A pair of cops were down the curb a ways, but their hands were full—some poor woman in one of those big conversion vans was getting the standard speech,ma'am you can't park here, ma'am you have to keep it moving,and they were locked into it. Good.
But there was a porter. Red cap, vest, a luggage cart, and he clocked me the second that blue spaceship of a car nosed up to his curb where it had no business being. He started toward me with his mouth already opening.
I got out and tossed him the fob. He caught it on reflex.
"Do me a favor," I said. "Take her for a spin. Keep her warm for me."
He looked down at the fob. Looked at the car. Looked back over his shoulder to the spot he was supposed to be standing in, the rules he was supposed to be enforcing, and then back at two million dollars of armored supercar idling in front of him with the keys in his hand. He gulped. And he nodded.
He folded himself into the driver's seat like it might bite him. I was already turning away, already scanning, working the crowdthe way I work any field—garage exits, crosswalks, the flow of bodies, looking for one dark head in a sea of strangers and praying I wasn't too late.
And I got lucky.
There she was. Coming out of the parking garage on foot, bag over her shoulder, that walk I'd have known anywhere—chin up, shoulders square, a queen crossing her own court. And a step behind her, carrying a bag in each hand, the lean, well-dressed shape from Craine's little video. Daniel Whitaker. The two of them, threading toward the terminal doors, ordinary as any travelers on any Sunday.
My chest did something complicated and I shoved it down.Later. Get to her first, sort the feelings never.
I drew breath to call her name across the lane?—
—and caught the movement at the edge of my eye.
A station wagon. An old one, genuinely old, wood paneling peeling off the sides in long curls, the kind of car you don't see anymore, coughing and lurching its way up the arrivals lane on an engine that was dying out loud. Full of men. Four, maybe five, packed into it shoulder to shoulder.
And that was the thing that stopped my heart, before my head had even caught up: a car pulls up, the people in cars are looking toward thedoors.At thecurb.At the spot where they’re trying to park and get out. They lookout.
These men weren't looking out. They were all lookingahead.Forward. Fixed on one point down the lane, every head in that wagon turned the same direction, the way men look when they've found what they came to find.
I followed the line of all those eyes.
It ran straight to Mary Catherine.
Beards. Hunter's ballcaps, that flat, hill-country orange and camo. Hard, sunbaked faces I'd seen the cousins of what felt liketwo hours ago on a residential street, going through their empty pockets. The same breed. The same sterile, sent-clean look.
I was already moving—already sprinting, low and flat-out, the cart and the curb and the startled travelers blurring past—when the windows came down and the muzzles came up out of that dying wood-paneled wagon, black and certain, swinging toward the woman I'd have burned the world down for.
And the airport came apart.
29
MARY CATHERINE
The parking garage smelled like oil and concrete and the chill of a structure that never quite caught the sun.
Daniel had both bags. I had my phone and my boarding pass and the restless, unfinished feeling of a woman who had left something important unsaid, which was accurate in more ways than I'd been able to fully count yet.
We walked the crosswalk from the garage to the terminal in the ordinary way of Sunday travelers. I was already composing the call I was going to make from the gate—what I would say to Brock, how I would explain the things I'd folded up and put away, how I was going to have that conversation like a person who'd learned something about honesty in the last forty-eight hours.
I was about halfway across when something made me slow.
Not a sound, exactly. Or not a specific sound—more like a change in the quality of the air. A shift in the ambient noise of the arrivals lane to my left, something that didn't belong in the ordinary grammar of drop-offs and pickups. A voice raised with a particular urgency. An engine sound that was wrong—laboring, coughing, not the smooth pull of a car finding a curb but something older and more ragged and moving with an intention that prickled the back of my neck.
I stopped walking.
Daniel, two steps ahead, turned. “What is it?”
I looked left. Just traffic. Just the usual organized flow of it. A porter at the curb.
Nothing.
