Chapter 10
Rand started texting on the sixth day.
Nate knew before Jude told him, because Jude went quiet in a particular way that afternoon, the quiet of a man rationing himself, and because Jude set his phone face-down on the kitchen table and then could not stop looking at the back of it.
Nate had watched Jude not-look at a phone before. He knew what that looked like.
"He found my number," Jude said. He did not pick the phone up. "I changed it. He still found it somehow. I guess one of our band mates must have given it to him, or he threatened it out of them."
"Can I see?"
Jude slid it across. Nate read them the way he read a manifest, standing at the counter with his coffee going cold, flat.
Then, an hour later:
Then, two hours after that, the register switched all the way over, the way Nate had been told it switched:
The same three moves Jude had described through a wall once. The plea, the jealousy, the threat dressed as devotion. Nate had read enough intercepts in six years to know coercion when it was written down. This was written down.
"You don't have to answer any of it," Nate said. He set the phone back down face-down, the way Jude had. "You don't owe him a read conformation."
"I know." Jude's hands were flat on the table. "I keep almost answering anyway. Just to make it stop. That's the part I can't-" He stopped. "He's very good at making it my job to make it stop."
"He's had practice," Nate said. "So have you. We're going to get you out of practice. Behavior becomes ingrained, especially with abuse like that. The trick is to create new response pathways. That takes time. But, now is as good a time to start as any, and some day… the new thought path will be the deeper one and you won’t even notice. It’s the same work everyone does when dismantling that kind of abuse. You’re not, and never have been, alone. "
Rand showed up two days later, at the load-out.
Hollow Bright had a Tuesday rehearsal at a rented space off Mack, the kind of cinderblock room with egg-crate foam on the walls and a roll-up door, and Jude had to go because the band was the band and Kit had asked.
Jude would not leave Kit holding the fort alone, especially if Rand was going to be unhinged. It wasn’t their responsibility.
Nate drove him. He had learned, watching Marcus, that the most protective move usually looked like the least, so he leaned on the truck in the lot with a coffee and read the street while Jude was inside, and when the Charger pulled in he was already off the truck and moving without hurry.
Rand got out fast. He had the look of a man who had rehearsed a scene in the car. "Jude!" he called, at the door, not at Nate. "Jude, come on, just talk to me for one-"
"He's working," Nate said. He kept his voice level and his expression placid, leaning into the fact that at 6’3, he towered over Rand’s five ten.
Rand turned. He took Nate in, the size of him, and Nate watched the calculation run behind his hard blue eyes, the same one from the alley: who's this, what's it cost, what's the play. Rand was not afraid of him. Rand was never afraid of the right things. What a fucking tool.
"You're the guy." Rand smiled. It was a good smile.
Nate could see exactly how it had worked on a nineteen-year-old in a Chicago green room.
"You're the one who's got him. Look, man, I don't know what he told you, but Jude's not- he gets confused, he gets in his head, he makes himself the victim of stuff that-"
"I'm going to stop you there," Nate said, and did not raise his voice, and Rand stopped, because some animal part of him heard the flat in it even if the rest of him didn't. "I'm not going to argue with you about him.
He's not a thing we're negotiating over.
You came to a place he works and you're making a scene at his job, and you're going to get back in the car. "
"Or what?" Still smiling. But he'd taken a half-step back without knowing he'd done it.
Behind Rand, across the lot, Zain had come around the corner of the building with his hands in his jacket pockets, unhurried, and stopped at a distance that was not quite close and not quite far.
He was not doing anything. He was just there, and then Jack was there too, in the doorway behind Jude, the quietest man Nate knew, and the biggest, doing nothing at all with great attention.
Nobody had called them. That was the house.
You did not have to call it; it arrived.
Rand counted the lot the way he counted everything. Three of them now, and the math had stopped being good.
"This isn't over," Rand said to Jude, past Nate, and there was a half-second where the charm dropped clean off his face and what showed underneath was not heartbreak. It was somebody doing sums. He may need him, Ghost had said, and Nate filed the look where he filed everything.
Rand got back in the car.
Nate's hands were open at his sides. He had not closed them once. He counted that, privately, as the harder win than the alley.
Ghost found the link that night, and did not want to say it.
Ghost laid it out carefully, the way you walk someone toward a stair in the dark. They were at the table after the house had gone quiet, the laptop open, three phones, the manifest printout that had been living under Nate's coffee mug for a week now gone soft at the folds.
"The promoter name on the Windsor manifest," Ghost said.
"The one that doesn't match a business. I ran the LLC it pays into.
It's a shell, three deep, but the second layer has a management company on it that books talent for the all-ages circuit.
Small stuff. Bands nobody's heard of." He turned the laptop.
"And one band somebody has. They cut a check to Hollow Bright's account in March.
Routed through Rand's name, because Rand handles the band's money. "
The kitchen was very quiet. The radiator ticked.
Nate looked at the screen. He read the line twice, the way he read everything twice. Rand's name, a routing number, a date in March, one layer above a shell that sat one layer below a manifest that moved equipment that wasn't equipment across the bridge to a place children stopped being findable.
And here was the part Nate would turn over later, on the nights he let himself: he saw it, and he did not let it connect.
He saw Rand's name. He saw the manifest. He saw the bridge and the missing teens.
He had every piece on the one screen in front of him, laid out by the best intelligence man he knew, and his mind did the thing it had spent six years learning to do, the thing the residency and the Army had drilled into his hands and the cold place had drilled into the rest of him: it kept the boxes separate.
Rand was a man who beat his boyfriend and owed money and was bad with a band's books.
The ring was the ring. The girl was the case.
Those were different drawers and Nate did not open them at the same time, because opening them at the same time meant that the man who had put Jude on a list to be hurt was standing in the same doorway as the man who had put Caleb in a drainage easement.
There was a soft kid asleep upstairs with a big voice, and Nate's whole body refused the arithmetic before his mind could even set it down.
The cold place opened its door a crack. Nate felt the draft of it at the back of his neck, the specific cold he had carried since he was twenty-six and stood at the back of a storefront church with a water stain shaped like Ohio on the ceiling. He shut the door. He had practice.
"Keep pulling the LLC," Nate said. His voice was level.
He had a lot of level and he spent it here.
"Rand's a degenerate with a band's checkbook.
Doesn't make him the center of anything.
Find me who's above the shell. I know the dude is a piece of shit…
but this seems like a stretch even for him.
And if it is…" He let the thought hang, unable to finish it.
Ghost looked at him a second longer than the answer needed. Ghost read people for a living too. But he only nodded and pulled the LLC, and Nate carried his cold coffee to the sink and stood with his back to the room until the cold place within him that kept him sane was shut all the way.
He told himself it was good operational discipline, keeping the boxes separate.
It was the only lie he let himself keep.
Jude was awake when Nate came up. He had the lamp low and the window cracked and a notebook open on his knee that he closed when Nate knocked. Jude’s smile was shy, and the shyness undid something in Nate that the whole long day had not managed to.
"You don't have to knock anymore," Jude said. "I think we're past you knocking."
"Habit," Nate said. He came in. "Good habits are hard to break. Be glad about that one."
He meant to sit in the chair. He had a whole plan that involved the chair.
But Jude set the notebook on the nightstand and looked up at him with the lamplight on the unbruised side of his face and the bruise on the other side faded now to a soft green-gold, almost gone, and Jude said, "Come here," in a voice that had no apology stapled to the front of it for once.
He went to the bed.