Page 82 of Ghost’s Awakening

19

AWAKENING

ONE MONTH LATER

CALEB

The alarm went off on the nightstand at half past five, and I knew where I was before I opened my eyes.

For four months I'd woken up reaching for a number. Now my hand found the phone Ghost had put in it on my second day in this compound, exactly two things on it allowed to make noise, and I killed the alarm with my thumb and lay there in the dark. The room was cold at the edges. Warm where he was. He smelled of last night's soap and the sweat under it, and his arm lay across my middle with its whole weight in it, and I let it stay.

Ghost's room. Ghost's bed, the bigger one he'd ordered a week after the raid, built for two men our size, with a foot of floor left on either side of it.

He stirred beside me. A long breath in, then he turned toward me, face-first, blind, until his forehead found my shoulder.

"Time?" Into my skin, thick with sleep.

"Half past five." I didn't move.

"That's a crime." His arm came across me and tightened. "Five more minutes. Tactical."

"You said that about the bed." His cheek moved against my shoulder.

"The bed was tactical." He was already going under again, the words slowing down. "Best call I ever made."

I put my arm around him. His hair was warm under my hand and flat on one side, and I ran my fingers through it slow, and we lay like that while the window went from black to gray.

One month since the empty box on the mezzanine.

We'd come back down those stairs to a floor full of Gravedigger's men on their knees, and Hawk had let them go.

He'd walked the line of them with the shotgun hanging from one hand. Every one of them had taken the man's offer at some point, he told them, which meant every one of them had a debt that didn't exist anymore, and the man who'd bought it had left them on a concrete floor and gone out through his own roof. They owed him nothing. So they were going to get up and walk out, and if Hawk ever saw one of those faces near Gravedigger again, he'd put it in the ground. He was remembering every face. Then the Phoenixes had stepped back, and the men had gone, a few of them running, most of them not able to.

We'd been rolling out of that district before the first siren cleared Henderson. The five prisoners from the parking structure went out our gate the next morning in the same van they'd brought for my brother, with the same warning and the same look from Hawk.

And Tyler had come down off that roof with a camera full of faces, and after the crowd was gone he'd walked the counting room with it. All of it, the faces, the books, the wire that had paid my brother's bill, went to the two people at the Bureau who owed him. Slow, he'd said. But also thorough.

Renzo had lain on that apron until I got down there, and I'd put my hand out, and he'd looked at it for a long time before he took it. He'd walked out of that warehouse on his own feet with his face in pieces and one arm wrapped around his middle, and he hadn't spoken one word to me, and I hadn't asked. I still didn't know where he'd gone. I didn't know if his wife was still in that bed, or who was paying for it now.

Harlan hadn't been on that floor either. I'd looked. He'd said please to me twice, and I still didn't know which side of that door he'd gone out of. The half-dead man they'd dropped in the ring for me to finish that first night, the one I'd left in a corridor, I never saw again either. I hoped somebody had carried him out.

My car had come home the same night, my keys still in the bag nobody had bothered to move off that back-hall bench. I'd driven it back myself with my throat still purple, and it sat in the compound row alongside the Harleys.

The next day Hawk had stood at the head of the table at Church, half the room in Rosa's tape and Kai's stitches, and told us to go lick our wounds, and to be ready. He'd had a message from Gravedigger. One that told us we'd all been too late. That he'd been playing with us that night. That he was done with the fighting pit anyway, and that he'd let me go.

He'd looked straight at me while he read it out. The shotgun hung diagonal on the wall behind his chair by then, the one that had put Gravedigger's name on every pellet through that steel door. "He commends your bravery," Hawk had told me, and his voice hadn't moved at all. "He says he was amused, the bastard. That he needs to take care of more important things."

Every patch not still under Rosa's hands had looked at Hawk then, wanting what I wanted, which was for him to read the rest. For now, he told the table, Gravedigger was not a problem for this club. The rest of the note was personal to him, and it stayed with him. Nobody pushed.

I'd looked down the table at Reaper, then Irish, then Tank, then Blade, and the same thing sat behind every face. Personal. Nolan had told me about Maria over a griddle weeks before that, Hawk's wife, gone two years with their daughters because the dangers kept getting too close, and I'd sat there hoping those girls were somewhere that man's arm couldn't reach.

Ten minutes later my phone had chimed. The bright clean chime I'd left on for the hospital.

Balance updated.

The number I'd carried onto the line and into that warehouse every Thursday for four months was gone. Where ninety-seven thousand and change had been, it read zero. Under the zero, in a different color, a credit, enough to cover months of whatever came next. And in the note field, the same little gray headstone, and four words.

An outstanding performance, Monk.