Page 28 of The Drifter

Or since a hallway of a hotel, and a woman with her shoulder against a doorframe, telling a stranger about Dubai with her hands cutting the air. Coming apart a little, right there in front of me, and putting herself back together prouder than she'd been before it.

I shook my head and kept walking.

It was somewhere south of there, down along the water, that the back of my neck went up.

I didn't break stride. That's the first rule and the oldest one—the body reports, and the body doesn't ask you to do anything stupid about it. I kept my pace exactly what it had been and let everything else come up to speed. Ears. Edges of the eyes. The map in my head, which never shuts off, lit up with the last quarter mile behind me: the parked cars, the porch lights, the one window with a curtain that had been open on my first pass down this street and was open still.

Someone was watching me.

I've been watched by professionals on multiple continents and by amateurs everywhere else, and my instrument for it has never once lied to me. It's not a thought. It's older than thought. It lives in the same place as the thing that turns a herd all at once. Every man in my former line of work either learns to trust it or gets buried by men who did.

So, I trusted it. I gave no sign, and I trusted it.

I came off the narrow street at the next corner and put myself on a wider one, water on my left, good sightlines, streetlamps in a row going away like fence posts. Public ground. If it was going to come, I'd make it come across the open.

Nothing came.

I walked six blocks of that seawall with the harbor breathing beside me, black and patient, a container ship sitting way out in the channel lit up like a small town. I gave whoever it was every opportunity a courteous man can give. I stopped once and looked at the water a while, hands loose, back open to the street—an invitation, if anybody wanted to accept it.

Nobody did.

No car rolled slow. No footsteps checked when mine checked. No shape detached itself from any of the hundred shadows I was tracking without looking at them. By every measure I owned, every one I'd bet my life on for years, that street was empty of anything that meant me harm.

And the feeling didn't lift.

That was the part I turned over as I walked. It didn't sharpen and it didn't fade. It just sat there, even and steady, less like a man in a doorway and more like—I worked for it—more like the city itself. Like the whole old town had one eye, and the eye had been shut when I got here, and somewhere in the last few hours, without any fuss, it had come open. And turned. And found me.

Not hostile. That's what I couldn't square. Thirty years of reading intent off the night air, and the read I got was not threat.

The read I got was noted.

Strange.

I didn't like it, but there was nothing to do about it. Those two facts have shared a bunk my whole life. Best to keep walking.

So, I did. I walked the seawall to the end and came up through a park where the fountains were shut down for the night. I went on, street after street, letting the miles do what miles do. Somewhere in there, the feeling of the eye faded, or I got used to it. I've never been sure those are different things.

I walked until the sky over the harbor went from black to a dark, waiting blue. The first gulls started up. My legs finally sent word that the account was settled.

Four in the morning, by the clock in a church tower that had been telling this town the time since before Texas was Texas.

I turned back toward The Palmetto Rose. The gas lamps were still burning on the quiet streets, steady little fires in their boxes, and I came up the block toward the hotel with my whole body finally ready to be done.

There's nothing a long hike can't cure, my father had said.

He was mostly right. He was ninety percent right.

I went up the steps and in through the doors. The girl at the desk lifted her head from the chicken wire and gave me a tired smile. I nodded at her and took the stairs.

9

SASHA

Iwoke up because the light was wrong.

Not the alarm. There wasn't an alarm. The light came in across my bed, and it lay over the foot of the covers like something spilled. I lay there and looked at it and didn’t understand a thing about my own life.

Then, my body did what my body does. It went off like a fire bell.