I have him. Call me when you’re clean.
Tiernan sees the name, sees my face. “Raff?”
“Yeah.”
The call routes through once and lands. “Where,” I say.
“Eastie,” Rafferty answers. No hello. His voice is wrong: quiet, stripped down to the wire. “Old cannery by the river. I’ll send the door code.”
“Who else?”
“No one,” he says. “Just me and him. Hurry.”
The pin lands. Tiernan turns our wheels toward it without being told. The cannery hulks against the water like a thing the city forgot to tear down.
Tiernan kills the lights two blocks out and parks where we can see the roofline. “Your call,” he says.
“Stay close,” I answer. “No one else walks in.”
He nods once and becomes nothing but a ghost. I cross the lot and slip through a man-sized gap in the fence. The door is exactly where Raff said it would be: side entrance, second bay, an old fire door with a panic bar you can fool if you know how it thinks. It huffs open like a cough.
Inside the river breathes through gaps in the boards. My boots know this floor; they avoid the boards that complain.
Rafferty is where the dark deepens around a pool of light he made from a single work lamp clipped to a pipe. It throws a hard circle on the concrete and leaves the blankness at the edges honest.
He’s standing with his back to me, shoulders square, hands at his sides. In the chair in the light’s burn is the man who once thought I’d never say his name in church. He’s duct taped to steel, clothes dark with sweat, face like dirty paper that’s been folded and unfolded too many times.
He looks up when my boots land in the light. The first thing I feel isn’t satisfaction. It’s maintenance—the quiet expectation that I’ll back down or undo what’s been done to him.
Rafferty turns, and the look on his face makes me stop the way a command wouldn’t. He’s steady. He’s something else, too. Stripped bare of any and all pretense.
“Had to be me,” he says.
“It didn’t,” I answer, because I came here to work and I don’t like being surprised.
“It did,” he says, and if I walk now he’ll follow me home with this between us for the rest of our lives. He nods at the man in the chair without looking at him. “I found him. No one saw. I brought him in. I kept him breathing because I needed you to look at me when I said it.”
“Said what.”
“I’m the one who told your father Blackvine Ridge would make you a man,” Rafferty says. “I made it sound like discipline when it was so much more than that. I knew enough to doubt what was happening there, and I chose not to. I was proud of being the son your old man didn’t have. Of being strong enough to manage for him in your absence. I’ll regret that until they put me under.”
Silence. Outside, the river moves. A gull cries like a bad joke.
He keeps going because he has to. “I saw you after. I saw how you slept standing up. I still didn’t ask the right questions. I told myself you were built for it, and that if you weren’t, it would’ve killed you and then I could pretend the choice had been God’s. I’m not asking you to say anything, boy. I’m telling you that I’m sorry.” He lifts his chin an inch. “And I made sure he felt everything I could translate. It isn’t enough. But it’s something.”
I look at Raff like I used to look at him when I was a boy and wanted to pick a fight he wouldn’t let me win. Then I look at the man in the chair. The uncle. My wife’s blood and not my family. His mouth is split. One eye’s swollen shut. The tape around his chest tells me he’s been breathing hard for a long time and isn’t very good at it.
“You used those rooms at the Ridge to get what you want,” I tell him. “You broke us to get more power. Those rooms? They stole our innocence and our futures and left us rotting husks of who we were. This one’s mine, though.”
He stares at me with the good eye, the old politics starting to mount a defense out of habit. I don’t care. Words are for men who walk back out of the building.
I turn back to Rafferty. “You done?” I ask.
“I am,” he says.
“Then listen,” I say. “You were a boy pretending to be a man, and my father wanted to hear the words you said. You were wrong, yeah. But he was worse because he could have stopped at any time or checked. I carried the weight of his decisions. I’m not interested in carrying you, too.” I let it sit. “You’re forgiven.”
He blows out a breath like a tire that’s been hissing for years. Color comes back to his face a shade. He nods, once, hard. “Thank you.”
