Chapter 6
The call came at one twenty-one.
Nate was in the truck in the gravel lot, reading Ghost's summary a second time. Three girls since Easter. Davya's phone dark at the on-ramp since Tuesday. A name Trip had pulled off a Windsor manifest that didn't match any cargo anybody could find.
He let the phone ring once to check the screen.
Jude didn't call. Jude texted, lowercase and no punctuation, three thoughts crowding into one line the way his mind ran when he was all right. A call meant Jude couldn't type. A call meant something had gone wrong enough to need a voice.
Nate picked up.
"Hey."
Breathing. Too shallow, too high, working to keep itself quiet.
"Hey. Jude."
A sound that wasn't a word. Then, thin and almost gone: "Nate."
"Where are you?"
It came in pieces. A street, a club, the back of it. Nate had the truck running and in gear before Jude finished, because he knew the club. He'd pulled its floor plan fourteen months ago on a job that had nothing to do with tonight.
He drove fast. Both hands on the wheel. He did not let himself hear Jude's breathing again, because it would not get him there faster and it would put a shake in his hands he could not afford.
The case file slid off the seat when he turned onto Gratiot. He left it on the floor.
The alley ran off the back of the club, lit by one amber bulb over the exit door. The Charger sat at the mouth of it. Rand's. Nate parked behind it and did not think about it yet, because Jude was twenty feet up the bricks and Jude came first.
He came around the hood and into the alley.
Jude was on the ground against the left wall, knees up, one arm crossed over his ribs. Sitting up. Nate took that first, because a man sitting up was a man whose spine was working, and crouched.
He put his hand to Jude's jaw and turned it toward the light.
Left orbital, swelling, maybe splitting at the upper lid.
He checked it with the back of two fingers.
Knuckle, not a heel of a hand. The nose sat straight under his thumb.
Both cheekbones whole. He moved to the shoulders, pressed for evenness, felt along the collarbone, and brought his palm to the left side of Jude's ribs where the arm had been guarding.
"Move your hand," Nate said.
Jude moved it.
Two ribs, maybe three. Jude's breath came shallow and held, the breath of a man who had already found out tonight how deep was too deep.
"Okay," Nate said. He checked the right side. Better. Then the wrist, two fingers at the pulse, and counted. Fast but steady. "You hit your head."
Jude's eyes were tracking. "Twice," he said. What was left of his voice.
"On the ground?"
"Wall first. Then the ground."
Nate got a hand behind Jude's skull. A lump up already, tender enough that Jude hissed through his teeth. Bone hard underneath it, no give. He tipped Jude's face back to the light and watched the pupils. Both moved.
"I'm okay," Jude said.
"I know," Nate said, which meant: I'll tell you when you are.
He heard the footsteps before the voice and had them placed before Rand came around the hood.
"What the -" Rand stopped. He had the show shirt on. He did not have the face of a man who'd found someone he loved bleeding on concrete. His face was running numbers: who's here, what's it cost, what's the play.
"Hey." Rand's voice slid into the careful register. "Is he… what happened?"
"I don't know." Nate stayed crouched. He gave Rand one second and went back to Jude. "How long's he been down here."
"I called as soon as I could get to the phone." Jude had almost nothing left. "Forty minutes. Maybe."
Forty minutes. November. Bricks against his back.
Nate got a hand under Jude's arm.
"We're going," Nate said.
"Going where?" The careful had a working edge to it now. "He should be somewhere he knows. Our place is ten minutes."
Our place.
Nate said nothing to that. He said to Jude, low, "Come on. Lean on me."
Jude leaned. He came up with a sound he was trying not to make. Nate took the weight, arm behind his back, hand braced under the bad ribs, and Jude's arm came over his shoulder and they were standing.
"Hold on." Rand moved into the space between them and the truck. "I don't know who called you, but he needs me. Let me take him."
Nate looked at him.
Rand wasn't afraid of him. Nate had known that a while. Men who were afraid of Nate kept more distance and watched his hands. Rand held eye contact and kept talking, because talking was the thing Rand was good at, and he was good at it right now, even with Jude bleeding between them.
"I'm not stopping you from anything," Rand said. Reasonable. Almost kind. "I just think-" And he reached for Jude.
Jude's weight shifted against Nate's side. A fraction of an inch. Away from the hand.
Nate hit him.
One punch. Knuckles to the jaw, not a full swing.
He kept it short on purpose, because a full swing was a fight and this was not a fight, this was a door closing.
It put Rand back against the Charger. Rand stayed there, holding his face, looking at Nate with something that was not surprise. Nate saw that and kept it.
"Move your car," Nate said.
Rand glared death, then seemed to land on the conclusion that pushing right now wasn't the advantageous play. He moved his car.
Jude was out before they crossed the Lodge. Not sleep, exactly. His body had stopped spending itself and gone still. His head tipped against the window. Nate kept his left hand on the wheel and his right flat on the seat by Jude's knee, near enough to the ribs to feel it if the breathing turned.
It held steady.
The case file was still on the floor of the cab.
He thought about the text from three weeks back, the one that came in at one in the morning and had been half deleted before Jude sent it.
Nate had read it and filed it and not asked. Not asking was the one thing he had that Rand didn't. He'd waited. Jude would walk through his door when he was ready, and holding the door open was not the same as shoving him through it.
He thought about the call Jude had told him about after, weeks ago, the one through the wall. The number too big for a band that played biker parties. Rand's voice gone strange. I know what they are. I know what they do.
A man who owed money like that, to people like that, didn't get beaten in an alley. The people he owed beat what he loved instead, where he'd have to look at it, so he'd remember to pay. Jude was the reminder.
Nate's hand was flat on the seat. He drove.
The light over the safehouse door was burning.
He saw it from the end of the street. He'd sent Marcus three words from the alley and the light was the answer: a bed was being made.
He pulled into the gravel and cut the engine and sat a second.
His chest had been tight since the alley.
a fist closed under the sternum, and it did not open, but it loosened by a finger.
Enough to get out of the truck. Enough to carry Jude in.
He got the passenger door open, got a hand behind Jude's shoulders, woke him part of the way.
"Hey," he said. "We're here."
Jude looked at the building through the windshield. He looked at it a long moment, the brick and the chain-link and the light over the door, and his face did something Nate didn't try to read.
"Okay," Jude said.
They went in.
The house was warm and dark but for the kitchen light and under it the cold mineral smell of old brick the building never lost. Marcus stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug he wasn't drinking from, a sweater pulled on over whatever he slept in.
He didn't look woken. He looked like a man who'd turned the light on and waited.
He looked at Jude. One read, quick and complete, and then his eyes went to Nate and back.
"Second room's ready," Marcus said. That was all.
Nate took him up the stairs. Jude was missing a shoe, gone somewhere in the alley; Nate had noticed it crouching and now matched his pace to whatever Jude's bare foot could manage on the cold runner.
Down the hall, second door on the left. He got it open, got Jude to the bed, sat on the edge while Jude lay back and let his eyes close.
The lamp was low. The river moved black in the window. The room hadn't changed since the last time Jude had used it: a bed, a chair, a lamp. The bed was made the same as he'd left it.
"Ribs are probably cracked," Nate said. "Two, maybe three.
Nothing to do but not move wrong. Ice on the eye when you can stand it.
" He'd brought a cloth of ice up from the kitchen and set it on the nightstand.
"Concussion's mild. But if you wake at two with a headache or your stomach turns, you wake me. "
"Okay," Jude said.
Nate looked at him. Eyes still shut. The concealer on his left arm had worn off between the alley and here, and the marks showed under the lamp: four ovals and a wider one below the thumb, red going toward plum.
A hand's grip, days older than tonight's beating.
Nate had seen it in the alley. He'd said nothing then. He said nothing now.
"You're not going back," Nate said.
He hadn't planned to say it. He'd been holding it in his back teeth for four blocks and it came out plain, no weight laid on it, and he couldn't take it back, and he didn't want to. It was true.
Jude was quiet. His chest rose and fell in the careful, shallow way. The room around them held its breath.
"Okay," Jude said.
Nate looked at the side of his face in the lamplight, the swelling, the jaw, the worn-out set of his mouth. Whatever was going on under it was Jude's. Nate left it there.
"I've got you," Nate said.
Not a question. Not quite a promise. Something he'd known for years and never had reason to say until he was sitting on the edge of a bed he'd carried Jude to.
Jude's throat worked. He didn't open his eyes.
Nate stayed until the breathing dropped out of its careful count into something slower, and when it did, he stood. Turned off the lamp. The room went dark but for the strip of light under the door and the river in the glass.
He went back down. Marcus was where he'd left him, same chair, same mug. He looked up when Nate came in. Nate took the other chair and for a while neither of them said anything.
The light over the door was still burning. Nate could see the edge of it through the kitchen window, yellow against the dark.
That was the whole of what the house did. Turned the light on. Made the bed. Kept the door for whoever needed it kept.
Marcus drank his coffee, or pretended to. Nate looked at the window.
The light held.