“Prayer,” I say, soft as I manage.
Her mouth doesnae do a smile, but her eyes widen in relief.
I step toward her but don’t crowd.I hold the only thing I’ve got that won’t break her even further tonight.
My word.My devotion.
“Tell me,” I say.
She does, and it all spills out about the adhesive, the footage of Eddie’s car, a witness, and Red Hands weaving himself through our work like a smug wee spider.
Aye, so I did fuck up, just not intentionally.It wasnae me the witness saw since I’m nothing but smoke while on the job, and I dinnae wear leathers.
But I gave the police the thread, aye?The good adhesive with the neat edges I used on Farley’s hand.How was I supposed to ken Eddie used that too?And now it seems like Red Hands just pulled that thread like a bastard who enjoys knitting with intestines to paint his own story over ours.
“Fuck, Prayer,” I say when she finishes.
“Yeah,” she says, soft.
“What do ye want to do?”I ask her.“Ye point.I hit.I dinnae move till ye say.I’m just the man who breaks things at your command.”
Her chin lifts a fraction, and she searches my face.The only thing she’ll find is a blade, honed and held out to her hilt first.
Something in her spine remembers and straightens.The queen in the wasteland pulls on her crown, tarnish and all.
She hands me her phone, which shows a local news site.The headline tastes like tin in my mouth when I read it, then I read the rest, slow, careful, like it’ll change if I blink.
Hospitalized.Domestic incident.Street I know far too well.
Michael Devlin.
The name sits on my tongue, and I want to rip it out with pliers.My hand tightens on her phone until the case creaks.The old hymn rises in my head, the one about blood and sins and death, and the monster in me drags its claws across my ribs.
“We need to end him,” she says.“The right way.”
“Aye,” I say.“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow,” she says.
The gears behind her eyes bite and turn.She’s building a gallows of ideas and rope.
I breathe.It’s perfect, the way relief and rage can live in the same exhale.
“But we start with Farley,” she goes on.“We need to pay him a visit and pull the teeth out of Red Hand’s story before it bites us clean through.”
“We could also destroy evidence,” I offer.
There’s the smile I’ve been after.“Seriously?”
“Aye,” I say.“I’ve a solvent that’ll make that fancy adhesive forget its own name, and I can cloud the surface so the polis”—at her confused look, I correct myself—“sorry,policelab gets an inconclusive and a headache.They’ll argue about it for weeks while we run rings round them.Make it look like they did it to themselves.A wee bit of condensation here, a mislabeled tray there.”
“Do you know where they keep the evidence?”she asks.
“In the Property and Evidence room, aye,” I say, already mapping locks and cameras by memory, the taste of old air-con and dust in my throat.“Basement level of the sheriff’s department, two badge points, one camera with a blind spot where the ducting sags.Night-shift walloper called Ritchie who spends three hours a watch on his phone pretending to quit vapes.Code panel that sticks on four if ye press it slow.One old-school deadbolt that loves a kiss from my wee rake.”
“Yeah, I only caught about half of that.”Her mouth twitches in approval.“But I can you’ve done this type of thing before.”
“I often break the chain without breaking the chain,” I murmur.
