Page 64 of The Drifter

The one riding shotgun found me in the shade where I was standing, and gave me a nod. One inch of chin. We have it.

I gave him one back.

They parked across the street from her building with a view of the door, the garage, and the sky. Inside a minute, the two in the bed had started a slow lap of the block in running shoes and beach hats, loose-shouldered, laughing about something, covering the ground in overlapping halves like they'd been doing it together for ten years, because they had. The two in the cab stayed put with the windows down, talking loud about a fishing show, having the chillest morning in America.

It was good work. And I’ve seen a lot.

Which raised its own question, and the question rode with me the rest of the day: who are these people my brothers work for, who keep operators like that sitting around on a random day, five minutes from anywhere?

I called a cab off the burner. It came in five minutes, driven by an old-timer with a Braves cap gone the color of dust and forearms that said forty years of ten-and-two.

"Where to, boss?"

"You know a place called Dominion Hall?"

He looked at me in the mirror. It was a long look for an old man in traffic, and there was a whole conversation in it—who's asking, and why, and do I want this fare. Whatever he read in my face settled the account.

"Everybody knows it," he said. "Nobody goes there."

"I do."

"Huh." He pulled off the curb. "Then, I guess today, I do, too."

He didn't talk after that, which I appreciated. I watched the city go by and let the mission-hum in my chest do its work. Over water. Down the peninsula. The land opened up, marsh and live oak, the road running along the harbor with the light coming off it in sheets. The houses got farther apart and older and quieter, and then, they stopped altogether, and there was just wall.

Brick, high, running along the harbor road for a distance that stopped being a property line and started being a statement. Live oaks came over the top of it from inside, big ones, century trees, moss hanging still in the morning air. I watched that wall go by for a long time.

"Here it comes," the old-timer said. First words in fifteen minutes.

The gate was black iron, ten feet if it was one, hung on brick pillars thick as grain silos. There was a guardhouse beside it that was built to look like a carriage house and didn't fool me for one second—I read the sightlines, the glass, the way the approach narrowed and the road surface changed to make any vehicle slow whether it wanted to or not. Somebody had spent real money making a fortress look like a postcard. The kind of money that doesn't want credit.

The gates were already opening when we rolled up.

Nobody stopped us. Nobody stepped out with a clipboard. The iron just swung, smooth and silent, and the old-timer took his foot off the brake and eased through. I watched his eyes go up and around in the mirror, a man memorizing a story he'd be telling at the cab stand for a year.

The drive ran under the oaks, curving, and then the trees opened up.

Dominion Hall stood at the end of it with the harbor at its back.

I've seen big houses. I've pulled security in palaces, actual ones, with actual thrones in them. This was something else. It wasn't the size, though it had the size. It was the set of it—stone and brick risen up off the lowcountry like it had grown there, wings running out to both sides, windows in ranks catching the water light, and the whole thing sitting in the land the way a fort sits, the way a thing sits when it was built by somebody who expected history to come calling and intended to be home when it did.

There were vehicles in the courtyard, blacked-out, clean, a row of them like patient animals. There were horses somewhere; I could smell them under the salt, and something in my chest turned over at that, because it smelled like being ten years old.

And there, on the wide front steps, sat my brother.

Cash, in the morning sun, elbows on his knees, easy as church. And against his leg, upright, ears already at attention, the big, tan dog.

Max saw me before the cab stopped rolling. He came up off his haunches, head high, tail going once, twice—a dog deciding I was catalogued and acceptable. Cash put a hand on him without looking and the dog sat back down, quivering, professional.

I paid the old-timer with the black card. He ran it, glanced at the name of whatever came up on his little screen, and looked at me one more time in the mirror.

"You have a good one, boss," he said, in the tone men use when they mean good luck.

The cab eased away down the drive, and the gates took it, and it was gone. I stood in the courtyard of a castle on the edge of a continent I'd spent years crossing in the other direction.

I started for the steps.

I was loaded. All the way loaded. Years of going with the flow, of if I need to know I'll be told, of biting my tongue out of respect for a religion I'd kept since I was a teen—and it had all burned off somewhere between a drone at her window and a burner phone in a parking lot.