Chapter 3
Nadia
The wedding took twenty minutes, which I want to say is the shortest job I've ever run, except I wasn't running it.
That's the part I couldn't get comfortable with. I've been in three weddings under other names. I've done a whole one as a bridesmaid to get at a safe in a rectory. I know weddings from the inside the way a plumber knows a house.
I had never once been the item on the table.
The Stark County annex smelled like carpet shampoo and warm printer. There was a laminated sign taped to the door that said CEREMONIES 9–11 & 1–3 and somebody had written NO RICE under it in marker, and under that, in different marker, NO BIRDSEED EITHER.
"They tried birdseed," I said.
"Somebody always tries birdseed," said the clerk.
Here is what I catalogued, standing in a hallway in a borrowed green dress, because cataloguing is what I do when the ground moves:
Two exits, one alarmed. A camera over the door with no light on it, which meant it was either dead or good, and in a county annex it was dead.
Eleven bikers in a hallway built for four.
A vending machine with an out-of-order sticker applied at a jaunty angle by somebody who did not respect the machine.
And Deke Marsh, six foot six, crying before anything had happened.
"He hasn't started," I said.
"Deke starts early," said the kid. Ozzy. Twenty, maybe. He was holding a raccoon. In a building. In his arms. Like a bag of groceries with opinions.
"Is that legal?"
"He's patched," Ozzy said, wounded.
"The raccoon is patched."
"Prospect."
"The raccoon is a prospect."
"Technically he outranks me," Ozzy said, "and I'd rather not discuss it."
Trick came out of the men's room at 1:04 in a black shirt with the collar open, and he'd shaved, and I hated that I noticed.
Let me get this out of the way, since we're going to be spending a book together.
He was beautiful. Not handsome. Beautiful, in the specific irritating way of men who have been getting away with things since childhood — a face that's been rewarded so many times it's developed a sense of humor about it.
Dark hair he clearly cut himself. Long hands.
And a grin that arrived about a half second before it was earned, every time, like a guy sliding into a booth he hadn't been invited to.
I've spent my whole life being the fastest thing in the room.
"You cleaned up," I said.
"You noticed."
"I notice ceiling tiles, don't get excited."
"Nadia." He put a hand on his heart. "We're about to be married. Give me the ceiling tiles."
"Twenty-two by twenty-two, four water stains, one loose."
"Which one's loose?"
"Third from the door."
"Why do you know that?"
"Because I always know where the loose one is," I said, and I meant it about ceilings, and he heard the other thing in it, and his grin did something complicated and got quieter.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
"Kovacs."
Gunnar Sloat, at my elbow, holding a folder because Gunnar Sloat is a man who brings a folder to a wedding.
"Vice President."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"The title thing. You did it to me in church too." He shifted his weight. "You put a title on a man to remind him he's got one."
Huh. Okay. Better than I'd rated him.
"That's fair," I said. "What's in the folder?"
"Your paperwork."
"You brought my paperwork to my wedding."
"Somebody's got to file it," Gunnar said, wounded. "It doesn't file itself, and if it's not filed by Friday the protection doesn't mean anything, because the protection isn't the ceremony. It's the record. That's what the other charters check."
"You know," I said, "you're going to be extremely good at this job in about two years."
He looked at me like I'd slapped him.
"That wasn't a con," I said. "Look at my hands, they're empty, I don't want anything. You'll be good at it in two years and you're bad at it right now, and both of those are true, and I'm only telling you because I'd rather you heard it from someone with no standing."
Gunnar Sloat stood in a courthouse hallway holding a folder for a long moment.
"Two years," he said.
"Give or take."
"That's a long time to be bad at something."
"It's the standard rate," I said.
The officiant was a woman named Judge Petrie who had done, by her own account, four thousand of these and had a rhythm like a woman reading a grocery list to a spouse.
"Do you take."
"I do," Trick said.
"Do you take."
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
Not nerves. I want to be clear. I have talked to federal agents with a stolen car in the lot. It wasn't nerves.
It's that in a con, every word you say is a tool. You pick it up, you use it, you set it down. And there is no version of I do that is a tool. It's just a door.
"Ma'am?"
Trick's eyes on me. Not smug. Waiting.
"I do," I said.
Deke made a sound like a boiler letting go.
Twenty minutes. Two signatures. A witness line with W. HALLIDAY-KANE in handwriting so fast it was practically a diagram. A woman I'd met for nine minutes who had already, in those nine minutes, asked me four questions about my grandmother that nobody in my life has ever thought to ask.
"I like her," Wren said to Wolf, in the hallway, at a volume that was not an accident.
"I know," Wolf said.
"That's alarming to you."
"Everything about you is alarming to me."
"He's very romantic," Wren told me.
The reception was at the clubhouse and consisted of a pan of ziti the size of a car hood, a keg, and Deke's cake, which said CONGRATULATIONS in icing and then, in smaller icing, and in a different hand, ALLEGEDLY.
Wolf laid out the terms over paper plates. He'd waited on purpose. That's the kind of thing I file away about a person — that he let me eat first.
"Four rules," he said.
"I love four rules."
"You ride with him. Not near him. With him. You want to go to the store, he's in the parking lot."
"Romantic."
"You don't leave the state without me saying so."
"Fine."
"You work the money off. Legitimately, and by legitimately I mean the books. Sunny says you can read a ledger."
"Sunny said that after eleven minutes of conversation."
"Sunny's been right about everything for twenty years," Wolf said. "It's tiresome."
"And four?"
He set his fork down.
"You never lie to me," he said. "Not once. Not small. You lie to him, that's between you two and honestly I expect it. You lie to me and the sentence goes back to being what Gunnar wanted."
I looked at him and did the thing I do. Forty seconds.
And I couldn't find it.
Not because there was nothing there — there was a mountain of something there, this man was packed with fear, it was coming off him like heat — but it was buried under something I don't have a name for. Something patient. Something that had already had the worst thing happen and had gotten up.
"Understood," I said.
Wren Halliday-Kane cornered me by the cake at nine, which I had been expecting since the hallway.
"Can I ask you a rude question?"
"Those are the good ones."
"How did you know Deke's name in the parking lot?"
"He was holding one Gatorade and he'd bought two."
"That's not an answer, that's a clue." She had a notebook out. She'd had it out all day. "Anybody could see the Gatorade. Not everybody gets to a name. What's the step in between?"
I looked at her.
Here's the thing about Wren, which took me about four hours to work out and which is the reason I like her more than is convenient: she isn't nosy.
Nosy people want information. Wren wants the structure.
She'd rather know how a thing is built than what it contains, and she will ask you a question about yourself that nobody has ever thought to ask, in a kitchen, holding cake, at nine at night.
"The step in between is that the man who buys two is never the man in charge," I said. "So he's not the danger. And a man who isn't the danger, in a group like that, has to be something else, or he wouldn't be there."
"And the something else is?"
"Feeding people."
"Huh," Wren said, and wrote it down. "That's the same answer he'd give."
"Who?"
"Deke." She flipped a page. "I asked him once why he thought he was in the club. He said, 'somebody's got to.'"
"That's not an answer either."
"No," Wren agreed cheerfully, "nobody in this building answers anything, it's why I've got four notebooks."
Around ten the noise pushed me out into the lot, and Trick was already there, sitting on the tailgate of Deke's truck with two beers, which he had clearly been holding for a while, and one of which he handed me without a word.
That's a con move. Have the second beer already open. It says I knew you'd come out.
"That's a con move," I said.
"It is."
"You admit it."
"I've got about six thousand of them," he said, "and I'd rather burn a few early so you stop counting."
I sat down on the tailgate. Gravel and a cold spring wind and somebody inside had put on the same Waylon song for the third time.
"Okay," I said. "Ground rules."
"Ground rules."
"Neither of us is going to work the other."
"Agreed," he said, immediately, which is what a liar says.
"You said that too fast."
"You'd have hated it if I said it slow. Slow reads as considering it."
"Slow reads as sincere."
"Slow reads as rehearsed," he said, "if you're any good," and I laughed before I decided to, which annoyed me for about a week afterward.
"Question," I said.
"Go."
"In church. When you put your hand up." I turned the bottle in my fingers. "You didn't look at Wolf first."
"Should I have?"
"Everybody in that room looked at Wolf before they said anything. Every single one. It's a whole choreography, it's like watching a flock of birds turn." I glanced at him. "You didn't. Which means either you don't need his permission, which I don't believe, or you didn't have time to want it."
He drank his beer.
"That's a hell of a read," he said.
"It's not a read, it's arithmetic. You volunteered before you decided to."
"Yeah."
"Why."
"That's the part I'd have to lie about," he said, "and I've just committed to burning con moves early, so give me a minute to find a bad true one."
"Take your time."