CHAPTER 3
Omar
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I smelled them before I heard the bike, which is how I knew the night was going to be a long one.
Grant's exhaust came in on the wind a full thirty seconds ahead of him, and under it, threaded through the cold and wet concrete and the river-rot of the city's east edge, was a scent that didn't belong out here.
Expensive shampoo. Office air. Fear, sharp and bright as a struck match.
And blood, a thumb's worth, the kind you get from a lip you've been chewing instead of screaming.
A whole person was riding toward me on the back of that bike, and I could read her like a paragraph before I saw her face.
I was under the overpass where the old freight road dips below the new one, sitting on my tracker with the engine off, humming something my brain wouldn't let go of. Three notes, over and over, the way a tune sticks when you're nervous and won't admit it. I had the map out across my tank.
That's a thing I do. People give me grief for it. We've got phones, Omar. Cady can pull traffic off a satellite that doesn't officially exist, Omar. And every time, I unfold the map.
It's soft as cloth now, folded and refolded so many times the creases have gone furred and white, frayed seams where the corridor runs north and the rivers cut, the back roads marked in pencil so faint you have to tilt it to the light.
It lives inside my jacket, against my chest, and it's taken on the jacket's smell, which Cady once told me is warm asphalt and orange peel, which I take as a compliment.
I touched the worn fold over the river crossing, the way you'd touch a doorframe on the way out of a house you loved. Then the headlight came around the pylon.
There they are.
Grant rolled in fast and stopped hard, the way he does everything, like punctuation.
And there she was behind him, this woman, arms locked around his middle, knuckles white, spine so straight you'd think someone had run a rule of law up the back of her coat.
She got off the bike before it had fully settled, and that one move told me half her history.
She wouldn't wait for permission. Her legs were shaking and she'd ruled that they weren't allowed to.
And somebody had taught her, long ago and for keeps, that the worst thing in the world was to be caught needing a hand down.
I liked her immediately. I like a hard case. You always know where the soft part is. It's wherever they've built the most wall.
"Counselor," I said, folding the map closed and sliding off my seat, ambling, hands loose, the whole sunshine routine, because a scared person reads a fast-moving man as a threat and a slow one as furniture.
"Welcome to the glamorous world of werewolf taxi service.
Tips appreciated, the coffee's terrible, and that one over there doesn't talk.
" I tipped my head at Grant. "So I do double. "
She looked at me. Gray-green eyes, flat and assessing, taking my measure like she was about to enter me into evidence. "You're the third one."
"I'm a third one. There's a fourth somewhere being expensive.
" I crouched a little, knee on the cold ground, below her eyeline, because I'd clocked the way she braced when I stood.
Show her my hands. Show her the chipped tooth when I grin, because nothing reads less like a predator than a man with a bad tooth and worse jokes.
"Omar. You're soaked through, running on fumes, white-knuckling a stranger's jacket for forty minutes, so before anything else: are you hurt anywhere that matters? "
"No."
"That a lawyer no or a real no?"
A flicker. Almost a smile, killed in the crib. "Real no."
Grant had already dismounted and walked the perimeter, silent, eyes up the freight road, down the embankment, counting exits under his breath so low it's barely a word.
Two. Three. Three's a lie. He came back into the dark of the underpass and stood at my shoulder, a wall of a man, smelling of gun oil and cedar and cold sweat.
"Tail. Single light. Held back two miles, then matched us. "
"I caught it on the bridge," I said. "It's not falling back."
"No."
That was the whole conversation. That's how Grant and I talk. He gives me the threat, I give him the road, and a plan happens in the middle without anybody having to be charming about it. Except me. Somebody has to be.
"Okay," I said, and pulled the map back out, because this was where I earned my keep. "Counselor, I need you to do something you're not going to want to do, in the next ninety seconds, and I promise it's the right call even though every cell in your overeducated body is going to file an objection."
She crossed her arms. The fear-smell spiked. "That's a remarkable amount of preamble for a man who claims to be the efficient one."
"See, now you're getting it. " I unfolded the map between us against the bike's seat, and the underpass light caught the furred white creases, the faint pencil tracks of every back road I've ever needed.
The smell of it lifted between us, the inside of my jacket worked into the fibers, the ghost of every mile I've put between myself and a closing door. "Your phone."
"What about it."
"It's on. It's been on since the office.
Which means every second, it is singing a little song to anybody who knows the frequency, and the people who want you in the ground.
" I watched her flinch and hated that I had to make her flinch.
"They know the frequency. That light behind us? That's the song getting answered."
"I need my phone."
"You need to be alive more than you need your contacts list."
"My evidence is backed up to a cloud."
"A cloud you can't reach from a morgue. " I said it gentle.
That's the trick with the hard cases. You say the brutal thing in the softest voice you own, like you're tucking it into bed.
"Sweetheart. The drive's in your bag. I can smell the cold plastic of it from here, and the doc room you cloned it in, and three different highlighters.
You did the smart thing already. You backed up the part that matters to something that doesn't broadcast. Now do the other smart thing and kill the radio you're carrying around your neck like a bell. "
She'd gone still. Very still. Fingers steepled in front of her mouth, a small precise gesture I'd learn later meant she'd already decided and was just letting the rest of us catch up.
Grant had said kill the phone twice tonight and gotten nowhere.
I knew, because the back of his neck was tight and he was thumbing that little brass thing in his pocket the way he does when he's losing patience and won't show it.
So here's the difference between me and Grant, and the whole reason Dane sends us as a pair. Grant tells you the truth and lets it hit you like the truth. I tell you the same truth and hand you a way to carry it.
"Here," I said, holding out my palm. "Don't turn it off.
Turning it off is hiding. We're going to murder it.
You'll feel better for the second one. " I nodded at the embankment, where the freight road ran down to a culvert and a foot of black river water moving fast. "You throw it, because it's your evidence and your call, and I'm just the guy pointing at the water. "
For a second she just looked at me, and something moved behind the flat lawyer-eyes that I'd put money was surprise. Like nobody had handed her the choice in a long time. Like everybody just took her phone, took her arm, took her down off the bike whether she wanted the help or not.
Then she pulled the phone out of her coat, looked at it one beat too long, a slab of glass with six years of a life on it, and threw it. Good arm, too. It went out over the culvert in a clean dark arc and the water took it, no splash worth the name, just gone, and the little song stopped.
I felt the tail's frequency die in the back of my skull like a tooth finally pulled.
"There's my girl," I said, before I could stop myself, and she shot me a look that should've left a scar, and I held up both hands. "Sorry. Habit. I nickname. It's a disease. There's no cure, my mother would've told you, except I don't have one of those, so."
That landed somewhere I hadn't aimed it. Her face did a small recalibration, and I thought, oh, you too. You're an orphan too. It's a smell, almost. Or a quiet. People raised by an absence move through a room a certain way, always knowing where the door is.
I folded the joke back up like the map and put it away.
"Now," I said, brisk, sunshine back on, "we ride.
Grant takes the front, because his idea of a scenic route is the one with the most clear fields of fire.
I take the back, because I know where the roads are that aren't roads.
" I tapped the map, the pencil ghost of a line that ran off the grid entirely, through an old quarry access the county forgot it owned.
"There's a tail now. There's not going to be one in about twelve minutes. Paper doesn't lose signal, counselor. A satellite blinks and a phone sings to the wrong ears, but a pencil line on cotton has yet to steer me into a wall."
"That's not an argument," she said, climbing onto the back of my tracker without being asked, which I clocked and loved. "That's a personality."
"It's both. Hold on tight, and put your hands on me, never on the jacket, because the jacket'll come off in a corner and then you're a stain."
She put her arms around my middle. She was shaking, and furious that she was shaking; I could feel that too, the way her whole body had a no in it.
And under the fear, under the office and the river and the cold, that struck-match brightness, that fierce live thing, and I thought, the people chasing you have no idea what they grabbed.
I hummed the three notes, kicked the tracker over, and we went.
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