Page 19 of Crow’s Shadow

“Your record guy. Keeps your papers. Renner got it out of him drunk or however and the old fool never knew he gave it up.” His eyes are huge. “That’s everything. That’s all I got, I swear. You said quick. You said quick, man, please—”

I look at Grim. Grim looks at me. Neither of us says his name. We don’t need to.

“Make it quick,” I tell Grim, and I walk out so I do not have to feel that one either.

Byte catches me in the yard with his laptop open against the hood of a truck, blue light on his face, and he has the look he has worn since the cannery, the one that says he found a thing he wishes he had not.

“You get anything more off the phones,” I ask.

“Enough. Calls cluster up in the hills past the line, matches what Marchetti told you about a mountain place.” He turns the screen, a scatter of dead pings in the green nothing of the border country. “I can’t get closer than a valley. No towers up there. That’s the point of up there.”

“Keep on it.”

“Crow.” He stops me. “There’s money moving. Somebody inside took a payment. Three of them, over four months, routed stupid, through a card game, a bait shop and a used-boat dealer, but it’s the same hand every time and it ends in cash.” He swallows. “Somebody at our table’s been getting fed by Renner since spring.”

“A name.”

“Not yet. Soon. The thread’s real, I just have to walk it back without tearing it.” He looks up at me. “You already think you know who.”

“Marchetti gave me the record-keeper.”

Byte’s face does something complicated. “Loki.”

“Don’t say it in the yard.”

“I’m just,” he pauses. “Crow, that doesn’t sit right. Loki? He taught her the book. He put the key on her. He’s the reason she’s got a place here at all.”

“I know what he is to her.” It is the exact thing that makes it worse, and I do not say so. “Walk your thread. Give me a name I can put my hands on. Tonight.”

I go to the crematory before church, because Marchetti is waiting and the work does not do itself, and because there is a stretch of the night where I would rather be alone with the fire than with the faces of men I have known fifteen years.

Mercy is there when I come in. Sitting on the cold table, boots swinging, as if he knew I would come.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I tell him.

“Neither should you, brother. Not the way you’ve been in here.” He watches me work the burner up. “Three today. Cofield yesterday. And you feed them in like kindling and you don’t say a word over a single one.”

“They don’t get words.”

“Everybody gets words. That’s the whole job. That’s what makes us different from the men we burn.” He slides off the table and comes to stand beside me at the mouth of the furnace, the heat pushing at both of us. “I’m not telling you to go soft. I’m telling you there’s a version of you that walks into that cannery and gets her out, and there’s a version that gets her out and has nothing left to give her when he does. I’ve watched you two days now. I know which one’s driving.”

“When she’s home,” I say, “I’ll worry about my soul. Not before.”

“You say that like the soul waits.” Mercy puts a hand on my shoulder, brief, the way he does at gravesides. “It doesn’t. It leaves a little every time you tell it to. Make sure there’s a man left for her to come home to, Crow. That’s the sermon.”

He leaves me to it. I feed the fire, and I do not say words over Marchetti. I tell myself I will find them again later, when she is breathing free air.

Church at midnight. Every patch at the table, and I do not sit down to say it. I put it to them flat, the cleaner’s report. Marchetti. The mountains. The collecting, and the women who go out like lights. The clock running on her.

Then the last part.

“There’s a rat. Renner’s had a man in our house since spring. It’s how he bent the book, how he learned her habits, how he walked her out to Darkwater without a shot fired.” The table is dead still. “Byte’s got money moving to somebody at this table, three payments, four months. And Marchetti gave me where it started. Said Renner got what he needed out of our record-keeper.”

I let it sit.

“There’s one way to bend that book. You’ve got to be able to write in it. In this whole club, living, two people can do that. One of them is in a cannery right now because somebody in this room sold her.”

“You’re sure it’s inside.” Buck, careful, because Buck counts everything twice. “A dead man says a lot at the end. Says whatever buys him a breath.”