Chapter 50 The Move — Ii
Ren’s car was in the drive.
I went up the walk fast and made myself knock like a neighbor and not like a marshal, three easy raps, because a woman who opens her door to a hammering fist comes out running and I needed her to come out walking, slow, no adrenaline, no reason for anyone inside to do anything sudden.
“Ren. It’s Wes Calder. I need you and Theo to step out here with me a second.
Don’t grab anything. Just come as you are, okay? ”
Nothing.
I knocked again, same easy rhythm. “Ren.”
The upstairs window. The corner one, Birdie’s.
A curtain that moved and shouldn’t have, because Birdie was downtown four minutes out.
I stepped back off the porch to get the angle and I saw a shape that was not Ren and was not Theo and was not, God knows, Birdie, and I understood two things in the same half-second, the whole scene arriving at once the way a fire scene sometimes does instead of in pieces.
Cody Rourke was in the building.
And he wasn’t running from it.
I’ve thought a lot, since, about the next thirty seconds, whether I got them right, because a man in my job second-guesses every thirty seconds he’s ever spent near a scene that could have tipped the other way.
What I did was not go in. Every animal thing in me wanted to go in, up those stairs, through that door, get my hands on him and get the family out, and I have spent enough years around fire to know that the animal thing that wants to charge is the exact thing that turns one bad outcome into four.
So I did the hardest thing there is, which is nothing yet.
I keyed my radio and I called it in low and clear.
Structure on Larch, possible device, occupants inside, subject inside, no entry, repeat no entry, set the perimeter wide and get Pike rolling now.
Then Birdie’s truck came around the corner too fast and stopped too hard, and she was out of it before it had finished rocking, and she crossed that street toward the building at a walk.
Not a run. A walk, fast and level and terrible, and I knew what that walk cost her because I knew what was up those stairs and I knew what she’d built three years to avoid, and I got in front of her before she could get past me.
“He’s inside,” I said. “Ren’s car’s here. I think they’re inside with him. Upstairs. Your flat.”
She looked up at her own window with a face I had never seen her wear, not once, not at the propane rig, not at the rec center, and for one second the whole town’s Birdie was gone off her, gone completely, and what was left was the woman who used to walk toward the thing everyone else ran from.
She said, in that flat far-away voice, “How long has the smell been down on the street.”
“Neighbor called it in maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
“Then we’ve got time we can’t count,” she said, “and a man who wants to be caught more than he wants to get away, or he’d already be gone.” She breathed once, all the way to the bottom. “Okay. Nobody goes up. Not you, not me, not one boot on that stair until I say. Where’s Pike.”
“Coming. A minute out.”
“Good.” She was already reading the building, eyes going window to window, door to door, doing arithmetic I couldn’t do because I didn’t have her eight years.
And then Theo’s face appeared in the upstairs glass beside the shape of the man, small and white and looking straight down at Birdie, and I watched her lift a hand and wave up at him, easy, casual, hi buddy, like it was any evening, like she’d waved at that window a thousand times, while her other hand found my sleeve and closed on it hard enough to leave marks I’d find that night.