15. Seven #4
And back home, the gate crew and a dozen more holding the compound with more rifles and RPGs than people to carry them, because a man who sends five fighters after a sleeping kid is a man who might send fifty at a clubhouse the night its patches are elsewhere. Hawk had planned for that too.
Tank wasn't on this block. Tank hadn't been off that hospital since the night the white van rolled into its parking structure.
He'd taken the second level for himself, a van of our own backed into the far corner with the windows blacked out, and he'd slept in it every night since, the shotgun on the bench seat and his boots on.
He never once took a night in his own bed.
Cuervo, Santos and Valkyrie had rotated through with him, so somebody was always awake at the ramp, and tonight Hawk had pulled all three back for this, because tonight we needed every hand that had ever thrown a punch.
Two of the gate crew were sitting in that van with Tank instead, with orders to call, not to fight.
Valkyrie was ten feet from me on an ammo crate.
Cuervo was inside that building with a beer in his hand.
Santos was below with a rocket. And Tank was where Tank had been for five days, and nobody was getting past him.
The plan was solid. I'd checked it the way my head checks things, forty angles at once, and it held from every one.
So why were my hands cold?
"Windows." Declan, in my ear, on the hour. "Front's quiet. Line's gone. Lot's full."
"North door." Blade, a whisper with gravel in it. "Nothing moving. A rat. Big one."
"Copy." Hawk, one word, and the radios went quiet again.
Down the window line a lighter clicked, once, and died under somebody's hand and a hissed word from three directions.
Valkyrie sat on an ammo crate with her forearms on her knees, turning a folding knife over and over without opening it.
Reaper stood at the next scrape with his arms crossed, and he'd been watching the pit's glow so long and so still he could've been part of the building.
Nolan sat at his card table with one headphone cup on and one ear free, the little green level meter the only light in the room. He'd been staring at it for hours the way other men stare at fires.
"Anything?" I knew the answer. My legs took me over anyway.
"Quiet." He didn't look up. "That mic's still off.
Nobody's lowered it or pressed a button.
No fight's been called through it yet." He turned a dial a hair and turned it back, giving his hands a job.
"The bug works, Ghost. I planted it myself last Thursday.
Bought a beer in there like everybody else, and tucked the bug out of sight where the mic's wire runs down the wall.
Declan drank his ten feet away in case anybody looked twice.
No colors, faces nobody in that place has ever seen.
Same trick you pulled your first night. I sat in the van after and heard that mic run from the first bout to the last drunk.
The second somebody switches it on tonight, we hear everything.
The only way we sit deaf all night is if they brought a new mic and never touch ours. "
It should have settled me. It didn't. By this hour last Thursday, that wire had already given him a ten-count and half a card of fights. Tonight the green meter sat flat at nothing, the lot outside was the fullest I'd ever seen it, and not one fight had been announced.
Gravedigger knew my face. He'd pulled it out of a crowd of two hundred once, between one sweep and the next, and that was why the best set of quiet feet in this club stood at a painted window two blocks off instead of inside, where I could do something.
The one job I was built for, and mine was the one face that couldn't go through that door.
The kid we'd taken in that parking structure had sworn the boss would be there tonight.
The whole crew, he's there, everybody goes one more time.
But the kid had also climbed into a van with four other men and never come home, and a man like Gravedigger recounts his tools.
Five gone without a sound. If it were my building, my night, I'd either stay away entirely…
Or I'd change the locks and stand at the rail to watch what walked in.
An arch at the entrance. A mic that hadn't said one word.
Then the roar came.
It rolled out of the pit and across two blocks of night air, through brick and painted-out glass, arriving low and enormous, and the old paint on the window ticked against it.
My knee stopped.
Every head along the windows turned at once. Valkyrie came off her crate with the knife open in her hand, and I hadn't heard her do either. Reaper's chin lifted, the first move he'd made in an hour. A room full of people stopped breathing to listen to a building none of us could see into.
A fight roar spiked and died. This one climbed and kept rolling, one long sound out of a whole crowd's worth of voices, like the whole building had been promised something. Nothing about a first fight sounds like that.
I looked at Nolan. Nolan was already looking at me, one cup still on his ear, and the easy answer was gone off his face.
The green meter sat flat. The line was silent.
The mic hanging over that ring was still off, and a building full of people had just come up off its floor screaming over something nobody had announced through it.
Why would a crowd come apart like that when nothing had gone into the hanging mic?
Was the mic we'd rigged even being used tonight?
The roar came again, bigger, and the glass in front of me buzzed against its old paint.
"I don't like this."
This time, nobody told me I was wrong.