Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Doom
I haven't slept.
I gave up an hour ago. Now I'm on my back with my hand on Nova's belly and her breath against my collarbone, watching the ceiling fan turn shadows on the wall.
She fell asleep a little while ago. I know because I’ve been up all damn night.
I don't move until I have to.
The digital clock on the dresser reads five-eighteen when I ease out from under her.
She stirs and resettles, her hand reaching across the empty sheet, finding the warmth where I just was.
She doesn't open her eyes. I let her arm rest where it lands.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a minute and watch her breathe.
She's curled with her cheek against the pillow, her hair across her face, one bare shoulder above the sheet where I pulled the blanket down off her last night.
I memorize the shape of her in the gray pre-dawn light because I'm not stupid enough to assume I'm coming back.
I mean, I assume I'm coming back. I plan on coming back, but I'm not stupid. Anything can happen.
I pull on jeans and a black t-shirt. The Sig from the dresser. The chain around my neck. My cut goes on last.
I write three words on the back of one of her nursing flashcards and prop it against the lamp where she'll see it when she sits up.
I love you. — E.
I lean down and press my mouth to the top of her head.
She doesn't wake. She smells like the soap she uses and faintly, me.
I head downstairs, careful not to stir her from her sleep.
The kitchen is full at five-twenty in the morning.
The smell hits me before I see anyone—fresh coffee, stale cigarette smoke, and oil. Ruby must be stocking us with food for the road.
The overhead light is on. The window over the sink is still dark with the predawn light.
Somebody's wiped the table down because the cards from last night are gone and the wood is clean under the maps.
Amara is at the head of the table in her cut. Maps in front of her. A satellite image of Aldama.
Two coffee cups, both still steaming, which means Dante's up too, somewhere in the clubhouse.
Brick, Boulder, Compass, Razor, Zorro, Python, Axel, and Ismael are around the table. Nobody's talking when I come in.
Amara nods at me. "Sit."
I take a seat.
Ruby slides a coffee in front of me without looking up.
Black. The way she knows I take it.
I wrap my hand around the mug and don't drink it.
The heat works through the ceramic into my palm.
Amara runs the brief.
Vega's at a rented house in a gated community outside Juárez.
He's scheduled to drive to the El Paso crossing at noon. Boulder leads. Razor and Zorro with him. Approach by six-fifteen, contained extraction. Alejandro's cleanup's already at the staging point.
Hatchet's been at a Kodiak safe house outside Aldama for three days.
Two escorts on the perimeter, both Kodiak patches.
He's running the Mexico operation out of there.
Python leads the Aldama team. Which consists of me, Brick, Compass, and Ramiro. Ismael coordinates with Alejandro's network from the compound.
Damon's on the line in Vegas. Every charter on alert by sunrise, as ordered.
Amara looks at me when she's done. "Anything to add?"
"One thing." My voice sounds the way it sounds in church. Steady. "I'd like to be the one who handles Hatchet."
She studies me.
The whole table's watching.
"Cold," she says.
"Yes, Prez."
"You understand what it costs to kill your own father?"
"He stopped being my father the day Mom left him. I don't owe him anything."
Amara holds my eyes for a few moments, almost like she thinks I’m going to change my mind. "Granted."
The table exhales. Razor, across from me, gives me a single nod.
The first one he's given me directly since the day I came back from Vegas.
I nod back.
Amara stands. "Boulder, your team rolls in eight minutes. Aldama team in twelve. Be careful. Be diligent."
* * *
I find Brick at my bike before I throw a leg over.
He's holding a fresh roll of medical tape and his go-bag slung over one shoulder. The morning's cool enough that there's vapor on his breath when he speaks. "Hey."
I stop.
He doesn't say anything for a second. He's looking at my face the way he does when he's about to say something he doesn't usually say.
"You told me about her on the plane. Wren."
"Yeah."
"You came back from that. We came back from that."
"Yeah."
"You come back from this too."
I nod.
He extends his fist. I bump it.
He gets on his bike and we head out of the compound.
The ride to Aldama's forty minutes when traffic on the bypass cooperates, and it does at this hour.
Python takes the lead. I'm on his right. Brick rides in the middle. Compass and Ramiro spread behind.
The desert's blue-gray under the dawn, the Sierra Madre going to gold off to the east as the sun pushes up over the range.
The bypass is empty. The wind off the highway smells like creosote, dry stone, and the diesel of a single semi two miles ahead of us.
We make good time. Twenty minutes in, my comm chirps.
Boulder's voice. Flat. Professional. "Vega's done. Moving to backup position."
Python replies, "Copy."
I listen and keep riding.
I let myself think on the way, briefly.
Mom in a hospital parking garage in the Vegas suburbs.
My sister at four years old in Sturgis, packing a bag for the weekend with the man on a birth certificate she never asked to be on.
Mom again, telling me Curtis doesn't punch you in the face. He sits across the street until your nerves give out.
Nova's hand against the cabinets at the medical school.
I think about each damn one.
I don't let myself think about what Nova's going to look like when she sees the note. That can wait.
The Aldama turnoff's at the next exit.
We take it.
* * *
The house is at the end of a dirt road on the outskirts.
Stucco, single-story. Low wall around the property.
Two Kodiak bikes parked under the carport.
A water tank on the roof catches the first real light of the morning.
The air this far out smells like dust, goat, and something sharp underneath—sage, maybe, or whatever else grows out here in the dry months.
No movement anywhere.
Python signals from his bike and we split.
Brick takes the left side along the perimeter.
Compass takes the right. Ramiro covers the road in case anyone comes up from the highway. Python takes the front door.
I take a knee at the corner of the carport and wait.
The Sig's in my hand.
The morning's gone quiet enough that I can hear Brick moving along the south wall fifty feet away, just barely, the scuff of his boot on the packed dirt.
I can hear my own pulse if I let myself listen.
Brick's voice comes through the comm a few seconds later. "First escort down. Garage side."
Then Compass, "Second escort down. Back kitchen door. House clear of perimeter."
Python, "Clean. Doom, you're up. We have the corners. The house is yours."
I stand and head to the front door.
It’s unlocked. Of course it is. He's been waiting for me. I push it open and step inside.
The front room's empty, and so is the hallway off it.
I move through the house silently. I know the layout from the blueprints we had access to, so the kitchen's at the back.
The smell hits me before I see him.
Coffee. Cigarette smoke that's been settled into the walls for a week. And underneath it, the aftershave he's worn since I was a kid—pine and something cheap.
It takes me back to being eight years old again for half a second.
I think about that too.
He's at the kitchen table.
He's sitting in a chair facing the door I'm about to come through.
Mug of coffee in his hand.
Newspaper open in front of him.
The bone-handled knife I remember from when I was a child, the one he used to take out of his back pocket and run his thumb along the edge of in front of my mother, is on the table beside the mug.
He looks up when I come in. "Hijo."
Hatchet says it like a man who's been expecting me for thirty years.
The kitchen's small.
Tile floor, white walls gone yellow at the corners.
One window over the sink with the desert past it.
A pot still on the burner.
A second mug clean and upside down on the drying rack like he set it out for me.
I clock all of it in under a second.
I cross the room in three strides.
The first thing I do is take the knife off the table.
The second thing I do is drive my elbow into his temple while he's still sitting in the chair. His head snaps back. His coffee spills across the newspaper.
He goes down hard.
I'm on him before he can recover.
My knee in his back, his face against the tile floor.
I pull his arms behind him and zip-tie his wrists.
Then his ankles.
I haul him up and put him back in the chair he was sitting in, head bowed, breathing heavily through his nose.
I bind his torso to the chair back with a third zip tie, sit down across from him and set the bone-handled knife on the kitchen table between us.
He spits blood onto the table.
He's still got his teeth. He's still trying to look at me like the man at the gate.
"Going to ask you a question first," he says. "Do you know how proud of you I am, that you handle yourself like a man? You move the way I move."
I don't answer.
"You and me." His voice is rough. "We've got the same blood. You can't outrun that, hijo. It's in you. The way you came through that door. That was me. That was all Curtis Brown."
I let him talk.
I look at his hands instead of his face.
They're bound behind him but I remember them.
Big knuckles. Long fingers. The same shape as mine.
I've been staring at my own hands for years, and I never let myself put together how much of him is in them.
When he's done, I lay out four things between us, the way you lay down cards. "Rapid City. The motel room. My sister. The contractor you sent to my fucking ol’ lady."
His face changes.
He didn't think I knew about Rapid City.
I watch the realization land. He tries to cover it up, but he can’t. I’ve got him, and he knows it.
"Your mother's a beautiful woman," he says. "I've never made a secret of how I feel about her."