“Tourist,” I answer, though we both know tourists don't come here in December.
The rush thins. I do a lap with a cloth and a smile, and the town settles in again, trusting the pastries and the clock. My mother touches my wrist and murmurs that she needs eggs. I nod. It’s a code we have used since I was a teenager who needed fresh air. It gives me the back hallway and the stairwell and the child at the top of it.
The stairs are narrow and old under my boots. In the small room over the alley, Marco’s on the rug with a coloring book spread like a map. He looks up, waiting for my face to explain the world.
“Hey, General,” I say as I sit on the edge of the bed. “How’s the snowman brigade?”
“They’re winning,” he announces and then looks past me to the door. “Is the man still here?”
“Which man?”
“The one with the serious face,” he says. “He looks like Batman at school pickup.”
I bite back a laugh. “He’s downstairs finishing a coffee.”
“Is he nice?” Marco asks. “Can I see him?”
“Not yet,” I tell him, smoothing his hair. “Later, maybe.”
He nods in that way he does when he decides to save a hundred questions for another time. He returns to his coloring. I sit there longer than I should, listening to the ordinary sounds a building makes when it knows your family. Then I get up and go back down, because hiding in a room doesn’t solve a thing.
Matteo stands when I appear, which annoys me and impresses me. He brings his cup to the counter and sets money down under the lip of the tip jar. I want to tell him he can tip me some answers instead.
“Leaving?” I ask, not looking at him, looking at the coffee machine.
“For now,” he says.
“Good.”
He studies my profile. His deep brown eyes catch light like soft gold, and I wonder what changed. “Youdon’thave to be afraid of me.” He turns and walks out. The bell rings once. I hold the counter because it’s the only thing in the room that feels nailed to the floor. My mind says he already knows I’m hiding something.
9
MATTEO
Ileave the bakery and let the door close on the eyes inside. The street waits, still and exact. I take it in piece by piece. The church spire with paint blistered from last winter’s salt wind, the hardware store window stacked with shovels and seed catalogs side by side, the diner breathing heat through a rusted vent, the sheriff’s cruiser angled to see both ends of Main. Wrenleigh is small enough that a stranger carries a ripple with him.
I make the ripple look natural. I walk the length of Main as if I have done it before. A woman in a quilted jacket passes with a paper bag of groceries. I nod once, the kind of greeting that costs nothing and means less. A man scraping his windshield looks up, and I offer half a smile, the polite currency of strangers. A boy goes by holding his mother’s hand, a red balloon bumping the air above him. I step aside so they keep their pace, say “Morning,” and let the sound fade.
There is a service lane behind the hardware store. Pallets lean against a cinderblock wall. A stack of salt bags sits under plastic. My men pull in one after the other, white vans withNorth Country Producestenciled on the doors. The paint isconvincing. So are the jackets and the insulated gloves and the tired postures.
Nico climbs down first, thick wrists, careful eyes. He has been with us long enough to know when to keep his mouth shut and when to ask the right question. Petro comes around the hood with a clipboard and a pencil behind his ear. He looks like a man who has delivered to schools since he was twenty and has a bad knee in the rain. Both keep their hands visible until I nod.
“Capo,” Nico says, low.
“We are not in the city,” I answer. “We are neighbors today.”
He adjusts. “Morning.”
I open the van’s sliding door and pull out a folded county map. Phones are for calls. Paper is for plans that do not belong to any system. I pin the map against a pallet with two knuckles.
“Here” —I mark the bakery with the pencil— “is our center. Two blocks feel like ten in a town like this. You will not try to be everywhere.”
“We anchor on edges,” Petro says. He gets it.
I draw a slow circle with the pencil. “School here. Church hall here. Park with the river here. Motel on the highway spur here. Lookout points here and here.” Two small dots mark a water tower and a line of pines above a bend in the road. “If Benedetti sends watchers, they will not stand on the sidewalk. They will rent a room above a bar, take coffee and forget to drink it, and park where the local ordinance says no trucks. We will see them because they will not smell right.”
I glance at the two of them. “Who’s from a small town?” I ask.
