I pulled him back in. Held him a second time, longer than the first. He held me back.
"Stay out of trouble," he said into my shoulder.
I gave him my best grin when I let go. The one that had gotten me out of more bar fights than it had gotten me into, which was saying something.
"Big brother, you must have me confused with one of the others."
"Tommy."
"I'll behave."
"You won't."
"I'll try."
"You won't."
He clapped me once on the side of the neck, hard, the way he'd been clapping me on the side of the neck since we were teenagers and he'd needed to remind me he could still take me. He walked off without looking back. I watched him go until he was around the bend in the path, and then I sat down on the bench again and put my boot on.
I had a thousand questions.
If Grant had been able to answer them, he would have. That wasn't his way—holding cards. He'd never been built for it. So, whatever he wasn't telling me, he wasn't telling me because somebody else had asked him not to, or because the answer was bigger than what would fit in a riverside park at nine in the morning.
The other thing was harder to set down.
Only my unit knew I was in Zion.
Not my brothers. Not my mama's nurse. Not the IRS, not the bank, not the woman in Tucson I'd been sleeping with on and off for the better part of a year. Nobody. The unit's whole point was that nobody knew where I was unless they were the ones who'd sent me.
If Grant had walked up to me in that park, somebody had told him where to walk. Somebody with the kind of reach that punched through the kind of compartment I lived inside. That meant whatever was waiting for me in Charleston wasn't loud, wasn't local, and wasn't small.
Deep shit, indeed.
The text came in seven minutes.
It took me three to pack. I'd packed light to begin with—duffel, guitar case, rental keys on the kitchen table, a fifty-dollar bill weighted down with the saltshaker for the cleaning lady. The truck started clean. The drive to the airstrip was a straight shot of two-lane through scrub and red rock that I barely saw.
The plane was sitting on the tarmac when I rolled up. Sleek. Black. The kind of black that looked deeper than other blacks, the kind I'd only ever seen on aircraft I wasn't supposed to know about. The engines were already turning over. Whoever owned it didn't believe in waiting.
A man in a clean white shirt and a navy windbreaker stood at the bottom of the airstairs. Mid-fifties, military bearing, the kind of pilot who'd flown things you could see and things you couldn't.
"Mr. Dane."
"That's me."
"I'm one of two pilots flying you tonight, sir. Come on aboard. Make yourself at home. Galley's stocked—help yourself to anything you want. We'll have you in Charleston as quick as the jetstream will allow."
"Appreciate it."
"Pleasure's ours."
I went up the steps.
The cabin smelled like leather and money. Six wide seats, two facing two facing two, in a tan that looked hand-stitched by people who knew what hand-stitching was. Recessed lights along the ceiling. A galley toward the front with a marble countertop that had no business being in something that flew. I set my duffel down. Set the guitar case beside it, carefully, the way I always did.
I went to the galley.
A row of bottles sat in a wood-lined shelf. Whiskey mostly, some clear liquor I didn't recognize, a single bottle of red. I picked up a heavy crystal glass from the rack above and pulled a bourbon I didn't know off the shelf and read the label.Four Branches.Never heard of it. The cap came off with a satisfying click.
