Page 56 of The Drifter

"My brothers."

"I've met them," she said.

That went through me sideways. My arms must have changed, because she felt it, and put her hand flat on my chest.

"Not like that. Through the desk." She said it carefully. "They've all come through the Palmetto Rose, one time or another. That's how I know the name Dane."

Oh. Okay. The wire in the back of my head eased off a notch. Of course, they had. A family outfit in a small city, a good hotel—the two would know each other the way the feed store knows the ranches.

But she hadn't finished. I could feel it in her, the weight of something being decided. She sat in my lap with the morning cool on both of us and looked out at the harbor. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped into a register I hadn't heard from her yet. Careful. Quiet. The voice of a woman stepping out onto ice she'd been told her whole life to stay off of.

"Clint. What do you know about Dominion Hall?"

"Why?"

"Because I've seen some things."

"What things?"

"Comings and goings." She said it flat, like a report.

"What do you mean?"

She didn't answer.

I watched her not answer, and I understood what I was looking at, because I'd spent three days learning her. This was the professional. Whatever she had, it was locked in the same vault as everything else her marble had ever shown her, and the vault was the whole architecture of her. I'd bet my pack she'd never once opened it for anybody.

She opened it a crack.

"I don't trust Dominion Hall," she said.

The words came out of her slow and level, and they cost her. I could see what they cost. Then, the rest came out fast, the way the true thing always came out of her, like something under pressure finding the seam:

"Did you know they own The Palmetto Rose?"

I sat with that.

"No," I said. "I didn't."

The harbor went on below us. A gull came up the face of the building, hung a second at our level like it was checking on us, and slid off sideways down the wind.

They owned the hotel. The hotel I'd been put in. Which meant the suite wasn't hospitality. It was a room in their own house. And the woman in my lap worked for them and likely didn't know it in full. I'd been sleeping in the middle of their machinery since the airplane door closed behind me. The card. The kid brother with the jokes. The eye that came open over the city and noted me.

Nothing about my three days in Charleston had happened outside their fence. I'd walked around thinking I was loose in a town. I'd been loose in a corral.

"I feel like I'm in the dark," I said.

It came out plainer than I meant it, and truer. She heard both.

"You, too," she said. Not a question.

"Me, too."

We sat with that a while, the two of us bare in the morning air, each of us kept blind by the same house from different directions—her by a desk, me by blood. Her fingers moved on my chest, slow, thinking. I watched the water. Somewhere down there, a shrimp boat was working the tide line, patient as a man mowing.

"Then, maybe we should both be careful," she said, finally. "Maybe we stay away from Dominion Hall. Both of us. Whatever it is."

That was where my mind had already been walking. Away. It's where my mind always walks, and this time it had company—her voice saying the same thing my feet had been saying for years. Stay clear of the big place. Keep to open country. Whatever's in there, it flew you across the country without telling you why, and things that do that are never handing out gifts.