Page 17 of Crow’s Shadow

He is looking at me. And on his face, lit soft and gray, is the purest, hungriest joy I have ever seen worn by a living man, the look of someone who has stood twenty years at a locked door and finally, finally heard the key turn on the other side.

“There,” he breathes. “There you are.”

Chapter nine

CROW

Loco gave me until nightfall. Scout it, he said, hit it if it can be hit, but come home either way. So, the same night they take her, Grim and I lie on our bellies in the salt grass a quarter mile off the cannery, glasses up, and what I see through them kills the plan I came out here to run.

“Count them,” Grim whispers.

“Two on the roof. Four on the doors. More inside, moving.” Cars staged nose-out for a fast leave. A second ring of men past the first. Sightlines clear all the way to the road. “He’s not hiding her, Grim. He’s daring us.”

“We could still take it. Hit it hard, hit it fast, before they set.”

“We go in hot, we lose men.”

“We’ve lost men before.”

“We go in hot, we lose her.” I lower the glasses and look at him in the dark. “That’s the whole point of the show. He wants us loud through the front. He’s got a man on her the second we breach, and the first thing that dies is her, right in front of me, so I carry it the rest of my life. That’s the trap. She’s the trap.”

Grim is quiet a long beat, the grass moving around us.

“So, we don’t go through the front,” he says.

“No. We take his people apart first. Every gun on that roof came from somewhere. Works for somebody. Drinks somewhere, sleeps somewhere, calls somebody. We find them off the wall, one at a time, quiet, till there’s nobody left to man it.” I start backing out of the grass on my elbows. “Then we walk in the front like we own the place, and there’s no one left to point a gun at her when we do.”

“That’s slow, brother.”

“Yeah, it’s slow. It’s fucking painful.” And she is in there right now, her first night as his, with a man who keeps women till the light goes out of them. The thought is a hand around my throat. “It’s the only way she comes out breathing. Slow is the price, and I’ll pay it, and I’ll hate every hour of it.”

“And if he moves her before we’re through?”

“Then we take the wall apart faster than he can pack.” I get to a crouch. The cannery sits black against the last of the light, and somewhere inside it she is learning what it is to be his. Somewhere inside it she is learning what his world looks like. He has until I reach her.

It takes Byte most of the next day to put a name in my hand. Marchetti. Careful man but careful men call their mothers. He ran Renner’s product out of Nohaven, and he comes out of a bar a little after six, drunk enough to be reckless and sober enough to walk, which is exactly what we need.

“That’s him,” Grim says. We are in the cab of the hearse across the lot, no lights, engine off. “Byte tracked his phone to the bar an hour ago. Mid-level. High enough to know things.”

“High enough to be missed.”

We take him at his truck. Grim comes around the tailgate quiet for a man his size, and by the time Marchetti hears gravel it is too late, my arm is across his throat, Grim has his wrists and the keys are out of his hand and into Grim’s pocket. He tries to yell. My hand kills it. He tries to fight, and there is nothing to fight, we have done this more times than either of us will ever say out loud, and inside ten seconds he is folded into the back of the hearse with a zip tie on his wrists and Grim’s knee in his spine.

“Please,” he is already saying, muffled. “Please, I don’t— whatever you think, man—”

“Save it.” I pull the door shut on the two of us and thump the panel. Grim takes us out of the lot slow and legal, a funeral car minding the speed limit, nothing to see. “You’ve got a long ride to decide how this goes.”

The man in the chair has a name, but I stop using it inside the first hour. Names are for men I mean to let live.

We have him in the back of the shop now, tied to a chair, Grim on the door, the furnace ticking through the wall. Marchetti has done enough crying to know it will not move me and enough thinking to know where he is.

“You drive for Renner,” I say. “So, you know the roads.”

“Yeah. I know the roads.”

“Then you know the one to the cannery.”

His face does the thing they all do, the flinch when they work out I already know more than they hoped. “I don’t know what you’re—”