I was not afraid of the same things anymore.
I pulled out my phone, found the number, and pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.
It rang twice.
"This is Diane."
"Hi," I said. "This is Mary Catherine Donovan. You called me about representation." I looked out at the water. "I was wrong about the timing. I'd like to talk, if you're still interested."
A pause. Then, warmly: "I've been hoping you'd call."
I smiled at the Atlantic.
"Good," I said. "Me, too."
16
BROCK
Iwent down the stairs with the warmth of her still on me and carried it out into the dark like a coal cupped in my hands.
It was a strange thing, leaving that room. I'd walked out of a thousand places in my life and never once turned to look at one. I turned and looked at this one—up at the lit window over the frame shop, the shape of her moving behind the glass—before I made myself face front and put my mind back on the job.
The car was a black SUV idling at the curb, glass too dark to see through. A man sat behind the wheel, and he had the look. I'd have made him in a crowd of a thousand—the economy of him, the way his eyes worked the street while his hands stayed loose, a man who'd been where I'd been and come back wrong in the same ways. He thumbed the locks. I got in the passenger side.
"Darren," he said, and put out a hand.
"Brock." I shook it. Dry grip, hard, brief.
He pulled off the curb smooth and unhurried.
"Where we headed?"
"Dominion Hall."
The name meant nothing to me yet. A place I was being taken, that was all. I filed it and looked at the car instead, because a man tells you what he is by what he keeps within reach. There was a pistol clipped up under the steering column where his right hand could find it without looking. And on the floorboard in back, riding loose on the mat, a shotgun.
"You expecting trouble?" I said.
Darren grinned without it touching his eyes. "Always."
We took our second turn off the main drag onto a narrow residential lane, dark houses and parked cars down both sides?—
—and the world hit us from the left.
A car came out of a side street with no lights and put its whole front end into Darren's door. Engine roar, the bang of metal giving, and we went sideways across the lane in a shriek of tires, shoved broadside until we slammed a parked sedan and stopped hard enough to rattle my teeth in my skull.
My head clipped the pillar. I got my right arm up bracing and felt it bark against the dash, a deep bruising hit, but I was awake, I was tracking. No airbags—old vehicle, or somebody had pulled them, and that was luck, because an airbag in my face right then would've been a half second I didn't have.
Darren wasn't tracking. He was slumped into the wreck of his door, blood sheeting down the side of his head, his left side caved where the other car had come through.
Then, the shooting started.
Muzzle flash out of the dark and the windshield came apart, rounds punching through where our heads had just been, glass raining into my lap. They were hunting us inside the car, raking it, trying to find the men in the seats.
I moved.
Snatched the pistol from under the column, came up just enough to put rounds back through the broken windshieldtoward the flashes—not aimed, not yet, just enough noise to make them duck and buy me a breath. With my other hand, I worked Darren's belt buckle, popped it, got a fist in his collar and hauled him down low into the footwell, under the line of the fire. He came heavy and limp. I dragged him as flat as the wreck would let me.
