Page 12 of The Jackal

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.

"Mr. Dane. We've been expecting you." Sasha, her tag said. She slid a folio across the marble like we'd done this a hundred times. She knew exactly who I was. Whatever my brothers were running in this town, the Palmetto Rose was wired into it, and Sasha was part of the wiring. She was good—warm, smooth, not one question in her.

I was signing my name, the same name I almost never get to use, when I remembered my phone.

I'd shut it off leaving Germany. Habit. A dark phone can't be a leash and can't be a beacon. I like to fly the way I like to do everything, off the grid, accountable to nobody but the man I'm carrying. I pulled it out and thumbed it on and watched it wake, expecting nothing. Or expecting Ken—a one-line follow-up, maybe. The only man above me with anything to say.

It wasn't Ken.

It was a name out of another season. A quieter one. From before the worst of anything, before federal trouble and silent brothers and cars that cost more than houses. A softer stretch of a hard life—the kind you never know was the good part until you're standing a long way past it.

Magnolia.

Mags, to me. Only ever Mags.

And the message under her name, sitting there since I'd been somewhere over the ocean dreaming about a dead man, said she was in Charleston.

Charleston.

Fucking Charleston.

I looked up at the ceiling and shook my head, slow, at a universe I'd quit expecting to make sense a long time ago, and that still, every so often, found a way to surprise even me.

Sasha glanced up, too, following my eyes like she expected to find a stain spreading across the plaster.

"Everything all right, Mr. Dane?"

"Fine." I brought my eyes back down. "The universe just has a funny sense of humor."