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Three minutes was a long time.
“Sixty seconds,” she said eventually.
“You said three minutes.”
“I did. It’s been four.” She cut the last strip of tape with her teeth, which I have told her twice not to do. “You didn’t move once.”
Then I went outside, because it was that or keep standing there.
The lot was cold for October. I’d been out there long enough for my knee to start talking when boots came across the gravel behind me and stopped three feet off my shoulder.
“You held that four minutes,” Dread said.
“She said three.”
“I know what she said.” He stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets and his breath fogging and didn’t say anything for a while. That was the thing about Dread. He’d wait all night. “I’d have left it another day. She was right and I was being conservative, and I’ll be telling her that myself so don’t you go doing it for me.”
“I know.”
“She had me pull a Penrose out of an eight-day-old gunshot wound in a room with a television going and a man cracking jokes at her.”
“I was standing right Goddamn there, Doc.”
“I know you were.” He looked at me then. “You’ve got the hands for it.”
My jaw worked once. That was all it did.
He didn’t push. He just stood there in the cold and let the sentence sit exactly where he’d put it. Then he nodded once and walked back toward the clubhouse. The door opened, and the television got loud and then quiet.
I stayed out there with my hands hanging at my sides.
Luck was a shop rag and duct tape and ninety miles an hour with one palm flat on a chest. Luck was a pulse that held when it had no business holding. I’d been filing it under luck since I was twenty-nine because luck is a thing that happens to you, and if it happens to you, then it isn’t yours, and if it isn’t yours, then nobody gets to hand you a man’s life and expect you to keep it.
What she’d done in that common room wasn’t luck.
And I’d had two fingers on a man’s shoulder and hadn’t moved, and nobody in that room had thought it was worth mentioning, including me, until right now.
I’d been wrong at twenty-nine. I’d been wrong for twenty years after that, and I’d built a whole life on top of being wrong, and the life was still standing, and that was somehow the worst part of it.
I stood out there until my fingers went numb, and I still didn’t have an answer for him.
* * *
Fox’s office had one lamp and a cigar he hadn’t lit in the four years I’d known him to keep it there.
I shut the door. The click was loud in a room that small.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Patch.”
I sat.
“Kirill Popov made contact.” He put both hands flat on the desk. “Text message. Brazil’s phone.”
“Brazil’s personal phone.”
