Chapter 2 #2
"Here's the ruling," he said. "You don't get killed, you don't get traded, and you don't get to leave."
"That's three," she said. "What's the fourth."
"There's a fourth."
"There's always a fourth."
Wolf almost — almost — smiled.
"Nobody within four hundred miles will put a hand on a patched old lady," he said. "That's not sentiment. That's the only rule anybody out here still keeps, including people who keep nothing. You're going to be one."
Nadia didn't move.
"Say the whole thing," she said. "Don't dress it."
"All right." Wolf put his knuckles on the table.
"It's protection, because whatever pointed you at that account is still pointing.
It's a leash, because you don't leave the state and you don't leave the man.
And it's a punishment, because you took from us and there's a bill.
It's all three. I'm not going to insult you by picking one. "
"That's the most honest thing anybody's said to me in a decade," she said, "and I hate every part of it."
"Noted."
"Married to who?"
"That's the second decision," Wolf said, "and I'm not making it for anybody."
"That's very progressive of you."
"It's not progressive, it's practical. You put a man on that detail who resents it and inside a month you've got two problems and a divorce.
" He looked around the table. "So it's volunteer.
And I'll tell everybody in this room right now that if nobody puts a hand up in the next thirty seconds, we're back to Gunnar's version, and I'll do it, and I'll sleep. "
The clock over the door did its thing.
Deke shifted like he was going to. I saw it.
Deke Marsh, who had a wife in the ground in Fargo and had not so much as looked at anybody since, was going to put his hand up for a stranger because somebody had to, and it would have been a disaster, and it would have been the kindest disaster in the history of this charter.
And my hand went up.
I want to be precise here, because it matters later and because I've had to explain it about forty times since.
I did not decide. I have made a career out of the gap between the deciding and the saying, I live in that gap, it's the whole property — and there was no gap. My arm went up like somebody else's arm.
"Me," I said.
The room reacted about how you'd expect.
"Trick—"
"Oh, that's a terrible idea—"
"Deke, is he serious?"
"He's never serious," Deke said, "that's the whole—"
"He's serious," Wren said quietly, from the wall, and wrote something down.
Gunnar was staring at me. "Why."
"Because I'm the road captain and this is a road problem," I said, which was true, and which was about eleven percent of it.
"Because I'm not married, which is a short list. And because whatever put her hand on that account did it on purpose, and I'd like to be standing next to her when it comes back for the rest."
All true. Every word.
Not the reason.
The reason was that a woman I'd known for ninety minutes had said a sentence to me in a parking lot and I had believed it, and for the first time since a courthouse in Nebraska I had felt what other people feel all day, every day, for free — the plain animal comfort of taking somebody's word — and I was not going to let her out of my sight until I understood why.
Deke was patting his chest. "That's chivalry. That's — Ozzy, are you seeing this—"
"It's a scam," Nadia said flatly.
Everyone looked at her.
"It's a scam," she repeated, "I don't know which one yet, but a man does not volunteer like that. He wants something out of the marriage that isn't the marriage, and I would like it on the record now, in front of witnesses, that I said so on day one."
"Ma'am," I said, "I'm hurt."
"No, you're not."
"No," I agreed, "I'm not."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Is he lying?" she asked Wolf. Not me. Wolf. Like I was a car she was having checked.
And Wolf — who has an eye that itches when a lie is told in a room, who has used that eye to catch three traitors and one accountant, who has never once in ten years been wrong about me —
Wolf hesitated.
Half a second. Nobody caught it but me.
"He's telling the truth," Wolf said.
The pale eye had told him nothing at all. I knew it the way you know a step is missing in the dark. It had gone quiet on me, the same night my read on her went quiet, and somewhere out past the county line a man in an extremely good suit was checking his watch and finding it right on schedule.
"Fine," Nadia said.
Wolf raised his eyebrows.
"Fine," she said again, through her teeth, and she put both hands flat on the table exactly the way he had, which I don't think she noticed and I absolutely did. "I'll take the patch, I'll take the leash, I'll take the bill and I'll work it off, and I'll marry your liar."
"And?" Wolf said.
"And when I find out what he actually wants," she said, without looking away from me, "I'm telling you first."
Deke, into the silence, delighted: "So do we do a cake, or—"
"Deke."
"I'm asking a logistics question."
"Nobody's asked you for a cake."
"That's exactly when a cake matters most," Deke said, with the total conviction of a man who has never once been talked out of anything, and I watched Nadia Kovacs look up at him and visibly fail to find a way in.
Wolf ended it the way he ends everything, by standing up and walking out, and the room emptied behind him in about ninety seconds.
I caught him in the hallway.
"Say it," I said.
"Say what."
"Your eye didn't work on me."
Wolf stopped walking.
"No," he said.
"Since when."
"Since about four this afternoon." He turned around.
"It's been quiet on you all day and I said you were telling the truth anyway, in front of the whole table, because the alternative was telling eleven men that the only instrument this charter has got has gone dark in the same season we buried Bram. "
"You lied at church."
"I stated a conclusion I couldn't support," Wolf said. "You want to call that a lie, that's between you and how you were raised."
"Wolf—"
"Are you telling the truth?" he said.
And there it was. First time in ten years he'd ever had to actually ask me anything, and I stood in a hallway that smelled like beer and floor cleaner and understood that this was going to be the rest of my life now.
"Mostly," I said.
Wolf looked at me for a long second.
"That'll do," he said, "for tonight."