Chapter 18
TOMMY
Iwalked out of her building smelling like her.
That was the part I noticed first, and the part I didn't want to wash off.
Some kind of soap she used—citrus, something herbal underneath—on the inside of my forearms where I'd held her in the bathtub.
On the side of my neck where she'd kissed me at the door.
On my shirt collar where her hair had brushed it.
I caught it three times in the first half-block, and three times, I smiled like an idiot and didn't try to hide it.
I'd never been a man who walked out of a pretty girl's apartment in the morning and went on a stroll.
Walking-out-the-morning-after, in my professional life, was an exercise in not being seen. Quick exit. Cab two streets over. Eyes on the windows above eye level for somebody who shouldn't be in them.
This morning, I walked out the front. I walked at a pace that wasn't anybody's pace but mine.
I tipped my chin at an old woman watering her stoop ferns and she said good morning, son and I said morning, ma'am, and I crossed the street with the other people who were crossing the street, like a guy with normal places to be.
It felt good.
It felt like the part of me that had grown up running a fence line with my brothers in the cool hour after sunup—a body that had a body's reasons to move, that wasn't going anywhere because anywhere was waiting.
I let myself enjoy it for two blocks.
That was when the bells started going off.
They weren't loud. They never were. The bells were the same bells they always were—the small rearrangement of a street's ambient pattern, the kind of thing the brain registered before the mouth could name it.
A Tahoe parked at the far corner with somebody behind the wheel who wasn't reading his phone.
A second Tahoe one block down on the cross street, same posture.
A guy in a windbreaker on the opposite sidewalk who was not, on any day of his real life, a man whose footwear was that comfortable.
Three vehicles. Foot man. They weren't trying to be invisible. That was the message. We see you. We want you to know.
Well.
Fuck them.
I kept walking.
I wasn't going to do them the courtesy of changing my pace.
I wasn't going to do Rebecca Lynn the discourtesy of leading them anywhere I'd just been.
They knew where I'd been. They'd been watching the door.
They'd watched me come in last night and they'd watched me come out this morning, and the math of why had presumably already been done by somebody in a windowless room with a corkboard.
I made my face do the cheerful thing. I let myself wonder, briefly, whether the version of me Rebecca had seen in the bathtub was the same version of me they had on a long lens.
I hoped not.
Some things were mine.
I cut left at the corner because I'd been heading there, anyway.
There was a flower shop two blocks down on King I'd noted yesterday on the walk over—a small place with a striped awning and zinc buckets out front full of things I didn't know the names of.
I'd been thinking, somewhere underneath the rest of it, about what Rebecca would do if a dozen of something showed up at The Carolinian.
I'd find out.
I was halfway across the street when the SUV pulled up.
It was the second Tahoe. Tinted windows, but not so tinted I missed the driver—wide-set guy in his fifties, ex-Marine by the cut—and the passenger window came down and there he was, bless his heart.
Special Agent T. Mendez.
Same suit, near as I could tell. Same haircut. The careful tactical neutrality on the face, only a little frayed at the edges from a night that had probably involved less sleep than mine.
I broke into a smile the size of a state highway.
"Special Agent. Buddy."
"Mr. Dane."
"Buddy. I have been racking my brain since six o'clock yesterday morning trying to figure out where I knew you from, and just now, walking down this very street, the answer came to me.
" I leaned a hand on the door of the SUV like we were old friends and I'd just bumped into him outside a hardware store.
"You're one of those Menendez brothers, aren't you? "
"It's Mendez."
"That's what I said."
"It's not what you said."
"Cousin, then. Distant cousin. Same family tree, different branch. Y'all had a rough go of it, and I want you to know I did not judge. The mommy-and-daddy stuff. Whew. That's a lot for any boy. I'm glad to see the FBI's been a comfort to you."
The driver, the ex-Marine, did not move his face. I respected that. A man who'd been in the service long enough to keep his face flat through other people's foolishness was a man I'd have a beer with.
Mendez did not have the same training.
"Mr. Dane," he said, slow, like he was speaking to a child who'd been warned. "You were told to leave town."
"Was I?" I tilted my head. "Let me guess. Or else."
He nodded, exactly once.
I could see, in that nod, that or else was the line he'd been given to deliver and that he was used to people receiving the line the way people received lines like that—a small change in posture, a small drying of the throat, a moment in which they began to recalculate their day.
I wasn't most people.
For all I cared, Mendez could take his badge and shove it up his puckered, Bureau-issued asshole. But I didn't say that. I didn't say it because what I was going to say next required him to still be sitting up straight when I said it.
A car a few feet behind the Tahoe gave the courtesy honk. The kind of honk Charleston drivers gave each other. Polite, brief, more reminder than complaint.
I lifted a hand to the driver—one second, sir, I appreciate it—and turned back to Mendez.
I leaned in close enough to the window that the air conditioning came out cool against my face.
I dropped the smile.
I didn't drop it all the way. I left a little of it on, the way a man left a little of a knife in a wound to keep the bleeding controlled.
But the warmth went out behind it, and Mendez saw it go, and his pupils did the small thing pupils did when a man who'd been talking to one person realized he was talking to a different one.
"Tell Deputy Director Craine," I said, low and friendly, "that if he wants to see me, he can make an appointment to come see me at Dominion Hall. He knows where it is."
Mendez didn't answer.
"And if he doesn't want to do that," I said, "he can keep doing whatever he's doing. With the trucks and the men in windbreakers and the watching of doorways. That's his prerogative. But if it goes on for more than the next twenty-four hours, I'm going to call my congressman."
A small flicker at the corner of his eye.
"He's a friend," I said. "Real close. I'm sure you know what I do for a living, Mendez.
I'm sure your people put together a folder on me before you knocked on my door yesterday morning, and I'm sure my congressman's name is in that folder somewhere, because that congressman has more than once gone to bat for the kind of work I do when other people in your building have tried to make life difficult for it.
" I let the smile come back a quarter inch.
"He doesn't like it when people get in the way of me doing my job. "
Mendez worked his jaw.
"You got that?" I said. "Want me to repeat it?"
"I got it."
"Good man."
I patted him twice on the upper arm. Light, friendly, the way you'd pat a teammate at the end of a play that hadn't gone your way.
"See you around, Menendez."
I straightened up.
I tipped my chin at the ex-Marine driver, who tipped his chin back, because some men understood other men.
The Tahoe pulled away from the curb. It went the opposite direction down the street, slow, deliberate, and the second Tahoe disengaged from the corner and followed it, and the foot man in the windbreaker fell into a stride that was just casual enough not to look like he was leaving.
I watched the back of the Tahoe until it took the next left.
I crossed the rest of the street and walked into the flower shop.
The bell over the door rang the small bright ring bells gave in old buildings.
A woman behind the counter looked up. She was in her fifties, half-glasses pushed up on her hair, an apron with stains on it that meant business.
"Morning, sugar. What can I do for you?"
"Morning, ma'am. I need a dozen of something."
"Of what?"
"Of whatever a man brings to a girl when he doesn't want her to think he's trying too hard."
She put her hands flat on the counter and gave me a long, slow look over the top of her glasses. The kind of look mothers had been giving me since I was about ten.
"Honey," she said, "you have come to the right shop."
I let her work.
I stood at the window with my hands in my pockets and watched the sidewalk while she fussed over a bucket of something cream-colored with the smallest blush of pink at the edge of the petals.
I watched the sidewalk because it was the smart thing to watch and because I needed something for my eyes to do that wasn't her.
Outside, the cheerful didn't move on my face.
Inside, behind it, the calculation had started.
The FBI was serious.
I'd known that since six in the morning yesterday.
But the way they'd run a tail on me from her doorstep this morning—openly, in three vehicles, on a residential block, at a time of day when half the city was outside getting coffee—was a step past what they'd done at the hotel.
The hotel had been a private message. We can come to you when you're alone.
This was a public one. We can come to you when you're with somebody.
That second message had Rebecca Lynn's name on it, whether they knew it or not. Whether they'd cared who she was or just clocked her as a woman whose door I'd walked out of, the math from now on included her.
I didn't love that.
I was going to have to handle it.
There were a few moves available. The first was the obvious one—keep her out of it.
Stay away from her until this thing settled, let her get on with her life and her playing and her ninety-four dollars, and come back when the air was clear.
That was the responsible move. That was the move a serious man would make.
I wasn't going to make that move.
I'd made enough decisions in the last twenty-four hours to know which way I was about to keep deciding.
I was not going to put a federal investigation between me and Rebecca Lynn at the exact moment I'd worked out that there was a me and Rebecca Lynn.
I was going to take her to dinner tonight on a balcony at the Palmetto Rose, and I was going to keep doing that, and the FBI was going to have to find a way to do their work around the fact of it.
Which meant I was going to need to get creative.
Which meant I was going to need a favor from Dominion Hall.
The woman behind the counter looked up.
"How does this look to you, sweetheart?"
She'd built me a thing about the size of a child's head, mostly cream, with a half dozen of the blushed-pink ones threaded through, tied with a ribbon that wasn't satin and wasn't burlap and was somewhere honest in between.
A single long stem of something green with small yellow buds laid against the cream like punctuation.
"Ma'am, that is exactly right."
"I thought it might be."
"How much?"
"Sixty-five dollars."
I pulled out my wallet and put a hundred on the counter.
"Keep the change."
"Honey."
"You saved my life. I owe you."
She shook her head, smiling, and rang me out.
"You want me to deliver these?" she said. "I can have a girl run them anywhere in town in the next half-hour."
"I'll take them myself."
"Lucky girl."
"I'm the lucky one, ma'am. Have a good morning."
The bell rang again as I went out.
I stood on the sidewalk with sixty-five dollars' worth of cream and pink in my hand and the smell of Rebecca Lynn still on my collar and the FBI somewhere down a side street pretending they weren't there, and I thought, with the same cheerful clarity I'd been operating in all morning:
All right. Time to get to work.
I needed to make a girl feel special tonight.
And before I did that, I needed to call in a favor at Dominion Hall.