Chapter 6 #2
He huffed something that wanted to be a laugh and didn't quite make it.
"Still working that out, brother. Honest answer.
We're still working out what comes next.
" Then the grin came back, deliberate, a man choosing to lighten a load.
"But until we do, it's first class all the way for you.
Anything you want, it's covered. You don't reach for your wallet in this town.
Food, a bed, whatever you need—you say the word. "
"Anything, huh?" I looked around the cabin, at the wood and the leather and the screen glowing soft in the dash. "Maybe, I'll ask for one of these."
I meant it as a joke. It's the only way I'd ever say a thing like that—as a joke, the way you'd say you'd take the moon if they were handing it out.
Brock didn't blink.
"You want it, it's yours," he said. "Say the word."
And that—that's what got me.
Not the money. We've never been a family that flinched at money, even back when we had none. Our father raised us to treat a rich man and a poor man exactly the same, which is to say with our eyes open. The Valentine Danes having a full tank now wouldn't have moved me on its own.
It was the way he said it. The flatness of it.
I'd asked for a half-million-dollar automobile the way you'd ask a man to pass the salt, and he'd handed it across the same way—no pause, no laugh, no that's-cute.
Like I'd asked for a stick of gum. Like the number on the thing had stopped meaning anything to him, because something else had gotten so big, it swallowed the number whole.
You only treat money like it doesn't matter when you've found out, the hard way, exactly how little of what matters it can buy.
Shit, I thought. This is bad. Whatever this is, it's worse than he's letting on.
I didn't ask. He didn't offer. We rode the rest of the way in the kind of quiet two men can only share if they've each carried the other off a field. The rain came down on the most expensive roof I'd ever sat beneath.
A few minutes later, he pulled to the curb in front of a hotel.
The Palmetto Rose. An older place, restored, the kind of Charleston building that's all wrought iron and good bones and a deep porch made for sitting out a storm. It had the look of money that had learned some manners.
"They're expecting you," Brock said. "Get settled. Rest." Then, as I reached for the door: "And if you go out—if you go wandering around getting the lay of the town, which I know you're going to do—watch your back, Cash. I mean it."
He didn't say from what. Didn't explain. I didn't ask him to, and maybe that was the respect between us, brother to brother, warrior to warrior—the understanding that a man like me doesn't need the threat itemized to know to keep his head up.
Or maybe it was the other thing. Maybe he didn't say because he couldn't. Because he didn't know either. And a thing you can't name is the hardest thing in the world to warn a man about.
I got out. Pulled my pack off the back seat. Brock lifted two fingers off the wheel, and the Spectre slid away from the curb and into the rain, silent as a thought, and was gone.
I watched it go. I'm always going to watch a thing leave. It's a habit older than my training.
And because I was watching the street, I saw it.
A minivan. Dark, a nothing van, parked up the block between a delivery truck and a parked motorcycle, in the one slot on the whole street where a person could sit and see the front of the Palmetto Rose without being obvious about it.
It was obvious to me, though. Seeing what doesn't want to be seen is the entire trade.
There was a woman behind the wheel. And as I stood there in the rain with my pack on my shoulder, her eyes came to me and stayed—a half-second past where a stranger's would have slid on by.
A professional's mistake. A small one. The kind you only make when you've been sitting in a van too long and a face you've been briefed on finally walks into frame.
FBI, I thought. Huh.
Well. Fuck it.
I've got nothing to hide. I've spent my life in the one corner of the world that doesn't leave a paper trail, doing a job that officially isn't a job, for an outfit that officially isn't anything.
Let her watch. Let her run my plates, if she could find them.
If my brothers had something the federal government wanted, that was a knot I'd untie once I had my hands on the actual rope.
For now, there was a woman in a van getting paid to look at me, and a dry room waiting, and the rain.
I went inside.
The lobby was cool and dim and smelled like fresh flowers. A young woman at the front desk looked up before the door had finished closing behind me. She had my name in her mouth before I reached her.