Chapter Sixteen Belair Road
Rome was teaching Tookie how to fold a paper airplane the way their mother used to make them, the specific extra crease along the nose that she’d sworn made all the difference, when Otis’s sister — a soft-spoken woman named Carla who’d fed them dinner two nights running without once asking a question she didn’t need answered — looked up from the kitchen window and went very still.
“Car,” she said quietly. “Sitting across the street. Been there ten minutes now, not moving.”
Rome was up before she finished the sentence, crossing to the window with his heart already climbing, and looked out through a gap in the blinds at a dark sedan parked at the curb, engine running, two silhouettes visible in the front seat, doing nothing at all except watching the house.
“Otis working tonight?” Rome asked, already moving toward Tookie, already running through exits in his head the way he’d been running through exits in every room he’d entered for four straight days now.
“Should be back any minute.” Carla’s voice had gone tight, careful, the sound of a woman keeping calm for the sake of the child in the room rather than because she felt any calm at all.
“Back door lets out to the alley same as most of these row houses. I can walk you two out through the Simmons’ yard behind us, they won’t mind, known them thirty years. ”
Rome grabbed Tookie’s jacket off the back of the kitchen chair, hands moving fast and sure now, four days of practice making the motions almost automatic even while his mind screamed at the unfairness of it, the exhaustion of having to run again, always again, every time they found the smallest scrap of stillness.
“We gotta go, bud. Same as before.”
Tookie didn’t argue, didn’t cry this time either, just nodded with a grim, too-old steadiness that broke something in Rome’s chest even as he was grateful for it, and grabbed his backpack off the floor without being told.
They were three steps into the kitchen, headed for the back door, when the sedan’s doors outside slammed open — not quiet anymore, not patient, the specific hurried scrape of men who’d decided waiting was over — and Rome’s whole body went cold with the certainty that they’d been made.
“Go,” Rome said to Carla, pushing Tookie toward her. “Take him out through the Simmons’ yard, right now, don’t wait for me.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll draw them off.” Rome crouched fast, hands on Tookie’s shoulders, forcing his voice into something steady despite the pounding in his own chest. “I need you safe more than I need you close right now. I will find you. I have found you every time so far, and I’m not stopping now. Go.”
Carla grabbed Tookie’s hand and pulled him toward the back door, and Rome watched them vanish into the dark yard behind the house just as the front door took two hard hits and burst inward, wood cracking off the hinge, a man’s shoulder driving through the gap.
Rome didn’t wait to see a face. He grabbed the kitchen chair Tookie’s jacket had been draped over and swung it hard into the man’s knees as he came through the doorway, felt the impact judder up his arms, heard a grunt of real pain, and used the half-second it bought him to vault the fallen chair and go out the side door at a dead sprint.
A hand closed on the back of his jacket before he’d made it three strides into the yard — a second man, faster than the first, close enough that Rome felt hot breath against his ear — and Rome twisted hard, ducking his shoulder the way he’d learned hauling engine blocks off tow hooks, breaking the grip at the cost of half his jacket sleeve tearing loose in the man’s fist. He didn’t stop to check the damage.
He put his head down and ran, boots pounding gravel, lungs already burning, notebook slamming hard against his ribs with every stride.
He heard the fence before he saw it, cleared it in one ragged, ugly motion that scraped his palm open on the top rail and dropped him hard onto his shoulder on the far side, and rolled up onto his feet without letting the pain slow him, because stopping wasn’t a decision his body was willing to consider anymore.
Behind him, glass shattered — someone going through a window instead of around it, unwilling to lose the ten seconds a doorway would cost them — and a voice, closer than Rome wanted to believe possible, called out something short and sharp that wasn’t words so much as pure aggression given sound.
He cut left through a narrow gap between two garages, boots slipping on wet pavement, caught himself against a chain-link fence hard enough to feel it bite into his palms, and kept moving.
A trash can went over behind him with a crash that seemed impossibly loud in the dark, somebody’s dog going off in a yard two houses down, porch lights flicking on in a ragged wave down the block as the noise woke half the street.
The first man — the one from the chair, limping now but not slowed enough — came around the corner of the garage just as Rome broke into the open alley beyond it, close enough that Rome felt rather than saw the swipe of a hand grab for his collar and miss by inches.
Rome didn’t look back. He knew, the way you know a fact about your own body without needing to check it, that looking back cost speed, and speed was the only currency he had left.
He didn’t hear the third vehicle until it was already screeching to a stop at the mouth of the alley ahead of him, headlights washing white and blinding across his path, and Rome’s legs betrayed him for half a step, skidding on loose gravel, arms pinwheeling before he caught his balance an inch from going down hard on the pavement — trapped now, chest heaving, whoever was behind him closing and whoever had just cut off the alley in front unknown, notebook clutched so tight against his chest his knuckles had gone bloodless and white.
A car door slammed. A figure stepped out into the wash of its own headlights, one hand raised — not a weapon, Rome registered with a half-second of confused, disbelieving relief, but a badge, held up plain and visible even through his blurred, gasping vision.
“Ellis!” Avery Moss’s voice, sharp and urgent, cutting through the dark. “Get in the car! Right now, I don’t have time to explain and neither do you!”
Rome froze half a second too long, every instinct from four days of running screaming at him not to trust a badge — but the man from the chair was closing the last twenty feet behind him at a dead sprint now, and Moss was already leaning across to shove the passenger door open from inside, and there was no version of the next three seconds that included standing still and thinking it through.
“Now, Ellis!” Moss shouted again. “Your brother’s already safe — Carla called it in the second she got him clear — but you are not, and in about five seconds that’s not gonna be hypothetical anymore!”
Rome threw himself into the car headfirst, barely getting his legs in before Moss stomped the gas, the passenger door still swinging as the car lurched into reverse, and something struck the trunk hard enough to rock the whole vehicle — a hand, a body, Rome couldn’t tell which, slamming into metal a half-second too late to catch hold of anything — and then they were screaming backward out of the alley mouth, tires shrieking against wet asphalt, headlights of the pursuing sedan swinging wild and chaotic in the rearview as Moss wrenched the wheel hard and put the car into a bootlegger’s turn that threw Rome sideways into the door hard enough to bruise.
A shot cracked somewhere behind them — one, sharp and flat in the cold air, no way to know if it was aimed at the car or just aimed at the dark in general out of pure frustration — and Rome flinched down instinctively, arms curling protectively around the notebook like it was something with a heartbeat, while Moss never so much as lifted her foot off the gas, taking the next corner on what felt like two wheels before the car slammed level again and the sound of pursuit finally, gradually, began to fall away behind them.
Rome sat there gasping, palm bleeding freely onto his torn jacket sleeve, notebook still clutched to his chest, staring at a detective whose name he’d been told to trust by a dying woman’s warning and a small-town instinct he had no way of confirming, and understood that whatever came next, he had just made a choice with no way of taking it back.
“You said my brother’s safe,” Rome managed finally, voice raw and shaking. “How do you know that.”
“Because I’ve had a unit two blocks over since forty minutes ago, watching that house the second Warren called me,” Moss said, eyes locked on the road, taking another hard turn that sent a trash can spinning off the curb in the mirror behind them.
“I got there before Fields’ people did. I did not get there before whoever just kicked in that front door — and I would very much like you to tell me, in the next sixty seconds, whether that was Fields’ crew again or somebody working for Whitfield.
Because depending on the answer, Ellis, we are about to have two very different problems, and only one of them ends with either of us still breathing by morning. ”