Page 125 of Shatter

I've seen them a thousand times, as numbers in a column.

I've never seen them as steel.

The smell hits me the second Pierce opens his door.

Fish and diesel and salt, rotting shellfish and bleach, so thick I can taste it on the back of my tongue.

Pierce comes around and opens my door.

I don't get out.

"Anni." He's crying openly now, his face red and wet. "Please don't make them come get you."

Behind him, a man is walking across the crushed shell toward us.

Nice suit, nice haircut.

Marc Laurent, from the counter at the Night Owl, smiling at me like we're old friends.

My legs carry me out of the car before I decide anything.

Up on the second floor of the building, in a window with the blinds half open, a man stands watching us with a coffee mug in his hand.

White hair above a sunburned face.

He watches me the way a man watches a truck pull in with a delivery.

Then he lets the blind fall shut.

The office is on the ground floor, at the back, past a long refrigerated room where men in rubber boots and white aprons are hosing down steel tables and nobody looks up.

It's freezing inside.

The cold comes up through the concrete floor, through the thin soles of my shoes, and my breath clouds in front of my face.

Laurent opens a steel door at the end of the hall.

"After you, Miss Carrow." He holds it for me like a gentleman.

The room is small and bare.

A metal desk faces a window over the docks, and a space heater glows orange in the corner, fighting a losing battle with the cold.

And a man in a charcoal suit standing at the window with his back to me, his hands clasped behind him.

Every muscle in my body turns to water.

He doesn't turn around right away, and he never did.

He always made me wait.

"Annika." Desmond says it to the window, soft, like a man greeting an old lover. "You look tired."

Then he turns.

He's exactly the same.

Tall and lean, dark hair silvering at the temples, smooth-shaven, not one wrinkle in the suit.