The streets ran narrow and old, single lanes choked between buildings that had been standing since before my country had a name for itself. Pastel houses stacked shoulder to shoulder, pink and butter-yellow and a faded Confederate gray, every one turned sideways to the street with long covered porches running down the flank, shuttered and shaded and built for a kind of slow living I'd never had the temperament for. Wrought iron everywhere—gates, balconies, fences worked into shapes that must've taken some dead man a year apiece. Window boxes spilling flowers. Live oaks older than the houses, hung with gray moss that drifted when the air moved, which it barely did.
I read it the way I read everything.
A nightmare, tactically. The lanes were too tight to maneuver a vehicle and too straight to escape one—you'd be boxed in a heartbeat, no shoulder, no turning room, walls of brick and stucco hemming you on both sides. The piazzas made fine shooting blinds; I noted a dozen I wouldn't want pointed at me. Rooflines stepped and pitched at angles that gave a man with patience and a long gun more hides than I could count in a slow roll-by. The carriage horses clopping tourists down the cobbles would mask the sound of damn near anything. And over all of it, steeples. The town was lousy with churches, white spires standing up over the rooftops in every direction like the place had been built by people who needed a lot of forgiving.
Pretty. I'd give it that. Pretty the way a thing is pretty when old money's had two hundred years to comb its hair. But pretty doesn't move me much, and I wasn't here for the architecture.
I wound through the peninsula for the better part of an hour, learning the grid, marking the water—the harbor flashing at the ends of the streets, salt and something darker under it, a low, rotten green smell off the marsh mud that I'd later learn the locals called pluff and said like they loved it. I marked the bridges. The choke points. The two ways out that weren't bridges. When I'd built enough of the map in my head to move through this place in the dark, I let some of the wire go out of my shoulders, found a curb on a quiet run of brick, and parked.
I yawned hard enough to crack my jaw. Eighteen hours of terminals and a night I hadn't slept. My body sent up the one demand it always sends up when the running stops.
Coffee.
I was out and walking when the bells started.
They came from a big church a couple blocks back, a stone pile bigger than the rest, and they didn't ring so much astoll—deep iron notes rolling out over the rooftops and down throughthe brick under my boots. Wedding bells, or close enough. Somebody getting hitched on a pretty Saturday in the Holy City. Good for them.
I found the coffee by smell before I found the door.
It wasn't much—a slot of a place wedged between a shuttered antique shop and a wall, no sign worth the name, a hand-lettered card in the window that said CASH ONLY. Inside was four tables and a counter and a woman behind it who looked like she'd been beautiful in some other decade and had decided to let it go on her own terms. Seventy, maybe. Silver hair pinned up careless. Brown arms, a man's watch, eyes that took my measure in about a second and a half and filed me undernot a problemwithout much interest either way. She looked like she'd buried two husbands and a war and made better coffee than either of them deserved. Hemingway would've married her and written her badly.
"Coffee," I said.
"It comes with food or it doesn't come." She was already pouring.
"Then, it comes with food."
She set down a cup black as a creek bottom and, a minute later, a plate—egg fried hard, thick-cut bacon, the whole thing folded into bread that had been on a griddle. I hadn't ordered it. It was exactly what I'd have ordered. I took the table by the window out of habit, back to the wall, eyes to the glass, and I drank.
The coffee was good. Better than good. The first swallow went down and hit the dead spot in me and lit a clean fire there. For about ninety seconds, with bells still rolling outside and bacon on my tongue, I came as near to peace as I get.
Then, a blaze of white cut the corner of my eye, and the ninety seconds were over.
Across the street, standing in front of a closed storefront like she'd been set down there by a passing tornado, was a bride.
A whole bride. Veil, train, the works—a long fall of ivory pooling on dirty Charleston brick, silk catching the sun so bright it hurt to look straight at. She had her chin up and her eyes going hard down the street one way, then the other, the way you look when you're waiting on a ride that's late and your whole life is riding on it showing.
What the hell?
I set the sandwich down.
She glanced back over her shoulder—back toward the big church, toward those bells—and something crossed her face that I knew. Knew in my gut before my head caught up. It wasn't bride nerves. It wasn't cold feet. It was the look of an animal that's found the gap in the fence and can't decide if the open is a trick. I'd worn that look. I'd put it on other men.
The church door swung open up the block.
She bolted.
Didn't hesitate, didn't gather herself—just grabbed two fistfuls of that enormous skirt and ran, ducking off the street and down a slot between two buildings a half second before the men spilling out of those doors could've laid eyes on her. Gone. A bride sprinting full-out in all that silk, vanishing into an alley like a ghost in reverse.
I would've laughed. I swear to God, I would have, except for that look. Except for the desperation in it, real as a wound.
"Fuck," I said, to nobody.
I laid a twenty on the table and lifted a hand to the woman behind the counter. She gave me a single, slow nod, unbothered, like she'd watched this exact thing happen a hundred times and would watch it a hundred more.
The bride wasn't hard to track. A woman in ivory silk doesn't exactly melt into a crowd. She'd gone to ground in the cutbetween buildings, then out the far end onto another lane. She'd made it a block, no more, hobbling now on heels that brick was never kind to, when I came up behind her at a distance a man uses when he doesn't want to scare somebody.
"Hey," I called. Easy. Low. "Can I help you?"
