Chapter Seventeen Terms
“I don’t know,” Rome said, still catching his breath, palm throbbing where the fence had opened it. “I didn’t stop to ask for names. One of them had a limp already, I caught him with a chair on the way out.”
“That’s something, at least.” Moss checked her mirrors twice in quick succession, easing off the gas now that the streets behind them had stayed empty for three full turns, though her shoulders didn’t loosen with the speed.
“Fields’ people work in twos usually, low-key, don’t like guns unless it’s already gone bad.
Whitfield’s crew is smaller, better trained, and that shot back there — that’s not Fields’ style.
Fields’ people miss on purpose when they want you scared.
Whitfield’s people don’t miss because they’re not trying to scare anybody. They’re trying to end it.”
Rome sat with that, notebook still clutched against his chest, and felt something cold settle into his stomach that had nothing to do with the cold night air still whistling through the half-torn sleeve of his jacket. “You’re telling me the polite one just tried to kill me.”
“I’m telling you the polite one’s patience finally ran out, which is a different and worse thing.
” Moss took a turn onto a quieter street, row houses giving way gradually to a stretch of shuttered storefronts, and finally let the car settle into something like a normal speed.
“Whitfield doesn’t send shooters unless the person giving him orders has decided the cost of you talking outweighs the cost of a body.
That’s not a decision men like that make lightly.
It means somebody very high up just got scared enough to stop being careful. ”
“Judge Holloway.”
Moss’s hands tightened almost imperceptibly on the wheel, and Rome caught it, filed it away the way he’d been filing away every flicker of reaction from every person he’d talked to in the last four days, building a map in his head of who flinched at what.
“You know that name,” Moss said, carefully neutral. “How.”
“Notebook.” Rome watched her face in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, weighing exactly how much to say. “I’m not showing you what’s in it. Not yet. No offense, Detective, but a badge hasn’t exactly bought a lot of trust from me this week.”
“Fair.” She didn’t argue it, which surprised him more than if she had.
“I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a clean claim on your trust, Ellis.
I’ve spent six years building a reputation in this department that looks a certain way from the outside, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you every part of that reputation is earned the way it looks.
” Her jaw worked once, tight, the words costing her something to say out loud.
“I’ve taken money. Not much, not often, and never for anything that put a person in the ground — that’s the line I drew for myself a long time ago and I’ve never crossed it, not once, but I understand that from where you’re sitting, that probably doesn’t sound like much of a distinction. ”
Rome said nothing for a long moment, watching the shuttered storefronts slide past the window, weighing the strange, uncomfortable relief of hearing someone finally tell him the truth without dressing it up first.
“Why tell me that,” he said finally. “Could’ve just kept letting me think you were clean.”
“Because you’re about to decide whether to trust me with your life and your little brother’s, and I’d rather you make that decision with the real math in front of you than find out later I lied to your face about it.
” Moss pulled the car into a narrow lot behind a boarded-up laundromat, killed the engine, and turned to face him fully for the first time since he’d gotten in the car, her eyes hard and tired in the dim light.
“Here’s my actual math, Ellis, since I’m being honest. I took a little money, years back, to look the other way on things that would’ve happened whether I looked or not.
I told myself that made it harmless. I’ve spent the last four days watching exactly how far that logic actually stretches — all the way to a nine-year-old boy getting snatched out of a school pickup line, all the way to shots fired in a residential alley twenty minutes ago.
I don’t like what I’m seeing when I follow that math all the way out.
I’d like the chance to be something other than one more name in that book before this is over.
That’s the honest reason I’m sitting in this car instead of at my desk pretending I never got Warren’s call. ”
Rome studied her a long moment, the raw, uncomfortable honesty of it landing somewhere he hadn’t expected it to land, and thought about Denise Deluca’s warning in that cold kitchen — the book only stays a wall as long as everybody in this city believes you might use it as a weapon someday — and understood, with a clarity that felt almost like exhaustion, that he was going to have to start making choices based on something other than certainty, because certainty wasn’t a thing this city was ever going to hand him again.
“My brother,” Rome said. “I need to see him. Now, not after we finish this conversation.”
“Understood.” Moss started the car again, pulling back out onto the street with the same controlled, purposeful speed she’d used the whole night.
“Carla’s holding at a location my unit secured twenty minutes ago.
I’ll take you there myself, and then you and I are going to have a longer conversation about what’s actually in that book, because Ellis — I need you to hear this clearly — you can’t keep running on instinct and luck.
You got lucky tonight. Luck runs out. If Whitfield’s decided the calculus has changed, you need people who know this city’s real architecture helping you decide what happens next, and much as it costs me to say it out loud, I think I might be the only person left who can offer you that without also wanting the book for themselves. ”
They drove the rest of the way in silence, Rome watching the city slide by outside the window — corner stores and church marquees and the particular tired architecture of a neighborhood that had been quietly bled for decades by people whose names, he now understood, were sitting in ink against his chest — and when they finally pulled up outside a modest brick house two streets from where they’d started, and Tookie came running out the front door the second the car stopped, throwing himself into Rome’s arms with a force that nearly knocked them both off their feet, Rome held on tight and let himself feel, for just a moment, something close to relief.
It didn’t last long. Over his brother’s shoulder, Rome caught Moss’s eyes through the windshield, watching them both with an expression he couldn’t quite read — something between genuine relief and the particular calculation of a person already three moves ahead, already working out what came next, already understanding, the way Rome himself was beginning to understand, that surviving tonight had bought them nothing more than the right to face tomorrow.
“They’re not gonna stop,” Rome said quietly, more to himself than to anyone else, Tookie’s face still buried against his shoulder. “Are they.”
“No,” Moss said, getting out of the car slowly, scanning the street on reflex even here, even now.
“They’re not. Which means it’s time you stopped running from this, Ellis, and started deciding what you actually want to do with it — because a war’s coming to this city whether you’re ready for it or not, and right now you’re the only person standing at the center of it who still has a choice about which side he ends up on. ”