I stood there with my thumb over the send button.
I sent it.
Then I kept walking, in the cold, in the dark, with the church bells somewhere behind me counting an hour I wasn't ready to name.
Maybe Clayton was right.
26
TOMMY
The first mile, I had a tail.
Not an obvious one. Whoever Craine had on me had been toldbe there but don't be seen, and the man working the assignment was good enough to keep a quarter mile back on a Charleston sidewalk and use the foot traffic the way people who'd been to that particular school used foot traffic.
He blended. He matched my pace without seeming to. He picked his sightlines off the parked cars and the corner storefronts and the angle of the sun coming low over the harbor.
He'd been good. Just not better than me.
I clocked him at the first turn, confirmed him at the second, and ran the next three blocks at a pace designed to test him without telling him I'd made him. He held it. By the fourth block he was sweating, but he was holding it. Fitness wasn't the limit of his game. He was an actual athlete on top of being an actual operator, which told me Craine had upgraded the surveillance personnel sometime in the last twenty-four hours.
Fine.
I let him hold it.
Then, I let him go.
I didn't lose him cleverly. I didn't dive into a coffee shop with two exits or cut through a hotel lobby. I just opened up. Operators in three vehicles and a man in a windbreaker had told me yesterday morning that Craine wanted me toknowI was being watched. So, today, on foot, in the Charleston cold, with the harbor on my left and the historic district sliding past on my right, I let his man see me run away from him at a speed his man could not match. I gave him the message I wanted Craine to have, which wasI am still the kind of man who does this for a living, and your guy is not.
By the second mile, the sidewalk behind me was clear.
By the third mile, my head had started to clear with it.
The world settled on a run the way it always settled. The body found the rhythm—stride, breath, stride, breath—and the brain rode the rhythm, and somewhere between the chemicals my legs were producing and the cold air going in through my nose, the noise turned down enough that I could hear myself think.
Craine.
Ask Dominion Hall about your father.
I ran with it for a long time.
There were two possibilities. The first was the obvious one. The thing was true. My father was alive. He had been hiding for years. The man who had sat me down in a parlor and talked of family knew where he was, and he had not told me, and the not-telling was either a thing Lucas had been instructed to keep from me or a thing Lucas himself had learned only after Wyatt and Grant had shown up at Dominion Hall with the same question I was now carrying.
The second possibility was that the thing was a play. Craine had nothing concrete on Dominion Hall and he knew it. If he could get me to walk into Lucas's parlor accusing the family of harboring my father, he could split me from the only structurestanding between me and his investigation. Brothers turned on each other faster than uncles or strangers. Tommy Dane—wedge product. Cheap and effective, if it worked.
Both were possible.
Bothplayed outthe same way, near as I could tell.
Either Lucas knew something and would lie to me, in which case I'd see it on his face. Or Lucas knew something and would tell me, in which case I'd have a piece of information I needed. Or Lucas knew nothing, in which case I'd have a face on him I could trust the next time I needed to read it.
The bait was the bait. I knew it was the bait. Craine knew I knew. The question was whether the meal underneath the hook was real.
There was only one way to find out, and it was to take the bite.
That was the thing about being a maverick. Mavericks didn't avoid traps. Mavericks walked into traps with their eyes open and a plan for the second after the trap closed. Half the work I'd done in my career had been inside boxes set for me by men who'd thought they were the ones holding the key. The ones who thought they’d walk away thinking they'd outsmarted me had usually never walked away at all.
I ran all day.
