run.

Darkwater. Forty minutes up the county road. I can be there and back before Crow knows I’m gone.

I lift the cord over my head and lock the book in the floor, because some rules I keep. I take my jacket off the hook. I take the little .380 Grim gave me two birthdays ago and pretended he didn’t.

I go out the back where the cameras have a blind spot I mapped when I was twelve, and I get on the road while the sky is still the color of a fresh bruise, and I do not tell one living soul where I am going.

It is the last thing I do as a girl nobody sees.

Chapter five

SHADOW

Darkwater earns its name before I ever hit the town line.

The county road runs down through pine so thick the dawn can’t get in, and the river shows up on my left, black, slow and swollen, the kind of water that takes a body and gives back nothing. I’ve filled that water. The club has, I mean. I’ve logged drops in the book, coded to this exact bend, but I’ve never been here. Seeing the place behind the entries makes my skin crawl.

The address on the bad run is a boat repair on the edge of town, corrugated steel, a sun-bleached sign for a marina that closed before I was born. No cars. No lights. Just the building squatting at the water’s edge like it’s waiting on me, which is stupid, because nobody knows I’m here.

I kill the engine and sit a second. The .380 is a cold little comfort against my spine.

I get out.

The side door hangs open on one hinge, and that’s the first wrong thing. Men careful enough scrub a drop don’t leave doors hanging open. My skin knows it before my head catches up, that old crawl I learned in the clubhouse hallways, the one that says slide behind something, get small, get gone. Twenty years I’ve trusted it.

I don’t trust it fast enough.

Inside is one big room, gutted, the guts of old boats hung on the walls like something skinned. Weak gray light through the high windows.

In the middle of the concrete sits a single wooden chair.

A phone rests on the seat, face up, screen glowing, waiting.