Chapter 59 The Outside
WES has never been more useless in a more important place in his life than the forty minutes I spent on Larch Street being the outside while the woman I loved was the inside.
That is the job, though, and I know it, and I’d tell it to any young marshal who’d sit still for it.
Everybody wants to be the one on the stairs.
Nobody wants to be the one holding the perimeter, and the perimeter is where the scene is actually won or lost, because the perimeter is where you decide how few people the worst version of the next hour is allowed to touch.
So I swallowed the animal thing down for the second time in one afternoon, and I ran the outside like it was the only thing on earth that mattered, because for those forty minutes it was.
Evacuation first. Pike had the block flowing toward the church lot, quiet, orderly, no crowd left on the street to become the next casualties and no crowd to spook the man at the window into doing the thing he was still, mercifully, telling himself he wasn’t going to do.
I set the trucks back and dark on this face of the building, engines warm and ready, nobody staged where one bad minute would take my own people out along with everyone else.
I put my two best on the back of the building at the foot of the outside stairs, not to go up, never up, Birdie had been dead clear and she was dead right, but to be the hands that caught anybody who came down.
I did the dull, invisible, life-saving arithmetic of the outside, and I did it the whole time with one piece of myself standing on those inside stairs in my mind, counting her footsteps up, listening for her voice to keep coming down through the open window, soft and level, boring on purpose, and while it kept coming I made myself keep working.
Then her voice stopped coming down through the window.
It had been coming down the whole time, soft, level, endless, the sound of her dosing the man with boring, and it was the thread I’d been holding onto without admitting I was holding it, and it stopped, and for eleven seconds — I counted them, I count everything, it’s the only prayer I know — there was nothing at all from that lit window but the idle of an engine and my own pulse.
Eleven seconds is a long time to stand on a sidewalk deciding whether the worst thing has happened and whether you get to keep the life you just let yourself want.
And then her voice came back, easy, dull, asking the man something about his mother’s garden, and I put my hand flat on the cold hood of the nearest truck to keep myself upright, and I went back to work, because the work was the only thing I had to give her from out here and she had told me plainly what it was.
And then I did the other thing. The thing Birdie herself had made me swear I’d keep doing no matter what was happening up in that flat, because she’d understood something about this whole summer weeks before I’d let myself catch up to it: catching Cody was tonight’s problem, but Cody was a symptom, and the disease was a man downtown with an attorney on retainer and a shredder running at lunchtime, and if we won the block tonight and lost the daylight case then Holloway would build his river walk out of the ashes and hire the next Cody Rourke inside a year and we would all be standing on this street again.