Page 40 of Rune’s Solace

“I can get her somewhere without making her suspicious.”

I believed him. That would’ve bothered me yesterday. Today I was grateful for it. I pulled out my phone. “Number.”

He gave it to me, hands shaking just enough I noticed and he probably hoped I didn’t.

“You’ll actually do something,” he said.

Wasn’t quite a question, but close. Kid handing something dangerous to a man he barely knew and needing to hear he hadn’t made a mistake.

“Yeah.”

“Like...an appropriate something?”

I looked at him.

“Right. Stupid question.”

“I’ll handle it.”

He let out a breath that looked like he’d been holding it since yesterday. “Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I’m going to go back inside now and be so aggressively normal she’s going to know immediately that something’s wrong.”

“Sawyer.”

He stopped. It was the first time I’d ever said his name and he heard it, I saw him hear it.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded, twice, quick, and went back across the lot toward the doors, and I swung my legs over my bike, watched him go, then I put my eyes on that building and I read every face going in and out of it, every corner, every parked car, my hands were steady, everything in me had gone cold, slow and clear, the way it goes when the waiting’s over and there’s finally something to do.

A man with jailhouse ink on his throat had been standing where I could have seen him if I’d been doing my job right.

I’d fix that. Starting now.

And tonight I was going to Devil, and this time I wasn’t bringing him a bad feeling and a hole in a radiator.

This time I had a man.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

DEVIL’S OFFICE WAS the one room in that clubhouse where nobody ever lied, and I walked into it knowing I was going to try.

Not about the man. About why I’d noticed him.

He was at the desk with the ledgers open, but he wasn’t in them. He had Raina’s picture in his hand. His wife, gone a long time now, and that picture has sat on the corner of that desk every day since, and he was just looking at her. He caught me catching him, and he set her back in her place, careful, squared to the desk the way he squares everything, and took one look at my face and closed the book.

“Sit.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Then talk.”

So I laid it out, flat and clean, the way you bring a thing to a president. Amy’s radiator, and the hole in it, and Gearhead not being able to swear either way but not liking it. The parking garage, and her going down on the concrete over something down a row of pillars that none of the rest of us could see. And then Sawyer coming across a parking lot to tell me there was a man on that campus. Two days running. Watching her come out of class. Following them to the coffee shop and standing across the street. Fifties. Thick through the shoulders. Weathered. Buzzed gray hair.

And the ink on his throat.

Devil hadn’t moved through any of it. That’s his way. He goes still and he lets a thing get all the way said before he touches it.

“Describe the tattoo again,” he said.