9. Chapter 9
Chapter nine
CROW
Loco gave me until nightfall. Scout it, he said, hit it if it can be hit, but come home either way. So, the same night they take her, Grim and I lie on our bellies in the salt grass a quarter mile off the cannery, glasses up, and what I see through them kills the plan I came out here to run.
“Count them,” Grim whispers.
“Two on the roof. Four on the doors. More inside, moving.” Cars staged nose-out for a fast leave. A second ring of men past the first. Sightlines clear all the way to the road. “He’s not hiding her, Grim. He’s daring us.”
“We could still take it. Hit it hard, hit it fast, before they set.”
“We go in hot, we lose men.”
“We’ve lost men before.”
“We go in hot, we lose her.” I lower the glasses and look at him in the dark.
“That’s the whole point of the show. He wants us loud through the front.
He’s got a man on her the second we breach, and the first thing that dies is her, right in front of me, so I carry it the rest of my life. That’s the trap. She’s the trap.”
Grim is quiet a long beat, the grass moving around us.
“So, we don’t go through the front,” he says.
“No. We take his people apart first. Every gun on that roof came from somewhere. Works for somebody. Drinks somewhere, sleeps somewhere, calls somebody. We find them off the wall, one at a time, quiet, till there’s nobody left to man it.
” I start backing out of the grass on my elbows.
“Then we walk in the front like we own the place, and there’s no one left to point a gun at her when we do. ”
“That’s slow, brother.”
“Yeah, it’s slow. It’s fucking painful.” And she is in there right now, her first night as his, with a man who keeps women till the light goes out of them.
The thought is a hand around my throat. “It’s the only way she comes out breathing.
Slow is the price, and I’ll pay it, and I’ll hate every hour of it. ”
“And if he moves her before we’re through?”
“Then we take the wall apart faster than he can pack.” I get to a crouch. The cannery sits black against the last of the light, and somewhere inside it she is learning what it is to be his. Somewhere inside it she is learning what his world looks like. He has until I reach her.
It takes Byte most of the next day to put a name in my hand. Marchetti. Careful man but careful men call their mothers. He ran Renner’s product out of Nohaven, and he comes out of a bar a little after six, drunk enough to be reckless and sober enough to walk, which is exactly what we need.
“That’s him,” Grim says. We are in the cab of the hearse across the lot, no lights, engine off. “Byte tracked his phone to the bar an hour ago. Mid-level. High enough to know things.”
“High enough to be missed.”
We take him at his truck. Grim comes around the tailgate quiet for a man his size, and by the time Marchetti hears gravel it is too late, my arm is across his throat, Grim has his wrists and the keys are out of his hand and into Grim’s pocket.
He tries to yell. My hand kills it. He tries to fight, and there is nothing to fight, we have done this more times than either of us will ever say out loud, and inside ten seconds he is folded into the back of the hearse with a zip tie on his wrists and Grim’s knee in his spine.
“Please,” he is already saying, muffled. “Please, I don’t— whatever you think, man—”
“Save it.” I pull the door shut on the two of us and thump the panel. Grim takes us out of the lot slow and legal, a funeral car minding the speed limit, nothing to see. “You’ve got a long ride to decide how this goes.”
The man in the chair has a name, but I stop using it inside the first hour. Names are for men I mean to let live.
We have him in the back of the shop now, tied to a chair, Grim on the door, the furnace ticking through the wall. Marchetti has done enough crying to know it will not move me and enough thinking to know where he is.
“You drive for Renner,” I say. “So, you know the roads.”
“Yeah. I know the roads.”
“Then you know the one to the cannery.”
His face does the thing they all do, the flinch when they work out I already know more than they hoped. “I don’t know what you’re—”
I hit him. Not hard. Hard enough. He spits red on the concrete and the crying starts up again. Whatever part of me might care is forty miles north in a dead cannery with Shadow. Until she’s out Marchetti gets nothing from me.
“Renner’s got her there. I know that already.” I crouch so we are eye to eye. “What I want is what’s under it. Why the show. Why a fortress for one girl who files paperwork.”
“I’m nobody, man. I move boxes. I don’t sit in on the— on the thinking.”
“You move boxes for a man who took what’s mine. That makes you a road between me and her.”
“I got a kid,” he says, and it is the wrong thing to say to me tonight, and something in my face tells him so, because he goes gray and tries again. “I’m just saying I’ll tell you what I know, I will, but you gotta—”
“I don’t gotta do anything. That’s the part you’re not hearing.” I let the quiet do the rest.
Grim shifts his weight by the door, and the small sound of it is enough, and Marchetti breaks like a cheap latch.
“Because she’s not— she’s not just a girl, man.” He is shaking, and it is not all fear now. “You want it, you make it quick after. You give me that much.”
I do not give him anything. But I go still, and he reads the still as close enough.
“He collects them.” Marchetti’s voice drops like the words weigh something. “Years. A long fucking time. He’s looking for a certain kind of woman. Special ones. He finds one, he takes her, keeps her a while.” A wet breath. “Most of them don’t last.”
“Don’t last?”
“They break. Or he breaks them. Or they just go out. Like a light going out. I seen a couple, up at the mountain place, and they were there but there was nothing home, you know? Like he’d used something up.” He shudders. “I stopped going up there. Didn’t want to be around it.”
The furnace ticks. I keep my face shut, my hands loose and I let him talk, because he is talking now, and a man who is talking will tell you the thing he does not mean to if you only wait for it.
“Her, though.” He swallows. “Her he’s been chasing the whole time. Says she’s the one that got away. Slipped him when she was a kid, five, six years old. Says he finally found Maren’s—”
“I know whose girl she is.” It comes out wrong and he flinches off it.
“Okay. Okay, man.”
“The mountain place. Where?”
“Past the line. Up in the hills, off every map there is. Private road, gate, the whole thing. That’s the real one.
The cannery’s just the front.” His eyes come up to me, wet, urgent, as if he wants me to feel the size of it.
“He’s gonna move her up there, man. That’s the plan.
Cannery’s the flypaper, keeps you looking the wrong way while he gets what he wants out of her, then he takes her up the mountain and you never see her again. Nobody comes back off that mountain.”
“How long?”
“Days, maybe. Depends how fast she gives him what he’s after.”
“And what is he after?”
“I don’t know!” It tears out of him. “Above me, I swear to Christ, above me. Nobody knows but him and the ones he keeps, and the ones he keeps don’t come back to say. All I know is he wants it given, not taken. He’s real particular on that. Said it more than once. It’s got to be given.”
Given, not taken. I file it with the rest of what I do not understand about the man who has my Shadow, and I stand up, and Marchetti sags in the chair thinking it is over.
That is when I ask the last one. Easy. Like it is nothing.
“How’d Renner use our book?”
“What?”
“My club keeps a book. Renner used what was in it to walk her out the gate on her own two feet. You can’t do that from the outside. Somebody him fed what we needed..” I look down at him. “You want quick? This is how you buy it. Who’s the rat.”
“I don’t have a name.” He sees my face and rushes it, words falling over each other.
“I don’t, he keeps that tight, only Renner knows who it is, but I heard him.
On a call. Laughing about it. Said the best part, the best part was the rat didn’t even know he was ratting.
Said he got everything he needed out of your record-keeper and the old man never felt a thing.
Said it like it was the funniest thing in the world. ”
The room goes very quiet.
“Say that again.”
“Your record guy. Keeps your papers. Renner got it out of him drunk or however and the old fool never knew he gave it up.” His eyes are huge. “That’s everything. That’s all I got, I swear. You said quick. You said quick, man, please—”
I look at Grim. Grim looks at me. Neither of us says his name. We don’t need to.
“Make it quick,” I tell Grim, and I walk out so I do not have to feel that one either.
Byte catches me in the yard with his laptop open against the hood of a truck, blue light on his face, and he has the look he has worn since the cannery, the one that says he found a thing he wishes he had not.
“You get anything more off the phones,” I ask.
“Enough. Calls cluster up in the hills past the line, matches what Marchetti told you about a mountain place.” He turns the screen, a scatter of dead pings in the green nothing of the border country. “I can’t get closer than a valley. No towers up there. That’s the point of up there.”
“Keep on it.”
“Crow.” He stops me. “There’s money moving.
Somebody inside took a payment. Three of them, over four months, routed stupid, through a card game, a bait shop and a used-boat dealer, but it’s the same hand every time and it ends in cash.
” He swallows. “Somebody at our table’s been getting fed by Renner since spring. ”
“A name.”
“Not yet. Soon. The thread’s real, I just have to walk it back without tearing it.” He looks up at me. “You already think you know who.”
“Marchetti gave me the record-keeper.”
Byte’s face does something complicated. “Loki.”
“Don’t say it in the yard.”