Page 26 of The Drifter

Just a break. Just one square of unclaimed time. Just a day that belonged to me, that I did not give to anybody, that I did not apologize for.

And the fact that the idea made my heart go like a bird in a box—the fact that I stood in my own lobby and felt genuine, animal fear at the thought of asking Isabel Harper Dane for a single day off⁠—

Well.

That told me everything I needed to know about how bad it had gotten.

I opened the leather book to the arrivals page.

There it was, where I'd left it. Magnolia Suite—hold, open. And beside it, in the column that wanted a name, the long, clean nothing I had left there because I hadn't been given one, and had known better than to ask, and had been good about it, the way I am always good about it.

I picked up my pen.

And I wrote, in my own hand, in a book that will outlive me:

Dane, C.

I looked at it a while.

Then, I closed the book, and turned out the lamp. I went home to a condo I owned outright, and I lay down in the dark in a room I had paid for with fifteen years of my life.

And I did not set an alarm.

8

CLINT

The bed was good. That was the problem.

A bad bed gives a man something to do. You negotiate with it. You find the one position that works and you defend it all night,. The work of that is almost like rest. This bed was wide and clean and quiet, in a room the size of some houses I've slept in. It took my body and left me alone with the other thing.

The other thing was my head.

I lay there in the dark with my hands folded on my chest like a man practicing for his own funeral. I thought about why I was in Charleston.

Nothing came. I turned it every way it would turn. The brothers needed me. For what, in a city like this—old money, old brick, water on three sides. I built theories and knocked them down.

An hour of that. Maybe more. The clock on the nightstand said 1:40 in numbers designed not to wake anybody.

Sleep and I have an arrangement, and the arrangement is that sleep does what it wants. Some nights, it comes. Other nights, it stands off somewhere and watches me, and no amount of lying still will call it in. I learned a long time ago not to fight that. Fighting it is how a man ends up staring at a ceiling hating his own heartbeat.

When I can't sleep, I walk.

I said it out loud to the dark—fuck it—and got up and dressed. Jeans, shirt, boots. The pistol went in my waistband at the small of my back, and the shirt went down over it. A man walking a strange city at two in the morning either has a reason to feel easy or he makes one.

The hallway was empty. The elevator was empty. The lobby was almost empty.

There was a girl at the desk. Not Sasha.

I noticed the disappointment before I could do anything about it. It went through me, small and quick. Of course, she wasn't there. It was the middle of the night, and the woman had a home somewhere. Whatever hours she kept, she'd earned the ones she wasn't keeping.

The girl at the desk was maybe twenty, hair up in a clip, bent over a textbook thick enough to stop a round. She had a highlighter in her teeth and a legal pad going and the hunted look of the young under deadline. She heard my boots and her head came up. She smiled at me the way you're trained to smile at guests, and then a little past it, because it was the middle of the night and we were the only two people in the world.

I glanced at the book. Chemistry, the college kind. Diagrams like chicken wire.

"Test tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir." She took the highlighter out of her teeth. "Cramming all the bits I can."