Chapter 46
Cara stepped into the lion's den with her hands where they could be seen.
The cabin was smaller on the inside than her fear had built it. A room meant for a card game and a coffee pot, but crowded now with guns. Five of Cartwright's men ranged along the walls, weapons not quite up and not quite down.
Skye sat roped to a chair against the far wall, her shirt gone dark at her side with blood, her face smooth as a shut door. Tom was folded over his dead board, wrists bound behind him, chin near his chest. Owen sat in the galley corner, gray and breathing and alive.
In a folding chair set square in the middle of the floor, one chubby knee crossed over the other, sat Helen Cartwright.
She looked like somebody's aunt. Soft gray, a cardigan gone shapeless at the elbows, reading glasses on a chain against her chest. A face you'd trust to hold your place in line. The file said she'd put more people in the ground than this swamp had, and the file, Cara was fairly sure, was light.
"Cara." She said it the way a hostess says a guest's name. "No last name. I did wonder about that."
"You don't need it."
"No. I expect I have most of them by now."
Cara let her eyes make one frightened pass of it, because a frightened pass was what the woman would expect to see.
Under the fear she counted. Five guns. The door behind her, and a window over the galley.
Skye's hands working behind the chair, the small patient saw of a shoulder that was not supposed to be moving at all.
Tom's chin a half inch nearer the board than a beaten man's would hang.
Owen looked too scared to be the slightest use, which made his the only honest face in the room.
"You came to talk," Cartwright said. "So talk. I'm a captive audience." The thin smile. "We both are it seems."
"You're boxed in," Cara said. "Your boat's dead at the dock, by the way.
The one road out has a parish sheriff and a whole handful of squad cars parked across it.
You can hurt every person in this room, and you'll still be standing on a porch in a swamp at sunrise with nowhere to put your feet.
" She let that settle. "I came to give you a way out. "
"Did you?" The woman either looked amused, or bored.
Cara swallowed hard. "Owen for a clean getaway. We’ve got a boat, but you’ll never find it without our help. We keep our people, and professor Harney here. You keep doing…whatever it is that you do."
Cartwright looked at her a long moment, and Cara felt herself being read the way she was reading the room, line by patient line. The floor went a little soft under her.
Please, Lord, let her believe.
"A poor offer," Cartwright said, pleasant as ever, "from a woman with no way on earth to make me hold to it. Which tells me it isn't the offer at all. You're spending my time." She did not move. "What interests me is why a person would walk in here to do that."
So Cara gave her the truth, because a truth cut to the right shape is the finest lie there is.
"Because I'm not a fighter. I'm the one they send to the door to talk. I do the job as long as it’s safe. No one’s worth dying over. Unless maybe for money. I stay alive by not caring that much. You know, like you."
She took a breath that was not all performance. "Maybe I walked in here to find out if that's still true about me. Maybe I came because people can change, and a file can't tell you when they have."
Something moved in Cartwright's face. Not belief. Interest — the hook of one professional watching another work, even knowing herself to be the mark. It was the only thing buying the people behind her one more second of breath.
Cara kept her eyes on Cartwright, and let the rest fall into the talk where only her family would think to gather it up.
"You want to know how this ends? The books always balance.
First thing anyone taught me in this work.
You can run as long as you like, but the books always balance in the end, and they balance tonight. "
Across the cabin, Skye's eyes came up.
Not far. A degree. To anyone else it was a beaten woman lifting her head at a familiar voice.
To Cara it was a hand closing hard around a thrown rope.
The books always balance was Skye's own phrase, drilled into Cara across a kitchen table for a doorstep in Petit Marais a hundred years and one night ago, and in the grammar Skye had built it meant exactly one thing. On my move.
All Cara had left to do was the one thing she had been doing her whole life.
Give Skye the space to perform. Every gun in it pointed at the only person doing anything worth watching, so that for one half second nobody in the world was looking at the wounded woman in the chair, or the man by the dead board, or the shaking professor in the corner.
She had spent her whole life making sure she was the most interesting thing in the room when it mattered. She had never once wanted it the way she wanted it now.
Cara took a step toward Cartwright. Two guns came up off the walls and found her — two guns that were no longer pointed at anyone who mattered.
"Here's the last page." She let her voice carry, let it shake in the exact place a confession shakes. "You didn't cross a country for a professor. Owen's a key. You came all this way for the lock. I can hand it to you. It's closer than you've let yourself hope. It's—"
She let herself look at Skye. One half second, full on.
Then Cara said the word that meant go, and dropped.