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By close, I was wrung out in the best way. Dante did his walk-through, checking the doors, the things he did, the things I used to watch and not let myself watch. When the lights were down and it was just the two of us and Reina humming her one-note hum in the back, I lost my nerve about the one thing I’d been building toward all day, which was ridiculous, because I’d already kissed the man. I’d already been caught. The whole building had a betting pool, for Christ’s sake.
“Hey,” I said. “So.”
He waited. He was always good at waiting.
“We said we’d talk, you know, figure out what this is, like on purpose, like a couple of grown men with sense.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Daylight’s gone, but my place isn’t far. I’ve got coffee and that tea you like. I’ve got a couch nobody’s christened, unlike some of the bar’s equipment.” That got the corner of his mouth. “Come over, but not for—I’m not—whatever you want, but mostly I just want to sit down across from you somewhere that isn’t a bar and figure out what we’re doing . . . but only if you want.”
Dante looked at me for a long moment in the dim light.
“Yeah,” he said. “I want.”
His voice was low and sure. The sixteen-year-old-boy firework went off in my chest all over again. Forty-eight years old, keys in my hand, standing in my own dark bar asking a man to come home and talk, I was terrified and happy and certain all at once.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Good.”
“Mark.”
“Yeah?”
“We should go before Rod comes back and dusts your booth for back prints.”
I laughed, got the lights, and led us out into the night. We walked together to my truck and his car, two vehicles, two men, one conversation waiting on the other side of the drive.
For once in my life, I wasn’t dreading the talk.
For once in my life, I couldn’t wait to have it.
Chapter 17
Dante
Mark’s house sat on a quiet street, low and solid, the kind of place a man who built things for a living would buy and then never quite finish making his own. I noticed it the way I notice everything, which is to say I couldn’t help it. It was a good house with warm bones, a real front porch, and a kitchen with an island big enough to feed a crew.
And it was too big for him.
That was the first thing that got under my skin, the way a house held the shape of the life it used to have. There were places on the walls a shade brighter than the paint around them, rectangles where frames had hung and come down. I saw a coat closet with too much room in it, and a second sink in the bathroom I could see down the hall, the kind you install when you’re planning for two.
He’d built that house for somebody, then somebody had left. He’d taken down the pictures but kept the house. He’d gone to the bar every day since so he wouldn’t have to sit in all the space.
I didn’t say any of that. A man tells you what he means to tell you, and Mark had already given me one name on a sidewalk, carefully, only once. I could wait for the rest, but I clocked the back door off the kitchen, the porch light burning beyond it, and I understood without being told that the porch was somewhere he didn’t sit anymore.
There was another thing I’d clocked, too, because clocking things was the whole of what I did. Twice that week I’d watched Mark’s hand go to his shirt pocket, press flat against something there, and come away without taking it out. I didn’t ask, but I set it beside the bright rectangles on his walls and the second sink, the small collection of things Mark Delgado was carrying and hadn’t said much about. I thought, Someday he’ll show me. And I found, to my own surprise, that I intended to still be standing there when he did.
“Sit anywhere,” he called from the kitchen. “Not the recliner, though. The recliner’s got a temper.”
I sat on the couch as he came in with two mugs, tea for me and coffee for him. He handed mine over and sat down at the other end of the couch with a whole cushion of good sense between us.
We looked at each other across it.
I took a sip.
“So,” he said, mirroring my sip.
“So.”
“This is the part where we talk.”
“It appears to be.”
