Chapter 24
TOMMY
She left.
Not in anger. That would have been easier to handle. She left the way she'd left the donut shop—gathering herself with the economy of a woman who had a shift to get to and could not afford to fall apart in front of a man she was going to think about all day, anyway.
She kissed me at the door. Soft. She said I'll see you tonight and I said yeah, sweetheart, you will and she said I have to think, and I said I know you do, take it, and the door clicked shut and the suite went quiet around me in a way it hadn't been quiet since I'd checked in.
I stood in the middle of the room for a minute.
The cream cardigan had been picked up off the floor. The candles had been blown out. The bedsheets were rumpled into the shape of two people having spent a long, complicated night together.
I'd been told I love you by a woman for the first time in my adult life, and she'd said it in the middle of telling me she didn't know how to be in the same world I was in.
That was a lot of weather to come through one window at the same time.
To my credit—and I would take credit where I could find it, this morning—I did not go after her.
I did not put on yesterday's clothes and chase her down the carpeted hallway and tell her that she was wrong, that the world I lived in could be made smaller, that I'd give up the suite and the helicopter and the limo and the Four Branches bourbon and the whole Dominion Hall apparatus and meet her halfway.
I didn't say any of those things, partly because some of them weren't true, and partly because Rebecca Lynn had asked me for time, and time was the one thing a man could actually give a woman without it costing her anything she'd be embarrassed about later.
So, I went to the bathroom.
I turned the shower as hot as it would go and stood under it for a long time and let the water do what hot water did to operators after long nights—reset the nervous system, work the lactic acid out of the shoulders, give the brain something physical to argue with so it would stop arguing with itself.
It didn't help.
I shut it off. Toweled off. Stood in front of the marble counter with the towel around my waist and looked at the man in the mirror.
The man in the mirror needed to run.
That was the only program left. When the shower didn't reset me, the run did. I'd been running my way out of weather since I was twelve years old and had run a fence line until I couldn't feel anything anymore.
I dressed fast. T-shirt. Shorts. A pair of trail shoes I'd packed because operators always packed trail shoes. I slipped my room key and my phone to the inside pocket of the shorts. I left the wallet. The whole point of running was leaving the man who needed that in the room.
I took the stairs down because the elevator was for men in suits and I was no longer that man this morning.
The lobby was busy. Late breakfast. A small crowd at the concierge desk asking about a carriage tour. Two women in matching Lilly Pulitzer in front of the fireplace. The smell of bacon coming up from the restaurant in the back, which I clocked and ignored.
I was almost to the front door when Sasha called my name.
"Mr. Dane."
I stopped.
I turned. I made my face do the polite thing, because Sasha had not done a single thing wrong this morning and did not deserve the Tommy Dane who'd just been told he was a charity by a woman who'd said I love you in the same paragraph.
"Sasha."
She tipped her chin down the hallway off the lobby. The one that ran past the bar to the private sitting rooms that hotels like this had for the kind of guest who didn't take meetings in the open.
"There's a gentleman waiting for you, sir."
I stood there a second.
I had a brief, vivid wish to be anywhere else.
"Sasha?"
"Yes, sir."
"How long has he been there?"
"About fifteen minutes."
"He give a name?"
"No, sir."
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
"Thank you."
She held my eye for a second.
"Mr. Dane."
"Yeah."
"Is your guest from last night okay? She seemed a little—" She picked her word with the care of a woman who'd worked the front desk of a place like The Palmetto Rose long enough to know which words to use and which not to. "Out of sorts, when she left."
I looked at Sasha.
I'd known her for thirty-six hours and she'd already pulled off a small dinner, a candlelit suite, a limo, and a quiet front-of-house exit. She'd done all of it without asking me a question I hadn't volunteered the answer to.
She was asking now.
I appreciated it.
"I hope I didn't fuck it up, Sasha."
Her face softened.
"I expect you didn't, sir. She didn't have the look of a woman who was finished with you."
"That a professional read?"
"I have been at this front desk for a little bit of time, Mr. Dane."
"Then I'll take it."
"You should."
I tipped my chin at her. She tipped hers back.
I walked down the hallway.
The sitting room at the end of it was a small, paneled room with a fireplace that wasn't lit and two leather chaises facing each other across a low table. There was a fresh pot of coffee on the table and two cups, one of them used.
Dominic Craine was on the chaise with his back to the window.
He was in another suit. Different from yesterday's, near as I could tell, but cut in the same line.
The man dressed like a man who didn't leave his bedroom without committing to who he was for the day, and I respected the discipline of it the way I respected Bratton's haircut—as a thing a person did to keep himself in a category, not as a thing I'd ever feel like doing myself.
He looked up when I came in.
He didn't stand.
I closed the door behind me.
"What the fuck do you want?"
He smiled.
It was a cool smile. Not unfriendly. The smile of a man who'd been smiled at by men in worse moods than mine and had developed his own system for handling it.
"Mr. Dane. This isn't the Tommy Dane I'd been led to expect."
"That right?"
"The Tommy Dane I read about, in the precious little of your file I have access to, is described by his commanders as cool, calm, and collected. The phrase comes up more than once."
"Sounds like a stranger."
"I thought so, too." He gestured at the chaise across from him. "Sit down."
"I'll stand."
"Suit yourself."
I didn't sit down. I didn't pour myself coffee. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for him to get to it, because the alternative was breaking something in the room, and the room hadn't done anything to deserve it.
Craine took a slow sip of his coffee.
"Two things," he said.
"Get to it."
"First. You missed your window."
He set the cup down.
"Don't try to leave town, Mr. Dane. Don't fly anywhere. Don't take a bus. Don't drive a rental across the state line. Don't get on a private aircraft out of any airfield within a hundred miles of this city. We will know."
I nodded once. The way you nodded at a man delivering a message you'd already half-expected.
"And the second thing?"
He stood up.
He wasn't as tall as I was. But the man knew how to stand. Shoulders back, weight even, chin level—the posture of a Southern gentleman who'd been raised by parents who had opinions about how a man entered a room and left it.
He buttoned his jacket.
The cool smile slipped. Just a little. What replaced it on his face was not pleasure. It was the expression of a man who was about to deliver a piece of bad news and was, for whatever reason of his own, not enjoying the delivery.
"The second thing, Mr. Dane, is a question you should be asking."
"What question?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Ask Dominion Hall," he said, "about your father."
I went still.
"Ask them," he said, "where he's been hiding."
He walked past me toward the door.
He stopped with his hand on the knob.
"I'm sorry to be the one to put that in your head," he said, and to his credit he sounded like he meant it. "But you needed to know."
He opened the door.
He went out.
The door closed softly behind him.
I stood in the small paneled room with the fire that wasn't lit and the coffee pot that was still steaming and the half-used cup he'd left on the table, and I did not move for a long count.
The world was not spinning.
That wasn't quite right.
I was spinning, inside the world, which was holding still.
My father.
Hiding.
The man who'd walked out the door of our house in Valentine, Texas and never come back.
The man whose name had shaped every meal at our kitchen table afterward and every conversation between my mother and any of her seven sons.
The man we'd been told, by every adult in our life, by the sheriff of Jeff Davis County, by the church elders, by my mother herself, was gone.
Unfound. Maybe-dead. Probably-dead, by the time I'd hit fifteen.
Definitely-dead, by the time I'd put on a uniform.
Hiding was a different word.
Hiding meant alive.
Hiding meant somebody knew where he was.
And ask Dominion Hall meant the somebody was the men who'd just sat me down in a parlor with a glass of bourbon and called me family.
I took one breath.
I took another.
I uncrossed my arms.
Tommy Dane did not get rattled. Tommy Dane kept his face level even when his interior had walked off a cliff. I'd been raised on that and trained on that and the unit had known it about me before I'd known it about myself.
But somewhere underneath the level face, way down past the diagnostics I'd been running at five this morning, the man who'd been a boy in a bunkhouse in Valentine was sitting on the edge of his bunk with his shoes still on, listening for the sound of his father's truck on the gravel.
The boy hadn't moved in a long time.
The boy was moving now.