11. Chapter 11 #3
“Where?”
“The mountain place. First light. That’s what I heard. I swear. First fucking light.”
“Who goes with her?” Loco asks.
The first words he has spoken since we came through the door.
The man’s eyes snap to him. “I—I don’t know.”
Loco takes one step forward. “You better.”
“I swear. Renner keeps that shit tight. I just heard the move. First light, day after tomorrow. Cannery to the mountain. That’s all I fucking know.”
I stare at him.
Day after tomorrow. My eyes go to the open garage door, where morning is already graying the river. Tonight and tomorrow. Two nights before they take her out of the cannery.
“Crow.” Grim’s voice is careful now, the way a brother talks when he isn’t sure how much of you is still listening. “Brother. He’s done. He gave it up. It’s over.”
“Not yet.”
“He’s breathing. Loco said breathing.” A beat, and something in Grim’s tone I have never once heard aimed at me in fifteen years. “This isn’t clean. This is cruelty.”
The blue flame hisses between us. Colt is dead on the dock, Shadow is two nights before Renner takes her somewhere we may never find, and the bastard in front of me helped put both of them there.
“He put his rounds through a nineteen-year-old at the quiet door.” My voice comes out low and wrong. “Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. It’s written on our own goddamn wall.”
“That’s the motto. It was never meant to sound like this.”
I do the thing anyway. Grim does not stop me, and Grim has stopped me before. When it is finished the garage is very quiet. The man is not breathing, and I have broken the one clear order my president gave me, and I know exactly what I’ve done.
I kill the torch. The silence rings.
“We take Colt home,” I say. “He rides in the hearse, up front, with us. Not in the back. He doesn’t ride in the back.”
Grim looks at me across the dead man in the chair, across the line I have walked over and cannot walk back.
Whatever is in his face is not disgust and it is not fear.
It is grief, the same grief that was in Loki’s wet eyes, the same one Mercy tried to warn me about at the mouth of the furnace with his hand on my shoulder.
Make sure there’s a man left for her to come home to.
“Yeah,” Grim says quietly. “Up front. I’ll drive.”
We burn Colt at midnight, and I say words over him.
I make myself. Every man gets words, that is the whole of the job, that is the thing that is supposed to hold us apart from the men we feed to the fire.
I stand at the mouth of the furnace where I have stood a thousand times feeling nothing, and I look at the boy’s big dead face, and I find that the words come out of me broken, small and real, and that they cost me.
I understand that Mercy was right about the soul.
It does not wait. It leaves a little every time you tell it to.
Colt buys back a scrap of mine, dying at the quiet door, and it is the worst possible way to be reminded I ever had one.
Loco comes in while the fire is working. He stands beside me in the heat and watches the boy burn, and for a long while neither of us says a thing.
“You went against a direct order,” he says at last. No anger in it. Something heavier.
“I did.”
“There’ll be a reckoning for that. Not tonight. Not till she’s home. But it’s coming, and Stryker’s going to be holding the knife, and he won’t be wrong to.” He watches the flame. “You knew what you were doing when you did it.”
“I did.”
“Two nights,” Loco says. “You got him to give us two nights. Then Renner runs her up that mountain and we’re done.
” He turns and looks at me. “So, we don’t get two nights.
We get one. We hit the cannery tomorrow, in the dark, and we bring our girl home, and God help every man standing between her and that door.
” He puts his hand on the back of my neck, hard, the way he did when I was young, half-broken and new to the smell of this place.
“Get right. Whatever’s left of you, get it right by tomorrow night.
She’s going to need the man, Crow. Not the fire. ”
He leaves me with the boy and the roar.
The gauge climbs to sixteen hundred. I thumb the log and note the time in the careful shorthand Bones likes even for the jobs no coroner will ever read, and my hand shakes doing it, the first time in twenty years my hand has ever shaken over this book.
Somewhere north of here, past the flats, she is awake. I know it because the pull toward her is back, the same damn thing I feel every night she walks into my crematory and I refuse to turn around. I blamed it on the heat from the furnace because that was easier than admitting it was her.
I carried her out of a fire once when I was fifteen, went through the smoke and came out with her against my chest and never told a soul. Now Renner knows. He has her in the dark, and tomorrow I walk into another fire to bring her home.
Hold on, I tell her, across the black miles, in the place I have never once let myself speak to her.
Hold on. I’m coming for you first.