"You okay?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"That's two answers and one of them is a lie, but I can't tell which. What's going on?"
"Did you call him?"
I didn't need to say who. Pickle had called a number he shouldn't have had, and whatever he'd said had cracked something open that three weeks of silence hadn't touched.
"Yeah." No hesitation. "I called him."
"How'd you get his number?"
"Pratt."
I paused mid-stride. "Pratt gave you Kieran's number?"
"Texted it to me. No message. Just the number and a period. That man is terrifying, and I love him."
Pratt, who'd been parked at the Northbound the night Varga interrupted. Who'd saidgood screenthe next day and nothing else. Who saw everything and reported nothing and, apparently, kept a line of communication open to Thunder Bay that I hadn't known existed.
"What did you say to him?"
"I don't remember exactly. I was—Adrian was making something in the kitchen and the timer kept going off and I was kind of—" He stopped. For Pickle, a mid-sentence stop was an event. "I was mad, Heath."
He didn't call me Heath often. I was most often Donnelly.
"I was really mad. You called me and you sounded like October. Like before any of it stuck. Like you were back on the floor checking numbers."
He was right.
"So yeah. I called him. And I was maybe—I was a lot."
"What did you say?"
"I told him he doesn't get to decide stuff for you. That's—that's not how you do it. You don't just—" A frustrated sound. "He made the call without you. That's the thing. He just made it. Like you weren't even in the room."
I turned a corner onto a block I didn't recognize—three-flats and a barber shop with a faded sign in Polish.
"I know."
"Are you mad at me?"
"No."
"Because Adrian said I overstepped. He did the face. You know the face."
"You didn't overstep."
"I definitely overstepped. But I'd do it again, so."
Quiet on his end.
"What happened?" he asked. "The actual thing. Tell me."
I gave him the shape of it. Flat. No dramatic framing. Kieran signed the extension. He didn't tell me he'd signed it to stop a trade. Three teams had called. My name was in a package. His signature dissolved it. He knew all of this and decided I couldn't handle knowing.
Pickle listened. I heard him breathing, which meant he was actively not interrupting, which for Pickle required the discipline most people reserved for penalty kills.
