I let him steer me in. There wasn't much else to do.
The inside of that house hit me harder than the outside. A great hall that opened up two full stories, a staircase that split and curved up both sides of it like something out of an old picture, a chandelier hanging down through the middle throwing light across a floor laid in stone. Oil paintings the size of barn doors. The air smelled of beeswax and gun oil, an honest pairing if there ever was one. Money and violence, side by side, neither one apologizing for the other.
Everywhere, people moving with purpose. This wasn't a home. Homes don't hum like that.
Tommy walked me back through it and down a stairwell to a lower level, and the old grandeur fell away to something clean and modern and bright—and then we were in a clinic. A real one. Better than some field hospitals I'd bled in. Exam tables, monitors, a glass-fronted cabinet of supplies, the cold, clean smell of a place built to put men back together.
Two of them came at me in black scrubs, a man and a woman, both of them carrying that unhurried competence you only get from doing it under fire.
"On the table," the woman said. Not unkind. Just done asking nicely a long time ago.
"I'll be back," Tommy said. "Soon as they clear you. We've got a lot to get into." And he was gone.
They worked me over like professionals, which is to say like people who'd been lied to by hard men a thousand timesand had quit taking our word for anything. The cut on my arm wasn't deep—they cleaned it, taped it, told me it wouldn't need stitching. Then they ran me head to toe. Lights in my eyes, fingers down my neck, hands pressing my ribs, the whole catechism.What hurts? Rate it. Did you black out? Track my finger.
I told them the truth. That's a thing operators learn slow and the smart ones learn for good—you don't lie to the doc, because the doc is the one keeping you in the fight.Arm's sore, I said.Got a headache, not a bad one. Ears rang till about ten minutes ago and now they've quit. Outside of that, I'm green.
They didn't take it on faith. They confirmed every word of it with their own hands and eyes first. Only then did the man give me a short nod, the closest thing to a thumbs-up that kind gives, and another armed fella appeared in the doorway to walk me back up.
And I'll say it again because it kept being true: the place was vast. We went back up through halls and past rooms and I lost the count of doors. You could've quartered a battalion in that house and had wings left over.
My escort left me in the kitchen. Which was where I found my brother with his fist in a plate of bacon.
He had a strip of it halfway to his mouth and froze when he saw me, then grinned around it, caught dead to rights. "Cook went down to the cellar for something," he said, chewing. "Woman’s got no idea what I do to a kitchen left unguarded."
I felt something in my chest come loose for the first time since the studio.
"You remember the Twix?" I said.
He started laughing before I'd finished saying it.
Because we both went straight there at once—September, the bag of Twix our mother bought on sale for Halloween two months early and hid up in the high cabinet, and how all seven ofus found it, anyway, and how we hauled it out to the barn and sat in the hay and ate the entire thing, every last one, fingers gone gold and brown with chocolate and caramel. The look on her face when she found the wrappers. A solid week of extra chores apiece, and worse than that, the shame of having to pool our money and buy a replacement bag before the trick-or-treaters came, so the whole town wouldn't know the Dane boys had eaten Halloween.
"Wyatt cried," Tommy said, wiping his eye, "because he thought you were gonna let him take the fall."
"I would've, too. He was the slowest. Easiest to catch."
We laughed like that for a minute, two grown killers in a stranger's grand kitchen, and for that minute we were just boys in a barn again with chocolate on our hands and nothing in the world after us.
Then it ran down, the way those things do, and the weight came back into the room.
"All right," I said. "Who were they?"
I pulled out my phone and brought up the photos—the two faces, slack and gone in the streetlight—and handed it across. Tommy thumbed through them, and his jaw set, and he grunted low.
"Yeah," he said. "About like we figured."
"Talk to me. These the same trouble you called me about?"
He set the phone down on the counter and was quiet a moment, working it, fitting pieces together behind his eyes.
"There's a man," he said. "Name of Craine. Dominic Craine." He said it like the name tasted bad. "Couple of run-ins, each one worse than the last. And what he's doing—what he's set up to do—is make it look like we're in a shooting war with a militia outfit out of West Virginia. Backwoods boys, the kind that mail-order their politics. Make it look like Dominion Hall and a bunch ofhill country zealots are settling some turf thing with bodies in the street."
"Are you?"
"Course not." A flash of the old grin, gone fast. "Weren't anyway. But this here's the third time they've come at us, and they're getting bolder about it, and now they've gone and pulled you into it your first night in town." He shook his head. "I'm sorry for that, Brock. Truly."
I shrugged. A man gets ambushed in an American city, you handle it and move on. "What's the play? We hit the militia?"
