15. Chapter 15
Zain was on his ninth or tenth lap of the floor. Marcus had lost the exact count somewhere after seven.
Seth sat on the arm of the couch and tracked him without saying anything about it, and once, on the turn, hooked two fingers through Zain's belt loop and let him pull free again.
Jude had folded himself into the far corner of the same couch, knees drawn up, chewing the side of his thumbnail down past where it should have stopped. He had not said a word in ninety minutes.
Ghost sat on the floor against the couch leg, laptop open across his thighs, one sock on, and made a small sound at the screen every few minutes that meant nothing yet.
Down the hall, behind a closed door, Trip had a chair pulled up next to the bed and Jack had not let go of Elijah's hand since they'd carried him in.
Marcus could hear it through the wall when the house went quiet enough: Jack's voice, low, saying nothing in particular.
Just enough words to keep the room from going silent.
Scarlet had saved ELijah's life and then sent them home in an ambluence with the needed equipment and two nurses to keep watch.
Marcus could not express his relief that they were all safe, relitavely speaking, under the same roof. At home. Together.
Nate was in the kitchen because Jack wasn't, because somebody in this house cooked when things went wrong and tonight that job had fallen to him.
He had a dish towel over one shoulder and a knife going against the board fast enough that Marcus had almost told him to slow down twice now and hadn't, because it wasn't the knife Nate needed to be careful with.
Marcus stood near the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed and nothing useful left to do with his hands.
"Gate," Ghost said, without looking up.
Zain stopped walking.
"Front gate. One vehicle." Ghost's fingers did not slow. "Gray Charger."
He knew the plate before Ghost said it. He would always know it. His chest went tight and low and stayed that way.
"It's your detective," Ghost said.
Nate's knife stopped.
"No," Zain said.
"Zain."
"No." Zain was already crossing the floor. He had his hands up, both of them, moving well ahead of the rest of him. "No. Absolutely not. Not tonight. You do not let him in this building tonight."
"He's already in the building," Ghost said. "You want me to un-let him in?"
Marcus heard the outer door. He heard the second door, and the change in the air pressure that meant the corridor, and then two sets of footsteps that had come in together, and Andre Jefferson came around the corner of the partition into the light with his jacket over his arm and his shirt untucked on one side and his hands empty.
He was wrecked. Marcus saw it in a second and a half.
Gray under the whiskey-brown. The silver at his temples, more of it than six years ago, more of it than four months ago.
A scrape on the heel of his right hand that he had gotten getting into or out of a car too fast. He had driven here at speed and he had not stopped on the way to make himself presentable, and Andre Jefferson had never in his life walked into a room he did not own.
Marcus's whole body turned toward him, chest going tight because fuck he'd needed this.
To put his eyes on the man, to know he was safe and not the next target…
He had to shut down the play of his need on his face, though, because Eli was in a room upstairs and had almost been in the ground.
This couldn't be about Marcus and Andre right now, even though everything in him wanted it to be.
Then Zain hit the open floor between them, and Marcus moved.
He got there first. Not by much. He put himself in the space where Zain's shoulder was going. Zain came up against the flat of him and stopped, because Zain would not go through Marcus, and both of them knew it. It made Zain angrier.
"Get out of my way."
"No."
"Marcus."
"No."
Zain's face was three inches from his. The dark eyebrows were all the way down.
He was breathing through his mouth. "Three hours," he said.
"Three hours on a table. Nobody would tell us anything.
Nobody would tell Jack anything, and Jack was down that hallway right now with his man's blood dried on his hands like a-"
"I know."
"You don't know! You weren't in the waiting room.
" Zain jabbed a finger past Marcus's shoulder, at Andre, at the room, at the city.
"None of this happened before him. Not one shot fired at this crew like that.
Not one. And then he walks in here with a badge and a task force and a chain of command, and we let the law touch it, and it almost cost us a brother! "
The rice was burning. Nobody moved to take it off.
"Say something," Zain shouted, past him. "Say something, Jefferson."
Marcus did not turn around. He kept his eyes on Zain because turning around would have been giving Zain his back, and because if he turned around he was going to look at Andre for longer than he could afford in front of these people.
They knew him too well. Seth had already stood up.
Ghost had not looked at the screen in forty seconds.
"He's right," Andre said.
That turned the room.
"Partly," Andre said. "He's partly right and I'm not going to argue the part he's right about. Every shot that's been fired at this crew has been fired since I came back into youur life. That's true. I'm not going to pretend it's not."
"Then get the fuck out!" Zane's expression was rage and fire.
"I didn't give you up."
Zain went very still.
"That's the truth." Andre's voice did not rise.
Marcus heard the effort under it, the same effort he had heard in a courthouse corridor six years ago, when Andre ran out of ways to cope with a verdict that allowed a monster to walk free.
"Somebody inside my channel is leaking. That's real.
I've known it since the warehouse and I've been running it down since then.
I'm going to find out who… and you have my word, this time…
I'll hand them to you. But it isn't me. It was never going to be me.
I have had six years and countless oportunities come across my desk…
and I never gave you up, not once, not when it would have made my career, not when it would have gotten me the bars and the corner office and the pension I'm never going to use. "
"Words," Zain hissed.
"Then here's a fact." Andre put his jacket down on the back of the chair like a man setting down a weight. "I went to Dray."
Nate came out of the kitchen doorway with the towel still in his hand.
"Dray took me to Velvet, and tonight he took me to the clubhouse off Telegraph. I spoke to Sovereign. Got my head straight about a few things."
Ghost's hands came off the keys.
Jude lifted his head.
Marcus had spent his whole career learning to hear a room instead of a person. This room gave him silence. The extractor fan ran over the burning rice. Down the building a compressor cycled and shut off.
Sovereign. A detective sergeant with fifteen years and a pension and a spotless jacket… sitting downwith the president of the Lords of Darkness Outlaw Motorcycle Club, with no wire and no warrant and no supervisor read in.
Andre had just walked into a building full of criminals and handed them the rope with which to hang him if they wanted. Saying they were confidential informents would only buy him so much grace… and not nearly enough to save him.
Marcus's ribs ached.
"He's telling the truth," Ghost said.
Zain rounded on him. "How?
"Because his phone sat at a dead-end service road off Telegraph for fifty-one minutes starting at 19:37." Ghost shrugged one shoulder, still on the floor, still not looking up. "And because he knows I know that, and he said fifty. Man's bad at rounding."
"You still have my phone tracked and backed," Andre asked and didn't sound overly surprised.
"I have everybody's phone." Ghost typed. "Yours is the boring one."
Zain's shoulders came down half an inch and then went straight back up, because coming down was a concession and Zain was not finished.
"That doesn't make him safe," Zain said. "That makes him reckless. He sat with Sovereign. You know what that is? That's him burning his own house down so we'll believe he's not holding a match."
"Yes," Marcus said.
Everyone looked at him.
"That's exactly what it is." He was still standing between them. He had not moved. "And it's the most useful thing anybody's done for this crew in nine hours."
"Marcus-"
"Elijah's stable. He's twenty feet down that hall with Trip on the door and Jack not letting go of his hand.
" Marcus let it come out flat and complete, because Zain needed numbers and not comfort, because comfort would have been an insult.
"I have a meet at Crimson tomorrow. The leak has a shape, and now it has a second set of eyes on it from the inside where we can't reach.
You've been walking this floor for two hours because there was nothing to do.
There's something to do now. Tomorrow. Not tonight. "
Zain's jaw worked.
"Jack would've said something funny by now," Nate said, from the doorway, not looking up from the pan.
It went through the room like a crack running across a windshield. Jude made a sound and pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. Seth closed his eyes.
"Yeah," Zain said. His voice came apart on the one syllable, and he pulled it back together in front of the whole room, both hands closing into fists at his sides. "Yeah. He would've."
Seth went to him, sensing that now was the time to bring his man down from the edge.
He came off the arm of the couch and got a hand flat between Zain's shoulder blades and steered, not hard, and Zain let himself be steered.
That was the apology. At the mouth of the corridor Seth stopped him and said something against the side of his head that Marcus did not hear and was not meant to, and Zain put his forehead down on Seth's shoulder for the length of one breath.
"Twenty minutes on fresh rice," Nate said, to nobody. "I ruined the first batch because of this drama. I'm making it again."
"Make less," Jude said. First words in ninety minutes. His voice was shot. "Nobody's going to eat eleven people's worth of rice."
Nate looked at him for a second, and then crossed the room and put his mouth on the top of Jude's head, then went back into the kitchen.
Which left Ghost on the ground pretending to work, and the two of them.
"Marcus." Andre had not moved from the chair he had set his jacket on. His hands hung at his sides and would not stay still, thumb moving against the pads of his fingers, the tell Marcus had never told him about. "Can we talk?"
Marcus looked at him.
He had a list of reasons to say not tonight, and every reason on it was good. He could have recited them in order. He had built a professional life out of being able to do exactly that.
Andre's eyes were open all the way. Marcus had seen that twice. Once in a car outside a courthouse. Once in a kitchen on Alter Road at two in the morning, four days before he moved out.
"Don't wait up," Ghost said to his laptop.
Marcus put a hand once, briefly, against the back of Andre's shoulder, and walked toward the front of the building without checking whether he followed.
He followed.