Chapter 3 #2
"You said a sentence to me in a parking lot in Dickinson," he said slowly. "About a fence and a shoe."
"I remember."
"That's it. That's the whole answer. You said a sentence and something happened to me and I'd like to know what it was, and the only way to find out is to be standing near you for a while."
I waited for the rest.
There wasn't a rest. That's how I knew it was true, and I hated it, because a man who tells you the truth on day one is a man who has decided you're worth the expensive version.
"That's the worst possible reason to marry someone," I said.
"It's in the top four," he agreed.
We tested each other for two hours.
That's what it was. I know it's supposed to be a conversation, and it looked like one, but what it actually was is two professionals in a parking lot running diagnostics.
I told him a story about a hotel in Prague and put three lies in it. He nodded through all three.
He told me about a customs officer in Portal, North Dakota, who thinks Trick is his nephew's godfather, and he sold it with a hesitation in the middle — the little what was his name, Ray, Roy — which is a tell, an actual tell, one of the best ones, and I waited for the rest of the tell to show up and it never did.
"You put a hesitation in that," I said.
"I did."
"Why."
"To see if you'd catch it."
"Did I pass?"
"No," he said quietly. "You caught the hesitation. You didn't catch that the whole story's true."
I turned my head.
He was looking straight out at the road with his beer against his knee, and the grin was gone, and without it his face was about nine years older.
"Try me," I said.
"What?"
"Say something false. Right now. Anything."
"I've never been to Nebraska."
And it went in.
Clean, whole, no edges. I sat there on a tailgate with a bottle in my hand and I knew he'd been to Nebraska, he'd told me a Nebraska story forty minutes earlier, and my gut had no objection whatsoever. My gut was fine. My gut was sold.
"Do it back," I said. My voice came out wrong. "Do it — say something. To me. False."
"My name is Judge Petrie."
Nothing. Not a flicker. I'd have signed a check.
"Now you," he said.
"I've never stolen anything in my life."
He waited. Then he shook his head slowly, and his throat moved.
"Nothing," he said. "You're a stone."
We sat with that for a long time.
Here is what nobody tells you about meeting the one person in the world you can't read: it does not feel like danger. Danger's got adrenaline in it and I know what that tastes like.
It felt like being turned off.
Like walking into a room where the noise you'd been hearing your entire life — the constant low hum of everybody's soft spots, every fear in every voice, all of it, always — just stopped, and in the silence there was one person, sitting there, unreadable, at exactly your height.
"Okay," Trick said. "So."
"So."
"We're invisible to each other."
"Yes."
"Do you want to talk about what that means?"
"Absolutely not," I said.
"Great," he said. "Me neither. That's the healthiest we're ever going to be, let's log it."
Wolf came out at midnight with a folder and no apology for the hour.
"You two done testing each other?"
"How long have you been standing there," I said.
"Long enough to hear a man claim he's never been to Nebraska." Wolf pulled a crate over and sat on it, which is the closest that man gets to being casual. "Before we start. Kovacs. Anything you want to ask me while it's just the three of us and there's no table."
I had about nine.
"Why'd you let me eat first?"
Trick's head turned.
"That's your question," Wolf said.
"That's my question. You laid out the terms after the ziti.
You could have done it in the annex, you could have done it in the truck, and instead you let a woman you'd sentenced eat a plate of food at her own wedding before you told her what her life was going to look like.
" I folded my arms. "That's a choice. I want to know what it means. "
Wolf was quiet for a second.
"It means my grandfather did it the other way," he said, "and I read about it."
Then he put the folder on the tailgate, and that was the end of that, and I have thought about it approximately once a week ever since.
"Fitch fenced a piece of the Ash inventory before he ran," he said. "It's not product and it's not money."
"What is it," Trick said.
"It's paper."
Trick sat up.
"Yeah," Wolf said.
"How much paper?"
"Enough that if it lands with the wrong people it's not a police problem, it's a history problem." Wolf handed the folder over. "Deadwood, then Cheyenne. Fitch's route. Bring it home."
"That's a road job," I said.
"It's a road job," Wolf agreed. "And on paper it's a honeymoon, and you're going to behave like it's a honeymoon, because paper matters to what's paying attention to this charter right now."
"That's a weird sentence," I said.
"It's a weird year," said Wolf, and walked away.
We took the van. Black, high roof, no windows in the back, the exact vehicle you would design if you wanted a state trooper to have feelings about you.
"It looks like a hearse," I said.
"It was a hearse."
"It was not."
"It was absolutely a hearse, Deke bought it at auction, there's still a rail—"
"Do not tell me about the rail."
I put the map on my knees. Trick put the key in.
And between us, in the glovebox, on top of the registration and a flashlight and eleven ketchup packets, was a marriage certificate with two signatures on it, sitting there the whole way to South Dakota like a loaded gun somebody had left out on the counter.