Page 69 of Rune’s Solace

Instead it belonged to the sick fuck who hurt Amy.

Nobody else at the table knew that. I watched the name pass around and land nowhere, watched Gearhead shake his head, Chain glance toward Bolt, and I sat there with my hands flat on the wood and kept my face like stone, because I’d known this bastard for weeks without having anything to call him.

“Don’t know him,” Gearhead said.

“No reason you would.” Mystic opened the folder. “Did five years on aggravated assault. Charges started uglier. Plea made ’em prettier.” His eyes lifted then, and there was a thing Mystic could do with those mismatched eyes, just let them go flat and empty, that could suck the warmth straight out of a room. “Ran his family about how you’d expect a man like that to run one.”

Nobody asked him to explain.

“Got out six weeks ago.”

Six fucking weeks.

The radiator. The garage. The campus. Six weeks of a hard man out and circling, and I felt the thing start to line up under the table.

“That’s your man on the campus,” Devil said. “That’s who the boy saw.”

“Prison ink on his throat,” I said, first I’d spoken since sitting down. My voice came out rough enough that Devil’s eyes cut to me. “Sawyer said some kind of animal. Dark. Blown out. Looked homemade.”

Mystic looked at me. Held it a second. “Yeah,” he said. “About that.”

Hard gray bastard with a buzzed head, thick through the neck and shoulders, lines cut deep around a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to do anything but go mean. Even staring straight into a county camera there wasn’t anything uncertain in him, no shame, no nerves, nothing that said he’d just had his freedom taken away. Sawyer had gotten that part dead right.

Nobody said anything for a second.

Then Chain said, “The hell is that?”

“Tiger, looks like,” Gearhead said. “Homemade. Ugly.”

“It’s nothin’.” Mystic didn’t even look at it. “Man did a lot of years. You come out of a place like that wearin’ whatever the yard put on you. Don’t mean he’s anybody’s but his own.” His eyes came up. “He ain’t Dragon Fire, if that’s where you’re headed. He ain’t anybody’s. He’s just a con.”

“Then how’s it related to Drago?” Chain asked.

“Because he spent nineteen days next to him.” Mystic set the photo face down, done with it. “That’s the how.”

He let it sit.

“Broad River,” he said. “Rickard’s last stretch. Same block they held Drago after the raid, before the feds moved him.” Mystic stopped to let it sink in. “Same cell. Nineteen days, the two of ’em, right before Rickard walked out a free man.”

“Same cell,” I said, more to myself than anybody else.

Chain sat back. “Fuck me.”

Gearhead swore under his breath, and I looked down at the photograph in the middle of the table and felt the pieces start moving before Mystic even finished laying them out.

“Rickard walks after that?” Bolt asked.

“Nineteen days later.” Mystic closed the folder halfway. “Walks out broke. No job. No wife. No family that’ll claim him. Parole address is a room over a garage owned by a cousin he ain’t talked to in eight years.”

Devil’s face changed. “Drago had money.”

Mystic nodded once.

“And needed somebody outside,” Bolt said.

Another nod.

Chain leaned forward, forearms hitting the table. “Somebody without a patch.”