Page 90 of Ghost’s Awakening

One sheet. Lined, torn off a pad, folded in half and in half again so it would ride flat inside my cut. Wood dust had worked into the creases and stayed there, pale grit off a desk I'd blown the corner from with my own shotgun, and a pellet had gone through the bottom margin and left a hole I could see the lamp through.

I'd found it a month ago lying on what was left of that desk with the splinters still on it, the glass front of that box gone, the dust coming down through the lamps onto the fighting floor below. I'd read it standing there with the shotgun in my other hand and the smoke off the rockets in my nose, and then I'd folded it into my cut with every one of my people watching my face.

It came out of the pocket at Church the next morning. In my office that afternoon. On the edge of this bed every night since, under this lamp, in this cold. Wherever I went, it went. I'd quit pretending I could leave it in the drawer.

Blue ink, the letters slanted and joined, a clean hand they'd taught in schools when I was a boy.

Hawkins,

Congratulations. You run good men. I told you that once over a dead woman and I meant it, and I have never once underestimated them. The night your sneaky kid with the blue eyes stood in my crowd and watched my ring, I knew you would be coming. I knew it before he was back on his bike.

It changed nothing. I had been building for a year by then, and the pit had given me every man I needed. I was ready to shut the doors on it and move on to more important things. Then I looked down at Monk, and I saw where he was looking, and I saw who was looking back. So I let it play. I wanted to see what you would do with him, and what he would do with you.

It was worth every dollar. I commend him on his nerve, truly. I was thoroughly amused.

But the entertainment ends tonight. You were too late, all of you, and I would sit with that if I were you. Late or not, it does not change the fact that you keep meddling in my business. So I meddled in yours.

Maria. Elena and Sophia. I know you pay for their house in the Los Angeles suburbs. I know which house. I know which school the girls started this fall, now that they are old enough for one, and I know what time the bell rings.

You hid them well. But not well enough.

I have no further use for the pit or for your new kicks-expert. He is free. Consider that a courtesy. Then consider this.

Meddle in my business again. And I will meddle in yours.

Victor Graves

The kid's got balls!

One line, under his name. The rest of the page ran in that slanted, even hand, and that one The kid's got balls! line came in differently. Leaning hard. Run together. The pen had dug into the paper on the downstrokes and the exclamation mark trailed off the edge of the line.

He couldn't have written it before Caleb said his piece into that mic. I'd been standing at a painted window two blocks away when it came through the horns, and the rockets went into the corners a breath after the last word. So I knew when he'd added it. With his walls burning and my people coming through his doors, he'd picked the pen back up for one more line.

Then he'd gone up through his own ceiling and left the page where my shotgun would find it.

Which meant the rest of it had already been written. He'd sat up in that box with my girls' names on the page in front of him and watched the fights.

He'd known I'd read it standing in that room. He'd known I'd still be reading it a month later.

Everything I'd built in my life, I'd built around one thing never happening. It sat in my hand in blue ink.

I got up off the bed.

The drawer of the nightstand stuck the way it always stuck, and I worked it open and lowered the paper into it slowly, on top of the reading glasses I didn't wear in front of anybody, and I pushed it shut with two fingers until the latch caught. Then I left my hand flat on the wood. Cool under my palm, and the paper in there under it. I did it every night anyway, the same as I checked the gate camera before bed.

I went into the bathroom.

The light came on with the tick and the hum it always made, one long tube over the mirror that washed all the color out of the room. Tile, cold, through the socks. I pulled the socks off with my heels and stood on it barefoot and let it bite.

The shirt came off over my head. Cotton, warm with a whole day of me, and the air of that room went across my back and down my sides the second it was gone. I dropped it on the floor. I unbuckled my belt, and the buckle rang against the tile in the quiet, and I pushed the jeans down my legs and stepped out of them, and my head ran the whole time, the way it ran before a vote, every road out to its end.

If I put two patches on a street in Los Angeles, Maria would see them inside a day, and then she'd move without telling me where. If I rode there myself, I'd lead him straight to the door. If I moved on him, every man and woman in this building would go with me, and he'd already planned for that.

If I did nothing, nothing happened. That was the road with no bodies on it. I'd walked it every night for a month, and it always ended in the same place, which was a man like that left alone to build.

I looked up into the mirror.

It gave me back a massive man going gray. Gray through the stubble and gray in the hair across my chest, the hair on my head cropped short the way I'd worn it since I was young, dark still, going silver at the sides. The shoulders were still wide. The arms were still thick with muscle from the hours I put in with Tank on the bags and the bench presses. Old scars, white against the rest, one low on my left side and one along the top of my right shoulder. Abs that still held. Under that, the rest of me, and I didn't look down. I looked at my own eyes. Dark. The girls had them.