6. Chapter 6
Chapter six
CROW
The lot is wrong the second I walk out into it, and it takes me a full ten seconds to work out why, which for me is a lifetime.
Morning came gray and mean over Grimstone, fog sitting low on the graves, and I’ve been up the whole night with a dead man’s phone in my head and a burning doorway I haven’t seen in years behind my eyes. I told myself I’d walk the perimeter to clear it. Habit. A cleaner checks his ground.
The ground is fine. The fence is fine. The wrongness isn’t in the lot at all. It’s in me, low and physical, something gone suddenly slack where she has always been.
Then the practical part of my head catches up with the animal part, and I see it.
Her car’s gone.
The rusted-out Corolla she keeps parked nose-out by the shop, always nose-out, because I taught her that without ever telling her I taught her it, a car you can leave fast is a car pointed at the road.
The space is empty. A dark rectangle of dry gravel where the fog didn’t reach under her, so she’s been gone a while. Hours.
Something in my chest goes very still and very cold.
Shadow left.
I make myself think it plain, because the plain thought is the safe one.
She got her back up last night, she does that, the wild in her comes off the leash and she goes and sulks somewhere until it burns down.
She drove into town. She’s sitting in the diner on Ruin Road with a coffee going cold, being angry at me, which she’s earned.
That’s all this is. She’s twenty-five and she’s furious and she left.
People leave. It’s the most ordinary thing a person can do.
I stand in the empty parking space and I do not believe one word of it.
Nova’s coming across the lot with two coffees when I come back around the shop, and she reads my face before I’m within twenty feet, because that’s the thing about the women, they read fast, and her easy walk goes tight.
“Where is she,” Nova says. Not good morning. Not what’s wrong.
“You tell me. When’d you see her last.”
“Dawn. The chapel.” Nova’s already looking past me at the empty space, and the coffees are shaking now, just slightly, the surface of them trembling. “We had coffee. She was asking me...” She stops.
“Asking you what.”
“Nothing. Girl stuff.” She’s lying. I know the shape of a lie, I make my living downstream of them, and Nova’s just told me one, but her fear is real and it’s climbing, so I let the lie go for now and file it, the way Shadow files things, and God, even her habits are in my head now.
“Nova.” The tone in my voice causes her to freeze. “This is the part where you stop protecting her from me.”
“She wanted to know about the book.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.”
“Her car’s gone,” I say.
“She wouldn’t just leave.” Nova says it fast, too fast, a woman convincing herself. “Not without telling me. She tells me everything.”
“Does she?”
Nova’s mouth closes. Because no. Shadow tells no one everything. Shadow keeps a book behind her eyes nobody’s allowed to read, and the two of us standing here both know it, and the knowing sits between us like a third person.
“Get Loco up,” I tell her. “And Byte. Now.”
Church at seven in the morning is a different animal than church at two.
No ritual to it. Men come in half-dressed and hard-eyed, Buck with his shirt untucked, Storm still working his boots, Stryker already annoyed because Stryker wakes up annoyed.
Loco takes the head of the table in a wife-beater with the founding skull faded on his shoulder, and he looks at me, and whatever’s on my face wipes the sleep off his.
“Talk,” he says.
“Shadow’s gone. Car’s gone with her, sometime before dawn. Nova saw her last, in the chapel, around first light.”
“So, she went to town.” Stryker drops into his chair. “She’s a grown woman, Crow, not a prospect. She doesn’t need a hall pass to buy tampons.”
“She took the back way out.” I keep my voice flat. Flat is the only way I know how to keep it. “Through the blind spot by the north corner. The one the cameras don’t cover.”
That lands. The table goes quiet. Because you don’t sneak out of your own home through a camera blind spot to go buy tampons. You do it when you don’t want to be followed.
“Byte.” Loco doesn’t look away from me. “Her phone.”
Byte’s already got his laptop open, fingers going.
“Pinging it now. Give me a sec, give me a sec...” The fingers stop.
He frowns at the screen, does a thing, frowns harder.
“Phone’s off. Or dead. Or gone. Last ping was oh-five-forty, tower coverage puts it...
” He looks up, and his cocky’s all gone again, same as last night.
“Puts it out past Darkwater. On the county road. Then nothing.”
“Darkwater?” I frown. “That’s Renner’s stretch of road.”
Stryker snorts. “So she drove into a supplier’s backyard at dawn for kicks?”
“No. She must have found something.” I don’t know what.
That’s the part with teeth in it. Shadow found something in that book of hers, something she didn’t bring to me, and she didn’t bring it to me because last night I made real sure she knew the shut door was the only thing I’d ever give her.
“She doesn’t spook and she doesn’t wander.
If she drove out there alone and quiet, she had a reason, and it’s sitting in a book none of us can read but her. ”
Stryker leans forward. “You’re saying she went to run down a bookkeeping error. By herself. At dawn. The morning after some ghost cornered her in our own lot.”
“I’m saying that’s exactly what she’d do.”
Because it is. Because she’s loyal to that book past all sense, past her own safety, and because I spent last night making her feel like the one thing she’s sure of, her place in this club, was being taken away from her.
And if she went looking for answers because of me, I handed whoever is out there exactly what they needed.
Somebody else set the trap, but I’m the one who sent her out into the dark alone to walk into it.
“Alright.” Loco’s voice cuts the room. “Everybody breathe. We don’t know she’s in trouble.
We know she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be, being stubborn, which is a Tuesday.
” He looks at me. “You. You’re wound like a spring and it’s making me nervous.
She’s a smart girl. Odds are she’s already halfway home with a chip on her shoulder. ”
“Odds are,” I agree, and I don’t believe that either.
“But.” Loco stands. “We don’t leave it to odds.
Grim, Crow, take the county road to Darkwater, find that address, find her car.
Byte, you keep working the phone. Get Nova to call every woman she knows and every diner on Ruin Road.
Anybody hears from her, I want to know inside a minute.
” He plants his hands on the table. “Probably nothing. We treat it like something anyway. That’s how the something never happens. ”
Chairs scrape. The room moves.
And under my sternum the slack line gives one small tug, faint, wrong, a pull toward the west road, toward the black water, and I’ve spent two decades not feeling things and I feel that, and it terrifies me more than any gun ever has.
We take the hearse.
You don’t drive out to a place where your girl might have left blood on the floor in a pickup. The long black car is built to carry whatever waits at the end of the road. I don’t look too hard at the empty deck behind the seats, and I try not to think about whether it stays empty on the ride home.
Grim rides shotgun and doesn’t talk, which is one of the better things about Grim.
The county road unspools gray and wet through the pines, the river showing black on our left, and I know this road.
I’ve driven it at three in the morning with something wrapped in plastic where Grim’s boots are now.
I know the bend where the water goes deep and slow and keeps what you give it.
Shadow knows it too. She’s written a dozen drops to this exact stretch.
She’d have driven out here reading the river like a page in her own book, unafraid, because she’s never once been afraid of the dead.
It’s the living she should have been watching.
“You’re doing the thing,” Grim says. First words in twenty miles.
“What thing.”
“The jaw thing. You do it when you’re about to kill somebody but you haven’t picked who yet.”
I unclench it.
“You want to tell me,” Grim says, watching the road, not me, giving me the mercy of not being looked at, “why you’re driving this car like it owes you money? Over the bookkeeper?”
The wipers drag. The black car eats the miles.
“No,” I say.
“Didn’t think so.” And that’s the end of it, because Grim doesn’t push. Now I’m the one being read, and I hate it, and I let him have it, because there’s no man alive I’d rather have in this seat driving into a thing I can’t see the shape of yet.
The boat repair shows up right where I knew it would. Corrugated steel, a dead marina sign, the whole place squatting at the water’s edge.
No cars in the lot.
Grim sees it the same second I do, and his hand drops to his piece. “Where’s her car?”
“I don’t know.” I’m already out before the hearse has fully stopped, gun up, moving on the building, every rule I’ve taught a prospect about clearing a structure slow gone out of my head, because the slack line in my chest is screaming now, hauling me at that open side door hanging off its one hinge.
Inside is one gutted room. Gray light. A single wooden chair dead center on the concrete.
And on the floor beside it, small, dark and horribly familiar, a shape that stops my heart in my chest.
Not her. I make myself see it clear before the fear finishes me.
Not her body. Her jacket. The battered leather one she takes off the hook by the chapel door, dropped in a heap like it was pulled off her, and beside it, thrown into the corner where it skidded, catching the weak light on its little chrome slide is the .
380. Grim’s gun. The one he gave her two birthdays ago and pretended he didn’t.
She never went anywhere without it. She’d never leave it. And there’s one spent casing on the concrete three feet away, winking up at me, which means she got a shot off, which means she fought, which means whatever happened in this room, my Shadow did not walk out of it on her own two feet.
Grim crouches by the jacket. Goes very still. When he speaks his voice has gone somewhere I’ve never heard it go.
“Crow.” He lifts two fingers off the concrete, and they come up dark and wet and red. “This is fresh.”
The room tips. Twenty years of keeping myself cold comes apart at once, and what’s underneath is anything but cold. It is hard, ripping through ever wall I have put up to keep it buried.
They took her.
My hand closes around the .380 until the little chrome grip cuts into my palm. I want something alive in this room. Something with a throat but there isn’t anything.
Somebody took my Shadow.
Somebody walked into a room I could have kept her out of, put hands on her, and made her bleed onto this floor. She fought back. Got a shot off. Went down swinging with a gun a big man gave to her as a joke.
And while she was fighting for her life, I was forty minutes south telling myself she’d gone to sulk over coffee.
I saw the wild come up under the fear last night. She asked me for one thing, and I walked away because it was easier than giving it to her.
Somebody else set the trap. But I’m the one who sent her out into the dark alone to walk into it.
“Crow.” Grim’s on his feet now, watching me, wary, the way you watch a thing you’re not sure is still on your side. “Talk to me. What do we do?”
I look at the blood on his fingers. I look at the little gun she fought with. And the man I’ve been for twenty years, the quiet one, the controlled one, the ghost in leather who never feels a thing, I feel him step aside, and I let him, and I do not think I’m getting him back.
“We find every man who touched this room,” I say, and I don’t recognize my own voice. “And we put them in the ground. Slow.”