Chapter 8
CASH
Silence.
I've always approved of silence. In my line of work, it's the main ingredient—partly the death, which doesn't make much noise once it's done, and partly the thing I worked out a long time ago, which is that silence isn't empty.
Most people can't stand it. They fill it the second it shows up, with music or talk or a television going in a room nobody's watching, because a quiet room makes them feel how alone they are.
I'm the other way. A quiet room is where I'm least alone. The silence is full, if you know how to listen to it. I learned how. I'm good at it. It might be the only thing I'm better at than finding the dead.
So, it should have been simple. A dark room, good sheets, the rain finally gone, my body clean for the first time in a week and laid out flat with nowhere to be until my brothers called. Silence on a plate. All I had to do was eat it.
I couldn't.
I lay there in the dark of an expensive hotel room, and the silence I'd come to collect wouldn't come. There was a name sitting in the middle of it, taking up all the room.
Mags.
In this city. The same city the universe had dropped me into with no warning and no reason, off a black jet I still didn't understand. What were the odds?
I've never been a numbers man, but I know a long shot when I'm standing inside one, and this was the longest I'd seen. A whole country of cities and she was in mine. Or I was in hers. However you wanted to read it, the math came out the same. Impossible, and true, anyway.
Here's the thing people get wrong, the few who get close enough to wonder. They think a man like me keeps to himself because he believes he's broken. Some damaged article a woman ought to steer clear of.
That's not it.
I don't think I'm broken.
I came back from where I went more whole than most men ever get to be—just whole in a shape that doesn't fit the world.
That's the trouble. Not that I'm broken.
That I'm strange, with a strange life, and no woman should have to build hers up against the side of mine.
Least of all her. Least of all a woman like Mags, who deserved a man who came home at night and could tell her where he'd been.
I knew all that. I'd known it in a parking lot in Virginia Beach with her hand in both of mine, and I knew it now, flat on my back a long way down the road from that parking lot. Knowing it had never once made it easier.
And for the first time in longer than I could remember, lying there unable to find my own silence, I got angry about it.
Lock your shit up, Cash.
It's an old instruction. It's served me well. There's a place in me I can lock anything down—grief, want, the faces, all of it—turn the key and walk away clean. I reached for the key now, out of habit.
The lock was already sprung. She'd sprung it a long time ago and I'd never gotten it to catch again. Now, everything I'd shut behind it came loose at once.
The memories came the way they do behind closed eyes, vivid as a thing happening now.
Mags walking into the exchange at Dam Neck ahead of me, glancing back over her shoulder to see if I was still coming. Just that. The turn of her head. Checking that I hadn't dropped off the face of the earth, the way I tended to. I can still see the exact angle of it.
The Chinese food I brought her on a Valentine's Day she'd told me—twice—not to make a thing of, and the smile that broke over her when I showed up at her door with two bags of it, anyway, like I'd handed her something that cost a fortune instead of forty dollars of lo mein.
That smile undid me. I'd planned the whole evening around getting to see it.
And the other one. The one that got me worst. The way she lit up.
Every single time. Every time I walked into a room she was in, her whole face came on like somebody had thrown a switch behind it, and it never wore down, no matter how many times it happened.
She lit up at the sight of me like I was good news.
Like I was a thing worth being glad about.
Nobody had ever done that. I want to be honest about how rare it is, because it's rare past telling.
Not my brothers, who loved me and kept half a step back.
Not the men I carried home, who couldn't. Not even my mother, God, keep what's left of her, and that's a different sorrow I don't open in a hotel bed at night.
Mags was the only one. Mags walked into the light when I walked into the room and aimed it at me, and never knew she was doing the rarest thing anyone had ever done for me.
Mags was the light.
Damn it all.
I picked up the phone before I'd decided to.
I opened her message and read it. Read it again.
Read it a third time, which is two more than a message that short needs, every word of it already burned in.
I think about you sometimes. I hope you're well, Cash.
She'd put my name at the end like she wasn't sure she had the right to.
Like after everything I'd never given her, she was still being careful with me.
I started to write back.
The first one was cool. Easy. Mags. Good to hear from you—the kind of thing you send a person you used to know, friendly, a wall standing behind it. I looked at it and heard exactly how it would land on her end, the deliberate nothing of it, and I erased it.
The second one was the truth, or close. Halfway around the world right now, I typed, which had been true that morning and was a lie by the time my thumb finished the line, because I was probably minutes from her door and pretending to a phone screen that I wasn't.
I stared at the lie. I'd given her plenty of silence over the years. I'd never once handed her a flat untruth, and I found I couldn't start now, not even to keep her clear of me.
Erased.
The third one was a joke. What are the odds? Light. An opening, a crack of one. The most dangerous of the three, because it was the one I wanted to send—and wanting it was the exact reason I couldn't.
Erased.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand and lay back with my hands behind my head. The silence still wouldn't come.
I slept the way I sleep, which is to say in pieces, on my own terms. I've never believed a word of the advice they hand you about jet lag—the schedules, the careful light, the managing of a body like it's a houseplant.
My body knows what to do. It always has.
It sleeps when there's sleep to be had and goes without when there isn't. It doesn't ask my permission either way.
Only now, it was confused. Disturbed in a way it almost never is, snagging on a name every time it started to go under, surfacing me again.
I'd drop for twenty minutes and come back up.
Drop and come up. No peace for me today, I thought, somewhere in the fourth or fifth round of it, and quit chasing it.
When I finally opened my eyes for good, it was dark outside the window. Full dark, the rooftops gone to shapes, the city lit up gold and wet.
Good.
A perfect time for a walk. Stretch the flight out of my legs, learn a few of these streets the way I learn every place I land, and—mostly—see whether the federal government was still parked outside, paying attention to a man who'd done nothing all evening but take a shower and fail to sleep.
It was.
The van was gone. In its place, half a block down on the far side, sat a dark rental sedan, the anonymous kind they buy by the thousand.
Behind the wheel, a man with his face lit blue by the phone was pretending to read.
He glanced up when I came through the door.
Just a flick. Half a second. To him, it was nothing—a bored man clocking movement on a quiet street.
To me, it was a signature. You don't look up like that at a stranger.
You look up like that at the thing you've been sitting there waiting for.
All right, I thought. Let's see how good you are.
I started walking. Nowhere in particular.
That's the point—you don't give them a destination, you give them a man with time on his hands and watch what they do with it.
The sedan didn't move. Didn't pull out, didn't creep along behind, didn't do any of the clumsy things a single car does when it's trying to stay with a man on foot.
Which told me what I needed to know. He didn't have to follow me, because he wasn't alone.
A man who lets you walk off easy is a man with friends up ahead.
I couldn't see them. Couldn't feel them, either, and I can usually feel them—there's a pressure to being watched that the body learns to read, the same animal sense that turns your head in a crowd.
I had a little of it now and nothing to pin it to, which meant they were good.
Better than the woman in the van. This was a team, a real one, and they'd handed me off smooth as a baton.
Then, I saw the couple.
They came up the block toward me arm in arm, easy, a man and a woman out for an evening.
She had an ice cream cone and was working at it, unhurried.
He had his free hand loose in his jacket pocket.
They were good. They were very good. Everything was right—the lean of her into him, the slow pace, the cone.
The cone was a nice touch. Who suspects a woman eating ice cream?