9. Chapter 9 #2
“I’m just,” he pauses. “Crow, that doesn’t sit right. Loki? He taught her the book. He put the key on her. He’s the reason she’s got a place here at all.”
“I know what he is to her.” It is the exact thing that makes it worse, and I do not say so. “Walk your thread. Give me a name I can put my hands on. Tonight.”
I go to the crematory before church, because Marchetti is waiting and the work does not do itself, and because there is a stretch of the night where I would rather be alone with the fire than with the faces of men I have known fifteen years.
Mercy is there when I come in. Sitting on the cold table, boots swinging, as if he knew I would come.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” I tell him.
“Neither should you, brother. Not the way you’ve been in here.” He watches me work the burner up. “Three today. Cofield yesterday. And you feed them in like kindling and you don’t say a word over a single one.”
“They don’t get words.”
“Everybody gets words. That’s the whole job.
That’s what makes us different from the men we burn.
” He slides off the table and comes to stand beside me at the mouth of the furnace, the heat pushing at both of us.
“I’m not telling you to go soft. I’m telling you there’s a version of you that walks into that cannery and gets her out, and there’s a version that gets her out and has nothing left to give her when he does.
I’ve watched you two days now. I know which one’s driving. ”
“When she’s home,” I say, “I’ll worry about my soul. Not before.”
“You say that like the soul waits.” Mercy puts a hand on my shoulder, brief, the way he does at gravesides. “It doesn’t. It leaves a little every time you tell it to. Make sure there’s a man left for her to come home to, Crow. That’s the sermon.”
He leaves me to it. I feed the fire, and I do not say words over Marchetti. I tell myself I will find them again later, when she is breathing free air.
Church at midnight. Every patch at the table, and I do not sit down to say it. I put it to them flat, the cleaner’s report. Marchetti. The mountains. The collecting, and the women who go out like lights. The clock running on her.
Then the last part.
“There’s a rat. Renner’s had a man in our house since spring.
It’s how he bent the book, how he learned her habits, how he walked her out to Darkwater without a shot fired.
” The table is dead still. “Byte’s got money moving to somebody at this table, three payments, four months.
And Marchetti gave me where it started. Said Renner got what he needed out of our record-keeper. ”
I let it sit.
“There’s one way to bend that book. You’ve got to be able to write in it. In this whole club, living, two people can do that. One of them is in a cannery right now because somebody in this room sold her.”
“You’re sure it’s inside.” Buck, careful, because Buck counts everything twice. “A dead man says a lot at the end. Says whatever buys him a breath.”
“He wasn’t buying anything by then. He was past that.” I hold Buck’s eye. “And Byte’s money trail says the same thing the dead man did. Two roads, one house at the end of them.”
“Then somebody say it,” Mercy says, quiet, from the foot of the table. “We’re all doing the sum in our heads and nobody wants to be the one to write the answer down.”
I do not say the other name. I do not have to.
Every head at that table turns toward the same man. Loki. Secretary. Fifteen years patched. The man who taught our girl her letters in that black book, who set the safe in the floor with his own hands, who looped the key over her neck when she was nineteen and half-feral.
His mug stops halfway to his mouth.
“Now hold on,” Storm starts, because Storm keeps the peace. “We don’t put a brother in the ground on a dead man’s word and a trail Byte hasn’t finished walking—”
“Let him answer,” Stryker says, hard, watching Loki. “Look at his face and tell me we shouldn’t.”
And here is the thing that breaks it, the thing that turns my hands to fists under the table.
An innocent man yells. An innocent man comes up out of his chair swinging and tells the room to go to hell for even thinking it.
Loki does none of that. Loki goes white to the lips.
The mug comes down slow and lands crooked on the wood.
His mouth opens and closes on nothing, and his eyes go somewhere far off and sick, a man turning a thing over and over in his head and finding it worse every single turn.
“Loki.” Loco’s voice is a low warning mixed with grief in the same breath. “Look at me. Tell them it wasn’t you.”
Loki looks up. He looks past Loco, past all of them, straight at me, at the man who does the thing the table decides needs doing, and whatever he sees coming for him across that table he does not flinch from it.
And when he finally speaks, it is barely a sound, and it is the worst answer a guilty man ever gave and the only true answer an innocent one could.
“I need to think,” he whispers. “God help me. There’s something I need to— I need to think.” His chair scrapes back.
Mine hits the floor as I stand.