Page 25 of Crow’s Shadow

The clock has been running for three days, but now every minute matters. We’re running out of fucking time.

“He’s got Darkwater people working out of a marine garage on the flats.” Byte pulls up a map and zooms in on a metal building near the water, with three vehicles parked out front. “Small crew, mostly muscle with a couple of guns. These are probably the same fuckers who set up the boathouse, and if Lash needed somewhere local to run, this is where he’d go. We take them out now, that’s fewer men guarding the cannery when we go after Shadow.”

Loco studies the map, taking his time before he looks at me.

“We do it your way, Crow. Strip away his men before we hit the cannery, starting with the garage today.” His eyes stay on mine. “But I want whoever’s running that crew alive. He might know where Lash went, and he might know when Renner plans to move Shadow. Kill him and we get fuck-all. You hear me? I want him breathing when you bring him back here. That’s not a request.”

“Breathing,” I say.

And right now, I mean it.

We take the flats at last light, five of us in two trucks and the hearse, Grim on my right hand the way he has been since the boathouse. The garage sits with the river sliding past behind it, black at this hour, the same water that runs down past Grimstone and takes what we give it. Salt, dead men and diesel.

Colt is the prospect who draws the short straw for the back door, because prospects draw the short straw. That is the whole of what a prospect is for. He is nineteen, green enough he still thinks getting the shit jobs means he’s made it. He has a kid sister he sends half his cut to, a laugh too big for a man in this line of work. He wanted to ride tonight so bad he near cried when Grim pointed at him.

He is going to cover the water side while the rest of us come through the front, and he is going to be fine, because it is the quiet door, the nothing door, the door where nobody ever is.

That is what I tell him. His grin splits his whole face.

“Quiet door,” Colt says. “Copy that.”

The front goes fast and it goes hot.

Grim hits the door first, shoulder driving through it hard enough to slam steel into the inside wall, and we pour through behind him into noise, oil stink, and bad light. Somebody shouts. A chair goes over. Boots scrape concrete.

Three men inside, none of them expecting the club to come to Darkwater, because Renner told them we would be looking north at the cannery. Renner was right until Lash made him too right.

The first man is sitting at a scarred table with a beer in one hand. His other goes for the pistol at his hip. He never clears leather.

Grim puts him down through the sternum and keeps moving, already looking past the falling body for the next threat.

The second man comes up from behind a workbench, young, eyes blown wide when he sees what’s coming through the door. His gun is already in his hand, but fear makes him fast instead of good. He jerks the trigger and the shot punches into the metal roof above us. The sound inside the garage is fucking enormous.

Buck fires once.

The man folds backward against the workbench, takes a row of sockets and a coffee mug down with him, then hits the concrete hard enough to bounce.

I keep moving.

Past an engine block hanging from a chain. Past shelves loaded with fuel cans and marine parts. My shoulder clips something and sends it clattering, but I don’t look. Grim is clearing left. Buck takes the middle. I catch movement deeper in the garage.

The third one hears the noise, and sees the two bodies. Sees us. Makes the only choice left to him. He runs. Not for the front. Not toward us. For the water side, for the quiet door.

“Back!”

I don’t know who yells it.

Maybe me.

The man disappears between two racks of gutted outboards, boots hammering concrete, and somewhere beyond that wall is Colt.

Nineteen years old. Green as spring, so fucking proud we gave him the back door.

I turn after him, and I hear it.

Three rounds. Close enough together they almost sound like one. Colt isn’t laughing anymore.

For half a second, there is nothing in me. Then I am moving.