CHAPTER SEVEN #2
“You’re not going to tell me not to go.”
“I’m not going to tell you one thing you haven’t asked me for.”
I walked out.
He stayed far enough back that I could pretend the walk was mine alone. At the first corner I saw his reflection in a dark shop window. At the next, I stopped checking.
?
“Eleven doorways to the corner,” I said, to nobody at all. “Four of them with no door in them.”
Nothing came back. That was the thing about Rosewood Street at half past nine on a Thursday. A roll-up shutter growled open three streets over and I heard the whole of it, start to finish, because there was nothing else to hear. No traffic. Not one throttle anywhere on the whole street.
My own boots. Wet brick. Six windows bricked shut on the north side, three gulls sitting along a crane arm over the water, two blocks with nobody in them, then three.
Somewhere in the third block the thing under my sternum started up. Not pain. A steady draw, like line paying off a spool behind my ribs, and it got heavier with every doorway I put behind me.
Boston Street was worse, and Boston Street had the police substation on it.
I had passed it a hundred times in a company van and never looked at it. It was a brick storefront with a blue stripe painted along the bottom course and a light over the door that was not on. The handle was aluminum and cold and it did not turn.
“One door, no light, no bell,” I said, to the door. “No cruiser. No cones. Nothing.”
The mail slot was taped over from the inside with packing tape gone yellow. Somebody had done that on their last day in the building and then gone home.
A card taped inside the glass gave a phone number and an address for a district eleven blocks north.
The plaque was screwed to the brick beside the door, brass, wiped clean by rain and nothing else. I read it once and then I stood there and read it again.
A community-safety grant from Crane Meridian Holdings. Dated three years back. A line about resources being redirected to where the community needs them most.
There is no police in the Ironline because a man wrote a check and had it engraved.
“Three years,” I said, to a brass plate on a wall on an empty street.
He did it before a routing sheet ever had my name typed on it, before I signed anything, before I had heard of him at all. Whatever he was building, he had already taken this street apart around it while I was still driving through it with the radio on.
That is what a plaque is for. It is not a thank-you. It is a receipt, screwed to the brick at eye height, and it has been sitting out here in the rain telling anybody who stopped walking long enough to read it.
The coffee had gone cold in my mouth. I made myself swallow it.
The wind turned my collar and I got the smell of the shirt I had on, and for two seconds I was not on Boston Street at all. Then I was. Standing at a dead door with my fists shut, furious at a piece of cotton.
Then I saw the car.
A gray sedan at the curb, half a block down, nose toward the water. Somebody sitting in the driver’s seat with the window up. Not on a phone. Not eating. Not doing one single thing that a man sits in a car to do.
He did not look at me. Not when I came level with him, not when my boots stopped being the only sound on the street, not when I got close enough to see the shape of his jaw through the glass.
He did not need to look at me. That was the whole message and it was delivered.
I stood on a dead street and wanted somebody to take that man out of that car and hurt him. Not stop him. Hurt him, by hand, and come tell me about it after.
I walked past him on purpose, all the way to the corner, and counted the steps under my breath so my legs would keep taking them.
“Twenty. Thirty. Thirty-one, thirty-two.”
At the corner I turned around.
The sedan had not moved. No engine, no mirror, no head turning to keep me in it.
If it had followed me I would have had something. A man in a car is a thing you can point at. This was a man who did not have to follow me, because there was nowhere on this street for me to be.
Somewhere behind my sternum something pulled, low and steady, in the direction I had come from, and my feet were already turned that way before I got around to agreeing with them.
“…before you turn around,” I said, and he had been right about me, and I did not mind that he had been.
I counted the blocks back. There were five.
Five blocks of hating it. Hating the gate for being open, because open is worse — open means the walking back is mine and I do not get to call it anything else.
Hating that the pull got easier the closer I came.
Hating that some animal part of me was already sitting down inside the fence while the rest of me was still on Boston Street arguing.
?
The gate opened before I reached it.
Nobody in that yard said one word to me about where I had been. The carburetor stayed in pieces. Bex came out of the bar door with a crate on her hip and did not break stride. Nobody claimed me, nobody asked, nobody said anything at all.
Six steps inside the fence the pull in my chest went quiet, all at once, like a hand had come off my throat — and what came up in me was relief, flat and animal, and I did not argue with it.
Marcus came through the gate behind me and leaned against the same post.
“Say what you want said.”
“I came back because out there’s worse. That’s it. That’s the whole reason.”
“I know.”
Two words. No hand out, no step toward me, nothing at all put in front of me to push against.
“Don’t make it mean something else.”
He didn’t. He stood there with his hands loose at his sides and let it be exactly the size I had made it, and that was worse than being argued with, because now it was mine.
Adrian came across the yard behind him and did not stop and did not look at Marcus.
“Victoria. You don’t go out that gate alone again.”
“That isn’t yours to—”
“It’s decided.” He put two fingers on the bolt and drove it home behind me, and the sound of it went up the whole fence line. Then he kept walking.
Nobody in that yard looked up. They had all heard him decide something before.
I had walked out of an open gate and walked back through it on my own two feet, and what I had bought with that walk was one fact, delivered cold: there is nothing at all between me and Elias Crane except a chain-link fence and seventeen men who have not yet told me what they want.
Then the sound of a motor at the end of Rosewood Street, coming slow.
“Gate — we got a van,” Bex said, from the yard.
White panel van, clean, indicator on. Marchetti & Ward Fine Transit painted along the door and a load tag hanging in the windshield. Six years I had driven that van. It stopped in the street with its motor running.
The door opened and the man who got out wore my company’s jacket. I had never seen him before.
He handed a sealed envelope through the mesh. “Bonded-cage notice. Public annex only. No signature required from the recipient.”
My name was in the courier-of-record box. Below it, in the routing block, was the code for the Sable Room.
Marcus took one look at the timestamp and stopped touching the paper.
RECEIVED 15:05.