Page 61 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Not to mention he might not know anything about the rest of the organization beyond the people who were kept around as watchdogs to make sure he behaved,” Jace said.

“Sometimes there are answers in the things people don’t say outright,” I murmured.

I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until everyone’s focus turned to me. My control had been slipping since the moment I landed on Hatterwick, and I needed to get a handle on it.

With a faint shrug, I added, “At this point, the only thing we can do is ask. If he says nothing, we’re no worse off than we were not going at all.”

“Well, can’t hurt.” Rios scooped a hand through his thick black hair. “I’ll contact the prison and make it happen.”

Thirty-One

JACE

The prison facility sat forty minutes inland from the coast, a low complex of concrete and chain-link that would have been unremarkable set against any landscape in the world. I’d been in prisons on four continents, including ones where the word facility was generous. This one registered as orderly and maintained, and nothing more. The parking lot was freshly striped. The entry officer greeted us with the professional neutrality of someone who had learned to be neither hostile nor friendly, because neither served any particular purpose in his job.

We passed through security in the order the officer directed. Phones in the lockers. Wallets stripped of anything with metal in them. Belts removed and folded. I moved through it without thinking, the process familiar enough to be automatic. Rios had his credentials already out, the paperwork from the racketeering inquiry that had gotten us access, and he handled the administrative piece while I waited and watched Layla.

She’d come prepared. No jewelry, flat shoes, nothing on her that would slow her at the checkpoint. The knife sheaths she didn’t know I knew she normally wore weren’t on her. She’d thought through what she could and couldn’t bring in, made her decisions, and hadn’t mentioned any of it. Merely showed up ready.

The duty officer handed back Rios’s credentials, made a note in the log, and buzzed the first gate open.

The sound of it was the same everywhere. That electronic clunk of a lock releasing, followed by the weight of a door built to contain rather than welcome. We walked through, and it shut behind us before the second gate opened. Then the third. The institution made sure nothing moved faster than it had decided things should move, and there was no arguing with that logic from inside it.

The room they put us in was small and plain. A table bolted to the floor, four aluminum chairs, a fluorescent light overhead that hummed at a frequency slightly below the threshold of conscious irritation. No window. The kind of room that existed entirely for function and had made its peace with that a long time ago. Private, though, which I’d hoped for and hadn’t been certain of. Attorney-client rooms weren’t always available, and Rios had called in a favor to get us one. No other visitors nearby, no shared space, no one who could pick up fragments of conversation.

When I found the camera in the upper corner, the small red eye blinking at a steady interval, I adjusted my appreciation of the privacy accordingly. We had the form of it. We didn’t have the substance.

Layla took the chair at the far end of the table, set her hands flat on the surface, and looked at the door. Rios took the chair to my left. I sat facing the door, settling in and letting the waiting be what it was.

Rios drummed two fingers on the table once and stopped. The habit of a man containing impatience he wasn’t going to show. “He didn’t know we were coming,” he said. “They told him the chief of police from Sutter’s Ferry wanted to meet. That’s all.”

“That’s enough to have him ready for something,” I said.

“He’s been ready for something for nine months.” Rios looked at the door. “Let’s see what he does with us specifically.”

Layla said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the door with the complete, unhurried attention of someone who understood that observation was work, and she was doing it.

The door opened, and the guard brought Miles through.

He’d been a few years ahead of us growing up, and I hadn’t seen much of him once I joined the Navy. Hadn’t been home to. But I’d seen the campaign photographs. The man who’d worked a room with the practiced ease of someone who’d honed his ability to make people feel like they were the most important person in it. Trim, yacht-club fit, the kind of polish that required maintenance. Nine months had taken most of that maintenance away.

He was broader across the shoulders than the photographs suggested, the muscle that came from having time and facilities and not much else to do. His forearms were thick below the rolled sleeves of the prison-issue shirt. But the middle had gone soft on institutional food and the kind of stress that sat in the body rather than moving through it. The lines around his mouth had set hard, and his eyes had a wary quality that definitely didn’t expect good news.

When his eyes landed on Rios, Miles stopped in the middle of the room, his face cycling through some recalculation before he managed to pull it back to neutral. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Have a seat, Miles,” Rios invited.

Miles stood there for another beat, working it through. Curiosity won, and he pulled out the chair across from me and sat. His eyes moved to me, to Layla at the far end of the table, and back to Rios. “What do you want? Where’s Carson?”

“Dead,” I said.

The flatness in his eyes cracked open, just for a moment, to reveal something involuntary and unguarded somewhere below the level of the defenses he’d spent nine months building.

He hadn’t known. I watched the information hit him, the implications of it unpacking in real time, before he shut the door back down. Apparently the prison was just far enough from Hatterwick that it either hadn’t made whatever news was broadcast here, or it had been a footnote that Miles hadn’t seen.

“Executed,” I added. “By a sniper at the end of the summer.”

Miles sat very still for a moment.