Page 35 of The Drifter

Nobody else gets to do that. A stranger says one word about my clothes and it's a long day for the stranger. Tommy could audit my entire life from the doorway of a hotel room and all it did was make the room warmer. That's brothers. That's the whole contract, written before either of us could read.

"I gotta go," he said. "We’ll call for you soon. Be ready."

"How soon?"

He walked to the door and opened it. He looked back at me with his hand on the frame, and gave me the shrug he's been giving authority figures since grade school.

"Depends," he said, "on whether you plug the phone back in."

Then, he was gone.

The door clicked. The room went quiet, and the quiet had a different weight than it had an hour ago. He'd filled the place with more questions than a man could work through in a week: a company with a headquarters here, a fed with an old grudge, six brothers gathered in one town like weather building, and a seventh on the way. And underneath all of it, unlisted, the thing Tommy hadn't said—whatever it was he kept walking around, the furniture in the dark.

Fuck.

There was no version of this day where I sat in that room and got anything useful done. The room was all questions and good linen. I knew myself that much.

I looked at the card in my hand. Black, no numbers, heavy as a bad decision.

Maybe I'd take a stroll. Find a real breakfast somewhere—eggs, and a griddle old enough to have opinions. Walk the town in daylight and see who its merchants were, see what a man with three T-shirts and Neverland in his pocket could do about a sprucing.

Or maybe I'd hit the road.

I stood at the window a while, looking down at the street coming awake, and let both of those sit there side by side, the way I've let them sit my whole life.

Only time would tell.

11

SASHA

Iwent in, anyway.

There wasn't a reason. I had the day. Izzy had put it in writing, with the exclamation points and everything. I had a sofa and a harbor and a coffee cup and a phone with a government website open on it. I sat in that condo for about an hour after the passport thing. Then, I got up and got showered and dressed and drove over the bridge like a dog let off a chain that doesn't know one single thing to do with a field.

Just stopping by, I told myself, going up the steps. Check the schedule. See that Missy's holding.

Missy was holding. Missy is always holding. Missy could hold that desk through a hurricane and a tax audit. I knew it when I hired her, which is exactly why I hired her.

I stopped at the doors and caught myself in the glass.

My hair was down.

I stood there and looked at that woman a second. She had on jeans and a sleeveless top the color of a good tomato. There wasn't a pin in her head. She looked about nineteen years old and like she'd been sleeping.

Turn around, I thought.

I didn't turn around. I pushed the door and went into my lobby with my hair down. It was the strangest feeling I'd had in that building since I was a child hiding in the linens. My scalp prickled the whole way across the marble.

Otis saw me first.

He came up off the stool with an expression I had never once seen on his face, which was open, undisguised delight, and he said, "Well, now," in a way that made me want to go straight back out the doors.

"Don't."

"I ain't said a word."

"You said well, now."