Chapter 13 Sun Shine With
a Spine
"Bishop"
"No." Same word. Same weight. Same flat certainty the second time as the first. "I'm done with favors. Done with jobs. Whatever I owed got settled the night your capo fed my name to a press cycle so he could keep his own clean."
"That's one way to read it."
"It's the accurate way."
Reyes is quiet. The lake moves behind me. The morning radio from the marina carries faint over the water the crew arriving, starting the day, the ordinary machinery of a life I built specifically to be boring. It sounds very far away right now.
"You've built something out here," Reyes says. He's not looking at me anymore. He's looking at the property. The house. The dock. The hedge line. "Quiet. Private." His eyes move slowly, methodically. "The kind of thing a man would want to hold onto."
There it is.
I don't move. Don't follow his gaze. Don't give him the satisfaction of watching me check on what I'm protecting.
"You threatening my property, Marcus?"
"I'm observing it." He looks back at me. "There's a difference."
"There isn't."
He absorbs that. Let’s the silence run for three seconds Reyes always let silence run, always let you feel the weight of it before he filled it.
"One favor," he says. "One week to think about it." He reaches into his jacket. Slow. Deliberate. Pulls out a card plain white, no logo, a number in small print and holds it out between two fingers.
I don't take it.
He sets it on the fence post between us. Steps back.
Then he looks past me.
Not at the house.
Not at the dock.
At the boathouse.
His eyes settle on it with the patient attention of a man who accounts for everything on a property before he leaves it. The door. The siding. The angle from the hedge line. I watch him take it in the way I've watched him take in a hundred rooms over the years methodical, thorough, cataloguing.
One second.
I keep my breathing even.
Two seconds.
The fishing boat knocks against its slip inside. A small, ordinary sound that carries in the still morning air.
Reyes's eyes don't move.
Three seconds.
I step sideways. Just six inches. Just enough to interrupt his sightline without making it a declaration.
His eyes come back to me.
We hold that for a moment.
He knows. Not for certain not enough to act on but he knows the way men like Reyes know things. By the geometry. By the step I just took. By the way I've been standing since I walked out of that boathouse with my body angled between him and it.
He files it. Says nothing.
"One week," he says instead.
"Get off my road."
He holds my gaze for three more seconds. Then he turns unhurried, same pace he arrived with, and walks back to the passenger door. Gets in. The door closes with a soft, expensive sound.
The window comes down.
He looks at me through the opening. At the house. At the boathouse one last time.
Then the smile comes.
The real one. Not the corner-of-the-mouth adjustment from before. A full, unhurried, completely certain smile that doesn't reach his eyes at all the smile of a man who has already decided the next move and is giving you the courtesy of knowing it's coming.
"Cute place," Reyes says.
A pause.
"Be a shame if it burned."
The window goes up.
The SUV pulls away from the grass verge, slow and deliberate, and moves down the lake road until it rounds the bend and disappears.
I stand at the edge of my property.
The card is on the fence post. The exhaust is on the morning air. The marina radio plays something I can't quite make out. The lake is doing what it always does.
I think about the parking garage eight months ago. The car. The choice I made standing in the same kind of morning light, the same kind of certainty, and how it brought me here.
I think about what's inside the boathouse. I think about what I'm going to have to do to make sure it stays safe.
I pick the card up off the fence post on my way past. Don't look at it. Fold it once and put it in my pocket.
Then I turn and go back.