Chapter 46 Predicting the Fuse — Ii
“You know what’s dumb? They’re tearing up our street for the gas line, right out front.
There’s a guy been out there all week, and Mom says the city’s not even paying for it, it’s the developer, isn’t that weird?
And they left the trench open Thursday and the caution tape’s just sitting there and nobody’s watching it, and Marcus and me could’ve fallen in and died and nobody would even know, and there’s like a whole—”
“What guy,” I said.
Something in my voice made him look up. I’d let the flat come into it. I heard it and couldn’t stop it and didn’t want to.
“The gas line guy,” Theo said, slower. “He’s there every day but he’s not, like, working working. Marcus’s dad said he doesn’t have a city truck, he’s got his own, and he mostly just stands in the trench. Is that bad? Birdie, is that a bad thing?”
Our block. One of my own two candidates, and I hadn’t been able to choose it because I hadn’t been able to see it, because it was home and home was the one place I’d trained myself to file as safe.
The answer wasn’t a house at all. It was the gas line in the trench that fed the whole row, my building included, Ren and Theo asleep over my head every night, and a man with his own truck and no city paperwork had been standing in it all week where I lived while I built a beautiful map and missed the one line running under everything.
I was looking at buildings. Cody was looking at the thing buildings are made helpless by.
The old cold clean feeling came up in me, dread and joy braided together, a cover coming off.
“It’s not a bad thing that you told me,” I said, and I made my voice come back up, warm, Birdie-warm, because the kid was scared now and that was my fault and I fixed it.
“You did something really smart, noticing that. You want to know a secret? Grown-ups walk past ninety things a day and don’t see them.
You saw the guy who doesn’t fit. That’s a whole superpower, bud.
Finish your cereal. I have to make a phone call to Mr. Calder about the caution tape, because you’re right, an open trench is dangerous and somebody should watch it. ”
“Is the guy in trouble,” Theo said, hopeful, because a documentary kid loves nothing more than being right about a bad guy.
“You let me and Mr. Calder worry about the guy,” I said. “You already did the hard part.”
He beamed at that, this lonely brilliant kid who’d handed me the thing three trained adults had missed over a bowl of sugar cereal, and I felt the found-family of it go all the way through me, sharp and sweet: that I’d built a life close enough to a child that he brought me the world every Saturday morning without knowing what he was carrying, and that this time, this one time, I was going to be able to catch it.
I called Wes with the flat voice on and no apology for it.
“It’s my own block,” I said. “The gas line in the trench out front — the one that feeds the whole row, my building, Ren’s, all of it.
He’s not going for a house. He’s going for what a block runs on, and he’s been standing in that trench all week where nobody watches, and I know because Theo told me, and Wes—” I stopped, because the size of it was landing “—this isn’t a scare anymore and it isn’t even Holloway’s plan.
Holloway wants a lot. You don’t get a lot by taking a gas line to a row of occupied houses.
This is Cody deciding what he wants, and what he wants is big. ”
There was a silence on the line, the good kind, Wes doing his get-very-quiet-and-let-it-talk thing.
“How sure,” he said. Not a challenge. A partner checking a partner’s math, which is the single most respectful thing you can do to a person like me, ask for the number instead of the reassurance.
“Sure enough to put people on it and not sleep,” I said.
“It’s my own block, it’s the line the whole row runs on, and there’s a man with his own truck and no city paperwork standing in the trench where it lives, all week, mostly not working.
That’s not a coincidence and it’s not a gas leak.
That’s a man getting comfortable with a target.
I’d stake the block on it, Wes, and I don’t stake blocks, I quit staking blocks. ”
“Then we don’t wait for him to be ahead of us,” he said finally. “For once, we get there first.”
“For once,” I said, “we get there first,” and I looked across my kitchen at a twelve-year-old scraping the sugar off the bottom of a bowl, entirely unaware he’d just changed the ending, and I thought: not this one. Whatever else. Not this one.