Fuck them.
I kept walking.
I wasn't going to do them the courtesy of changing my pace. I wasn't going to do Rebecca Lynn the discourtesy of leading them anywhere I'd just been. They knew where I'd been. They'd been watching the door. They'd watched me come in last night and they'd watched me come out this morning, and the math of why had presumably already been done by somebody in a windowless room with a corkboard.
I made my face do the cheerful thing. I let myself wonder, briefly, whether the version of me Rebecca had seen in the bathtub was the same version of me they had on a long lens.
I hoped not.
Some things were mine.
I cut left at the corner because I'd been heading there, anyway. There was a flower shop two blocks down on King I'd noted yesterday on the walk over—a small place with a striped awning and zinc buckets out front full of things I didn't know the names of. I'd been thinking, somewhere underneath the rest of it, about what Rebecca would do if a dozen of something showed up at The Carolinian.
I'd find out.
I was halfway across the street when the SUV pulled up.
It was the second Tahoe. Tinted windows, but not so tinted I missed the driver—wide-set guy in his fifties, ex-Marine by the cut—and the passenger window came down and there he was, bless his heart.
Special Agent T. Mendez.
Same suit, near as I could tell. Same haircut. The careful tactical neutrality on the face, only a little frayed at the edges from a night that had probably involved less sleep than mine.
I broke into a smile the size of a state highway.
"Special Agent. Buddy."
"Mr. Dane."
"Buddy. I have been racking my brain since six o'clock yesterday morning trying to figure out where I knew you from, and just now, walking down this very street, the answer came to me." I leaned a hand on the door of the SUV like we were old friends and I'd just bumped into him outside a hardware store. "You're one of those Menendez brothers, aren't you?"
"It'sMendez."
"That's what I said."
"It's not what you said."
"Cousin, then. Distant cousin. Same family tree, different branch. Y'all had a rough go of it, and I want you to know I didnot judge. The mommy-and-daddy stuff. Whew. That's a lot for any boy. I'm glad to see the FBI's been a comfort to you."
The driver, the ex-Marine, did not move his face. I respected that. A man who'd been in the service long enough to keep his face flat through other people's foolishness was a man I'd have a beer with.
Mendez did not have the same training.
"Mr. Dane," he said, slow, like he was speaking to a child who'd been warned. "You were told to leave town."
"Was I?" I tilted my head. "Let me guess.Or else."
He nodded, exactly once.
I could see, in that nod, thator elsewas the line he'd been given to deliver and that he was used to people receiving the line the way people received lines like that—a small change in posture, a small drying of the throat, a moment in which they began to recalculate their day.
I wasn't most people.
For all I cared, Mendez could take his badge and shove it up his puckered, Bureau-issued asshole. But I didn't say that. I didn't say it because what I was going to say next required him to still be sitting up straight when I said it.
A car a few feet behind the Tahoe gave the courtesy honk. The kind of honk Charleston drivers gave each other. Polite, brief, more reminder than complaint.
I lifted a hand to the driver—one second, sir, I appreciate it—and turned back to Mendez.
