Chapter 20
brOCK
They put me in a Bugatti.
I'd have laughed, if I had the time. Somebody tossed me a fob in that marble entry hall and pointed me at a low blue thing crouched in the courtyard that probably cost more than every house in Valentine put together. I dropped into it and fired it up, and felt the wrong of it right away.
The doors shut too heavy. The whole car sat too low on its springs, sluggish to settle, weighted down with something that wasn't engine. I knew that feel. I'd ridden in enough up-armored vehicles to know one through my own backside.
An armored Bugatti. A two-million-dollar supercar built to stop rifle rounds. There's rich, and then there's a kind of money that doesn't make sense, money with a war chest behind it. The longer I was inside the gates of that estate, the less I liked the smell of any of it.
And it did smell. That's the only way I know to say it.
The whole operation had a stink on it I couldn't place, the way a room smells when somebody's standing just around the corner holding his breath.
Too clean. Too ready. A private army with a clinic and an armory and a mansion full of stern, dead faces, and my own brother standing in the middle of it telling me they were the good guys with something the size of a continent stuck behind his teeth.
I'd spent my whole life learning to trust the itch on the back of my neck, and the back of my neck did not like Dominion Hall.
But that was a problem for later. I built the order of things as I drove, the way I build any op.
One: get to Mary Catherine. Craine had been at her door, and a man like Craine doesn't knock on a door to say hello.
Two: get her somewhere he couldn't reach, and make a plan to put this whole city in the rearview.
Because I was done with Charleston. I'd been here a day and it had handed me an ambush, two corpses, a federal shadow over my family, and a brother knee-deep in something that reeked.
The only thing this place had given me worth a damn was a dark-haired woman who'd jumped off a pier, and I'd decided somewhere on that drive that she was coming with me.
I didn't know where. Didn't matter. Anywhere the air was clean and nobody knew the name Dane.
She was the icing, the one good thing, and I was taking the icing with me.
Tommy had wanted to send people. A whole convoy of them—he'd nearly begged me to take an escort, four men minimum, said the streets weren't safe and I shouldn't move alone.
I'd told him no. I move better alone. And there was a piece of cold logic under it too: if Dominion Hall knew Craine was standing at her studio, then Dominion Hall already had an eye on that studio.
Somebody of theirs was parked within sight of her door right now, watching.
Which meant I wasn't really alone going in—I just hadn't agreed to it.
I didn't love that either. But I filed it and drove.
I made the run across the peninsula faster than I had any right to, the armored beast eating the narrow lanes, one hand on the wheel and the other checking the pistol they'd given me.
I came up on Wentworth with my eyes already working the parked cars for the watcher I knew was there.
Couldn't make him. Whoever it was, he was good.
Then, I was up the stairs and through her door and she was on me before it shut—not in the way I'd spent the drive half hoping. In words. Fast and hard, one on top of the next.
"Who is Craine, what investigation, what did you walk into, is it true the Danes are being investigated, did you know my father's business was—who are you, what is Dominion Hall, why does a federal deputy director know my name—"
I put my hands up. Same as the alley. The universal easy.
"Hey. Hey. Let me—can I take them one at a time?"
She stopped. Arms crossed, chin up, eyes bright and furious and scared all at once. She gave me a short nod that wasn't really permission, just a pause.
"Craine," I said. "I found out he existed about an hour ago. Same time I found out somebody's running a play to frame the outfit my brother works for. That's the truth, and it's most of what I've got."
"You mean Dominion Hall," she said. Flat. Sharp as a slap.
I stood there a second, thrown. Not by the words. By the way she said them—like they meant something to her, like the name had weight in her mouth. And by something else underneath it that took me a beat to catch.
"How do you know to call it that?" I asked slowly. "I never told you where Tommy was. And—" The other thing landed. "You said Dane. To Craine, the investigation, all of it. I never gave you my last name."
"Because the Danes run Dominion Hall." She said it like she was explaining water to a fish. "Everybody in this city knows that name and nobody says it out loud. And you're one of them."
"I'm a Dane," I said. "Yeah. That part's true.
" I watched her face when I said it and saw it harden, saw the word land as a confirmation of something she'd already decided.
"But I'm telling you straight—I heard the words Dominion Hall for the first time tonight.
From a man in a car. I came to this city because my brother Tommy called and said he was in trouble.
That's the whole of what I know. Tommy, and trouble.
I don't know that house. I'd never set foot in it before two hours ago. "
She laughed.
Not a good laugh. A short, disbelieving bark of one, the kind people let out when a thing is too absurd to do anything else with.
"You don't know Dominion Hall," she said.
"No."
"The Dane brothers. The private army. The pier.
The thing this whole city whispers about like the boogeyman under the bed—the family nobody crosses, the one the careful people won't even name at a dinner party.
" She was staring at me like I'd grown a second head.
"And you want me to believe you're not one of them and you've never heard of it. "
"I want you to believe it because it's true.
" My voice came out rougher than I meant.
"I grew up on a horse ranch in West Texas, Mary Catherine.
Seven brothers, dirt and cattle and a father who up and vanished.
I went into the Army and I went—other places after.
I did not know my family was anything but scattered, and I damn sure did not know there was a mansion in Charleston with our name running it.
" I shook my head. "Whatever this city thinks it knows about the Danes, I'm hearing half of it for the first time, same as you. "
"Why should I believe you?" Quiet now. Worse than the laugh. "I don't—I have a federal agent threatening my family in my own studio and a man I met yesterday who travels under a fake name, and I don't know which one of you is lying to me. I don't know who to believe."
"Me," I said. "Believe me. I have not lied to you once, not about anything that counts, and I'm not starting now.
" I took a step toward her and stopped, because she didn't want me closer yet and I could feel it.
"I swear it to you. And I'll prove it. You wanna be gone from all this?
Say the word and we go. Tonight. I'll take you anywhere on this earth you point at and we stay gone a month, six months, a year, however long it takes for Dominion Hall and the FBI to chew each other up.
Let them. I don't give one good goddamn which of them wins.
The only thing in this whole mess I care about is standing in front of me. "
That landed somewhere. I watched it land. But it didn't fix anything, because there was too much loose in the room and neither of us knew yet what was true.
So, we just stood there.
Both of us breathing. Both of us turning it over—her trying to decide if I was the boogeyman or the one good thing, me trying to square the woman I'd held last night with the stranger looking at me now like she'd wandered into a trap with my face on it.
The morning light came gold and useless through the east window across all those canvases of hers, and the quiet stretched out long and brittle.
I didn't have the next words and neither did she.
It was the phone that broke it.
Hers, this time. It went off on the counter beside the half-unpacked groceries and we both flinched at it. She looked at the screen and her whole face changed—went smooth and blank, the curated calm slamming down over everything. She picked it up and answered.
"Daddy?"
I watched her listen. Watched the color drain out of her by degrees, top down, the way water goes out of a glass. Whatever was coming through that phone, it was bad, and it was getting worse the longer it ran.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, Daddy, I—no. No, don't. Don't say anything to anyone, don't sign anything, just—" Her hand had come up to her mouth. "I'll take care of it. I will. I promise you. I promise. Let me make some calls."
She lowered the phone. Stood there with it in her hand a second, staring at nothing.
Then, she turned to me, and her eyes had gone hard and bright and wet and full of accusation. The soft thing that had been growing between us for a day was nowhere in them at all.
"The FBI," she said, "just raided my father's business.
Agents, a warrant, boxes, the whole street watching.
" Her voice shook and held. "He was on his way to Mass when he got the call.
Twenty-three years, he built that, and they walked in and tore it apart.
Because of you. Because of your family and your name and whatever you've all done that I don't even know about.
" She lifted her chin, and the tears didn't fall, because she wouldn't let them.
"So. You came here to prove you're not the one lying to me. "
She stared me down.
"What do you have to say about that?"