Chapter 2
ANGEL
Iput my gloves on at the corner and roll my shoulders loose. That’s what I do before church, before a fight, before anything worth doing.
Bishop’s exact words were stand down. The war is over. We won. Darling is home, the coastline is protected forever. Victor Hale is a beaten man sitting on land he can’t build on, no matter how much money he has. Let the lawyers dance on the grave.
Bishop is my president and my brother. He’s right about almost everything.
He’s wrong about this.
Darling is home but she still flinches when a door closes too hard. She’s resilient but Bones and I both know what those weeks took out of her. And the bastard who made it happen still breathes easily thirty-two floors above this street. I doubt he has once looked over his shoulder.
So today Victor Hale and I are going to have a constructive talk. I’m wearing the cut on purpose. An anonymous beating is a mugging. This is payback. I want him to know exactly who, and exactly why, and I want him to carry both answers around in his rebuilt jaw for the rest of his life.
The lobby empties out after the lunch time rush. Skeleton security, one guard at the desk, a service elevator with a camera I already know is a decade old. I’ve walked this in my head forty times.
I’m a few feet from the doors when they open.
A girl comes out first, then a suit. A driver peels off toward a black limo double-parked with its hazards on.
I recognize her face before I remember why I know it. It’s in Hale’s file. Sloane Hale. His niece. Victor takes her with him like an accessory that makes him look good. Corporate doll. I wrote it under her picture, and moved on to people who mattered.
The suit next to her is expensive. The man inside it is past fifty, gone thick through the middle. I know the kind … a heavyweight gone soft. Money, but not clean money.
And her. She isn’t walking with them. She’s being walked. Hands empty, no purse, no phone. A woman leaving work at this time of day carries half her life in one hand and her keys in the other. She carries nothing.
I take a photo of the plate on instinct. Old habit. I don’t care what Bishop says, everything Victor Hale touches goes in my folder.
The driver rounds the hood and opens the rear door. I watch her understand it in real time, the geometry of her situation. The fat man on her left with his eyes on traffic, the driver with his body half turned …
She runs.
Smart girl.
She’s fast, too. Flat shoes, no bag, coat snapping behind her like a flag. She takes the corner into the side street at a full sprint without one look over her shoulder. Looking costs a stride.
The fat man doesn’t chase her. Men like him stopped running ten years and forty pounds ago. He doesn’t shout either. No scene, no name yelled down a public street. He says one word to the driver and points.
The driver goes. He’s fast for his size.
And now I have a decision with a clock on it.
The lobby is right there. The talk I wanna have is thirty-two floors up but the girl …
I turn away from all of it and go after the girl.
The side street doglegs left past a loading bay.
I don’t follow the driver. I cut through the alley one block short, the one the delivery guys use, because a running man watches what’s behind him and never what’s beside him.
Rain is coming down soft now, the sort of rain Seattle can keep up for a week. Good, it kills the sound of my boots.
I come out of the cut ahead of him and let him run into me.
He’s a pro. I’ll give him this much. Most men lose half a second when an adversary appears out of a wall.
He loses nothing. He plants, drops his weight, and his hand goes to his right hip in the same motion, so instead of hitting him I have to smother the draw, both hands on his wrist, driving him into the brick before the gun clears.
It scrapes out of the holster and skates away under a parked van.
After it’s gone, he doesn’t lose his shit. He knows how to work up close. He splits my lip with the crown of his head. Blood on my cut. Now I’m annoyed.
He swings wide once, which is a mistake. I step through the swing, put an elbow into his temple, and follow him down with two more he doesn’t need. He’s out before the rain finds his face.
He noticed, though. In the clinch, up close, I watched his eyes crawl across my chest and read the patches. Thunder Bastards. VP. He’ll wake up in twenty minutes with a headache and a story. By tomorrow someone in whatever outfit signs his checks is going to hear a Thunder Bastard took Hale’s girl.
Future problem.
I fish the pistol out from under the van, strip the mag, rack the slide, and feed all of it to the storm drain. I don’t leave armed men behind me, even sleeping ones.
Then I go find her.
The dogleg ends in a cul-de-sac, a dead pocket between the backs of three buildings. Brick on three sides. A fire escape with the ladder racked ten feet up. A steel door with a chain through the handles, padlock rusted shut. One dumpster against the far wall, city issue, lid down.
No girl.
Except the rain is doing me a favor. Every surface in this pocket is beaded wet and untouched, and the dumpster lid is sitting a half inch proud on one corner, propped on a fold of cardboard so it can’t slam.
On the lip of it, printed in the grime, there’s half a handprint. Fingers pointing out, toward me.
Nobody leaves a handprint facing out throwing trash away. You leave it climbing in.
Here’s my Doll. Porcelain and silk in the photographs, posed on a shelf next to a man who collects pretty objects and breaks the rest.
She’s some smart doll. She read the street in one second flat, outran a professional, and picked the only hiding spot in a dead end with a lid she rigged not to slam. I put my boot on the wheel rail, take the corner of the lid, and lift.
She’s knee-deep in flattened cardboard with a broken piece of pallet wood raised in both hands, mascara to her chin, rain and worse in her hair, not screaming, measuring the swing.
“How did a corporate doll like you get into so much trouble?”
The pallet wood stays up. Her arms are shaking. Her chin isn’t. Under the fear, someone stubborn is looking out at me, deciding whether I’m an escape door or another wall to slam against. I stand very still and let her decide. It’s never wise to reach for someone that scared until they lean.
Then I break my own rule. I hold out my hand.
I came downtown today for Victor Hale’s blood. Instead I’m standing in the rain over a garbage bin, offering my hand to what could be the last piece of his shiny dead empire.
Works for me.