Chapter 9

Declan's POV

The rain started at six. By seven it had stopped being rain and become a single sheet of water falling past the window, and it hit the old glass hard enough that the sound got inside the apartment and stayed there, a dry scratching at the frame like something outside had decided to try the locks.

I stood at the window with my coffee going cold in my hand and watched it come down sideways under the streetlight.

I used to hate rain. It washes scent out of the air — takes a street corner and turns it into a blank — and for me that was like walking with a bag over my head. Ask a human what it feels like to lose their sense of smell for a week and most of them would shrug. They don't know what they're admitting.

Then the running started, and I changed my mind about rain.

A hunted thing doesn't want to be found. Two hours of this and every track I'd left in the last month would be in the storm drain, diluted down to nothing, spread out over half the county. The rain was on my side now. Some irony. But it was a good thing.

Behind me, the pot on the stove pushed its lid up a quarter inch and let out a line of steam. Tomatoes, beef, onion, garlic, the cheap wine I'd put in because there was nothing else in the cabinet. I'd been standing over it for an hour and a half.

I wasn't making a date. I want to be clear about that, at least inside my own head.

Piper was going to sit down across from me at seven o'clock, and I was going to find out what she was. That was the whole purpose of the pot and the candles and the clean shirt. If she was what I thought she was — what my gut kept insisting she was, every time her heart rate jumped when I got within six feet of her — then I'd deal with her the way it had to be dealt with, and I'd be quick about it, and I wouldn't enjoy it, and it would still be the correct call. If she wasn't, then this meal paid for the moving help and closed the account. She'd eat, I'd thank her, and after tonight I'd be a neighbor who nodded in the hall and nothing else.

Two outcomes. I can live with either one.

I set the knife down on the board. Somewhere under my ribs, very quietly, something that was not quite a thought added: Can you.

I put the onion in the pan.

"You're cooking."

The voice came up out of the back of my skull the way it always did, like someone standing behind me and breathing on my neck. I didn't turn around. There was nothing to turn around to.

"I'm preparing," I said.

"You're cooking for someone who might be a shooter." Bracken said shooter the way he said everything, flat, like he was reading off a card. "That's not preparing. That's a candlelit dinner."

"She's not going to shoot me. They don't send shooters into apartments this small. There's no cleanup." I scraped the board into the pan. "If she's anything, she's eyes. She watches, she reports, and then someone else comes."

"Fine. Then it's a handler's dinner." A pause. "Put something in the wine. Nothing that kills. Something that slows her down. Then you ask questions and she answers them."

"No."

"Under the table. Right hand side. Handle toward you. When she stands up, you stand up first — don't let her get behind you. And when she reaches for her glass, watch the —"

"I'm not doing the knife either."

The silence that followed had weight to it. I've known Bracken since I was eighteen years old and I could count on one hand the number of times he'd been quiet for longer than three seconds.

"You're already making mistakes," he said, and he wasn't joking anymore, the flatness gone out of it. "You know what they'll do if they take us. You know it better than I do. You were there for the —"

The overhead light flickered twice, buzzed, and went out.

The refrigerator died mid-hum. And then the rain got louder, all at once, like someone had reached over and turned the volume knob all the way up, because there was nothing left in the apartment to compete with it.

"That's it," Bracken said. "That's the move. They've had us for a week and we missed it. Get out the back window, go down the fire escape, don't stop for the —"

I stood still and let my eyes do their work. It took about two seconds. The room came up out of the dark the way it always does — the shape of the couch, the chair, the edge of the counter, the wet gleam of my knife on the board. People pay money to be afraid of the dark. I've never once been afraid of it.

I crossed to the window and looked down.

The street lamp on the corner was lit. The building across the alley had its porch light on and a television flickering blue behind a curtain. Only our building was out — this block, this address, nobody else.

"The building's from 1983," I said. "The landlord told me the grid on this side goes down every time it storms. He was apologizing for it while he handed me the keys."

"He was apologizing because he's in on it."

"He's seventy-four. He has gout."

"Hm." Bracken doesn't have eyebrows, but I could hear him raising one. "Then we'll see."

I found the candles in the second drawer down, and the lighter behind the receipts. The flame caught on the second try, wobbled, then stood up straight, and a warm piece of light spread across the wall and made the whole apartment look smaller and shabbier than it had a minute ago.

That was when somebody knocked.

Three knocks. Pause. Three knocks. The ordinary kind, the polite kind.

Then it stopped being polite. The next ones came all in a row, too fast, and then the sound changed to a flat open-handed slap against the door panel, one after another, and somebody on the other side of it was having trouble getting enough air.

"Declan — Declan, are you in there — please, please open the door —"

"Trap," Bracken said. "Do not open that door."