Chapter 8 #2
But I read people. It's the other half of what I am, the same sense that finds the dead and weighs the living, and I have never been able to switch it off.
And what I read on the two of them, under all that easy choreography, was the one thing they couldn't fake.
There was no give between them. A real couple carries a thousand small slacknesses, years of them, the body gone comfortable past noticing.
These two were holding a shape. There was a faint clench where the ease should have been, a current pulled tight under the arm-in-arm, two professionals performing a closeness neither of them felt.
To anybody else on the street, they were a couple.
To me, they were a clenched fist wearing a glove.
I stepped off the curb and crossed.
I didn't hurry. Didn't look at them, didn't look back.
Just took myself to the other side like a man who'd remembered something was over there.
Behind me the couple kept walking their easy walk, not breaking stride, not turning—following would have shown their hand, and they were too good for that.
They'd call it in instead. He's crossed, moving south.
Somebody fresh would pick me up on the far side. A team. Confirmed.
There was a church up ahead.
St. Horatio's, the sign read, an old stone thing with its doors standing open to the night, light spilling soft down the steps. I took a chance and went up them and inside. As I came in out of the dark, I wondered whether the federal government had the nerve to follow a man into a church.
I had nothing to lose. I genuinely couldn't work out what they had to gain. A man takes a night walk and ducks into a chapel—what's that worth on a surveillance log? Nothing. Which was starting to be the shape of the whole thing.
This didn't feel like containment. Nobody had braced me, nobody had crowded me, nobody had moved to put hands on me or even let me know for certain I was made.
It felt like watching. Loose watching. The kind you do when you're not sure yet what you're looking at and you don't want to spook it before you are.
I wondered if my brothers had the same soft net over them right now.
Four Dane men in one city, all of them being looked at by patient people who hadn't decided yet what to do about them.
I filed it and let it go, because the chapel had its hands on me now.
It smelled the way they all smell, every Catholic chapel I've ever stepped into, anywhere in the world.
The thin ghost of incense. The old wood of the pews, oiled by a hundred years of hands.
And under it that other smell, the one I've never found anyplace else—the waft of untold thousands of candles lit and burned down across the years, every one of them somebody's hope or grief or thank-you sent up in smoke.
You can smell the praying in a place like that. It soaks into the stone.
I found a pew halfway up and sat down.
I'm not a religious man. I want to be clear about that. I don't keep the rules, don't say the words, couldn't tell you the last service I sat through that wasn't somebody's funeral.
But I'm a spiritual man, all the way to the floor of me, and there's no contradiction in it.
It's the whole reason I am the way I am.
I've stood where I've stood and seen what I've seen, and a man who's been where I've been doesn't get to pretend there's nothing on the other side of it.
I know better. I know it the way you know your own hand.
There is something more. There is another country, and I've had my passport stamped, and I came back the rest of my life unafraid because of it.
So, I sat in St. Horatio's and tried to gather my peace back up off the floor where it had scattered. And it came. Slow. The way it always comes, one breath at a time, the silence in that old room filling back up the way it's meant to. Full, and kind, and mine again.
A priest came out from somewhere near the altar.
An old man, unhurried, in no way surprised to find a stranger sitting alone in his church at night.
He looked my way and he nodded, a small smile in it—the nod of a man who's spent his life keeping a door open for whoever the dark sends him and asking them no questions.
He set something on the altar. I didn't see what.
Didn't need to. Then he went back out the way he'd come and left me to it.
I've thought, more than once, that in another life I might have been a man like that.
A man of the cloth. The temperaments aren't far apart.
We both sit with people at the edge of the worst thing.
We both believe, past argument, in what's on the far side of it.
We both keep company with the dead and don't find it morbid.
But not this life. Too many rules. For all that I live like a monk—one pack, plain food, nothing I can't carry—I've never been able to abide a rulebook, and a collar comes with a thick one. I go loose. I've always gone loose, as loose as the work will allow.
A teammate said a thing to me once, years back, and it stuck. “Wear life like a loose garment.” He was quoting somebody; I never asked who. It fit me better than anything anyone's said about me before or since. Don't grip. Don't cinch it down. Let it hang easy on you and move when you move.
Sitting in that pew with my peace coming back, that's exactly how it felt. Loose. Easy. Mine again.
Then, my phone buzzed.
Unknown number. And for one second—one stupid, weightless second, before the trained part of me could catch it—I thought it was her. I thought Mags had given up on the silence and reached out again. Something in my chest moved before I could lock it down.
It wasn't her.
Tomorrow. Pick you up at 9am. —Brock.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding. Looked up at the dim vault of the ceiling, at the candle smoke hanging in the gold light, and almost smiled.
So. Tomorrow, I'd maybe see the rest of them, and find out what kind of trouble flies a man eight thousand miles and hands him a half-million-dollar car for the asking. Tomorrow, I'd start doing the one thing I've always known how to do, which is find what's hiding.
Good. Something to do.
Something to do that would keep my mind off her.
Hopefully.