Page 116 of The Maverick
We looked at each other.
"Tell me what happened," I said.
"Which do you want—the long version or the short version?”
"Long," I said. "I want the long one."
He looked at me for a moment. Deciding, the way he always decided—not whether to say it, but how much truth to use and in what order.
Then he sat back in the chair and started to talk.
He started with his father.
He told me about the door opening at Dominion Hall and the man on the other side of it with Tommy's hairline and his jaw and his hands—the man he hadn't seen since he was eleven years old, who had, apparently, been alive all this time and who had, apparently, been connected, in ways Tommy was still working out, to the house we were sitting in right now. He told it flatly, without self-pity.
I didn't say anything. I just listened.
He told me about the brothers. Not two brothers, not seven brothers. Twenty-one brothers, total. Most half-brothers. The same father, Byron Dane, who had apparently scattered himself across enough women and years to produce a small army of sons, and who had apparently also produced Dominion Hall—or had been the reason for its creation, depending on which version was true, and Tommy didn't know yet which version was true.
"The men here," he said. "Lucas. Elias. Noah. The others I haven't met yet. They're mine. Half-mine. And they've been building this place—" he gestured at the ceiling, the walls, the surgical suite we were sitting in— "for years. For all of us. That's what I was told tonight."
"By your father."
"By my father."
I looked at him.
"Tommy," I said.
"Yeah."
"How are you?"
He looked at the floor for a moment. Then back at me.
"I don't know yet," he said. "I'll let you know when I figure it out."
I nodded. That was honest. That was Tommy.
"And the FBI," I said. "The explosion. What's—what's actually happening?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"There are people who don't want Dominion Hall to exist," he said. "Or who want to control what it does. The FBI piece is complicated—we don't know yet how dirty it goes or how high. The explosion tonight was somebody's message." He paused. "Somebody who's been watching me."
"Am I in it?" I said. "The watching. Am I—are they watching me, too?"
He held my gaze.
"I'm not going to lie to you," he said.
"Then don't."
"Yes," he said. "They had photographs. You were in some of them."
The room was very quiet.
I looked at my bandaged leg. I thought about the pier. His hand in mine and then the roar and then the ground coming up sideways. I thought about a fire exit in an alley behind the Revel Room and a cab I'd never taken before and a gate swinging open in the dark, and how all of those things had led me to a pier at the wrong moment.
