Ihad her one more time before the world took me back.
I couldn't help it. I looked at her lying there in the gold light off the window, dark hair spread across the arm of that beat-up sofa, and I could not make myself believe she was real or mine or that a man like me got to have a thing like this even for an afternoon. So, I reached for her again, and she came to me, and we didn't say a word.
We just took each other. No talk, no soft jokes this time, none of the slow learning. Something more like need stripped down to the bone—both of us moving like this was the last cup of water before a long walk into dry country. And maybe, it was. Maybe some animal part of me already knew the desert was waiting on the other side of that door, knew this was the drink you take deep because you don't know when the next one comes. I held her like that. Like a man memorizing a thing he's about to lose. I didn't let myself think the wordlose.I just drank.
After, in the quiet, my phone buzzed against the floorboards.
I reached down and got it. Tommy.
Got a lead on Craine. Call when you're clear.
I read it twice.
"I have to go," I said. She was tucked against my side, warm, her hand flat on my chest. "It's the FBI thing. My brother's got a lead. I'm going to go fix this, Mary Catherine. All of it—your father, the whole mess. I'm going to put it right."
She went still under my hand. Then she pushed up on one elbow and looked at me, and her mouth opened like there was something behind it—something she meant to say, something with weight—and then it closed again. She didn't say it. Whatever it was, she folded it back up and put it away.
I didn't read into it. God, help me, I didn't. I figured she was scared for me, the way people get scared when a man they care about walks toward trouble. I had a soft spot a mile wide for the idea that somebody was scared formefor once.
"Don't worry," I said. "You hear? I do this for a living. I'm coming back."
She gave me a small smile that didn't quite reach.
And because I'm a fool, and because I wanted that smile to reach, I put a period on it the only way I knew how—bent my head and kissed her at the mouth and then worked my way down, throat and breastbone and belly, slow, until I'd settled myself right back between her thighs.
She laughed and squirmed and got a hand in my hair. "Easy, tiger. I'm sensitive." She tugged me back up, breathless. "We'll have all the time in the world for that. Later."
"You promise?"
And there it was again. That look. The one where something rose up behind her eyes and pressed at the back of her teeth and didn't come out. It crossed her face and was gone.
"Yes," she said. "I promise."
I dressed fast—jeans, shirt, the pistol at the small of my back—and kissed her once more at the door, quick, and went downthe stairs with the taste of her still on me. I did not know it was the last easy moment I'd get for a long while.
The Bugatti was where I'd left it. I dropped in and fired it up and Tommy's call came through before I'd pulled off the curb.
"Tell me," I said.
"Craine called." My brother's voice was wrong. Careful. Flattened out, every word set down like he was watching where he stepped. Not Tommy at all. "He wants a meet."
"With us?"
"Withyou.Just you. He was specific." A pause. "I'll send the location. We'll cover you—we've got birds up and eyes on the ground before you ever get there. But he asked for you alone, and right now we want to know what he wants bad enough to give it to him."
I didn't love any piece of that. But I trusted my brother more than I trusted the situation, and that had to be enough.
"Send it," I said.
The pin dropped a minute later. A little park on the ragged edge of the city, hard up against a rundown apartment complex, the kind of place with more boarded windows than lit ones. I read the ground off the satellite view before I ever got there and didn't like it—open in the middle, blind on three sides, sightlines from every one of those dark windows. A textbook spot to kill a man. If Craine wanted me dead, this was where he'd do it. Tommy's birds and eyes were the only reason I drove toward it instead of away.
It took close to thirty minutes to get there. Thirty minutes where I tried to separate myself from what I’d just done in that studio.
I parked and got out and felt the back of my neck come alive. And the thought slid in sideways, unwelcome:is he watching this, too? My father, somewhere, with his own birds and his own eyes?I shoved it down hard. That way lay madness, andmadness gets you killed in a spot like this.Put it out of your head. Focus. One problem at a time.
Craine was sitting on a bench in the middle of it, a to-go coffee cup in one hand, for all the world, a man enjoying a gray afternoon.
"Mr. Dane," he said.
