Chapter 45 Predicting the Fuse
BIRDIE figured out Cody Rourke’s next target on a Saturday, and the last piece of it came from a twelve-year-old eating cereal, which is either proof that the universe has a sense of humor or proof that I should have been listening to children my whole life.
Here’s how we’d set it up. Pike had her subpoenas working the daylight case, the LLC claims lining up against my escalation curve like I’d promised they would, cold and rational and damning on paper.
That was Holloway’s undoing and it was going to happen in an office with a court reporter, which is exactly how a man like that should fall, boring and total.
But the daylight case did nothing about Cody, and Cody was the fuse, and you cannot subpoena a fuse.
You have to be standing where it burns before it gets there.
So my job — my real job, the one I’d sworn off, the one I’d taken back up on Wes’s kitchen table without ever quite saying the words — was to predict the fuse.
Read the man. Get ahead of him one more time, but out loud now, with a badge beside me and a detective with paper, so that this time when I was ahead of him it counted for something instead of being one more scene I fled.
Tox called it “thinking with the enemy’s hands.
” He used to make us do it as a drill, out in the desert, sitting in the shade with cold water he’d made everybody drink: don’t ask what you’d do, ask what he’d do, the specific he who built this specific thing, because the device is a letter and somebody wrote it and people write like themselves.
A neat man builds neat. A furious man builds furious.
A man in a hurry leaves the hurry in it.
You read the handwriting and you meet the writer before you ever meet the fire.
I’d loved that drill and I’d hated it, because it means you have to let a dangerous stranger live in your head for a while, wear his logic like a borrowed coat, and there is no shower long enough to get all the way out from under a man once you’ve thought like him.
But it works. It’s the only thing that reliably works.
And I sat at my kitchen table on a Saturday morning and let Cody Rourke into my head on purpose, and asked, in his voice, not what I would burn, but what he would love to.
I built the target list the way you build a threat picture, which I will not pretend was anything but the old training walking back into my hands like it had never left.
I took Holloway’s remaining holdouts, the parcels the daylight case said the money still needed.
I crossed them against Cody’s harm curve, the appetite line, the places he’d choose not because they served the plan but because they’d feel like something.
I looked for the overlap: a lot Holloway still wanted, and a fire Cody would enjoy.
That’s where a man off his leash goes. Where his boss’s need and his own hunger point at the same house.
Two candidates fell out of it. And I couldn’t choose between them, and it was eating me, because “somewhere on these two blocks, sometime soon” is not a thing you can put a marshal and a detective on, and being 80 percent right is, in my old line of work, a way to get somebody killed with a clear conscience.
Wes and I had gone around on it twice at his kitchen table, both of us knowing that if we picked wrong we’d be standing on an empty corner while it happened one street over, and both of us knowing there was no honest way to pick.
He’d said, finally, “So we watch both and we’re tired,” which is the most Wes sentence there is, and I’d loved him a little more for not pretending there was a clever answer, and we’d both gone home unhappy.
Because here’s the truth about tradecraft that nobody puts in the recruiting brochure: most of it is being 80 percent right and knowing it isn’t enough and having no way, none, to close the last 20 without a break you can’t manufacture.
You can read a man’s handwriting all day.
You still need him to sign something. I’d been staring at two candidate blocks for two days waiting for Cody Rourke to hand me the last piece, and he wasn’t going to, and I knew it, and it was making me short with Marcy and quiet with Ren and I’d caught myself the night before double-checking my own locks like the woman I pretend to be.
Then Saturday morning Theo came down to my flat in his socks, because Ren was sleeping off a night shift and Theo comes to me on those mornings, always has, since the week they moved in, and he sat at my table and ate the cereal I keep for him specifically, the terrible sugar kind Ren pretends not to know about, and he talked, the way he talks, in long unbroken paragraphs about whatever documentary had him that week.
And I was only half listening, my colored-pencil map folded small in my head, two candidate blocks fighting each other, and Theo said, through a mouthful: