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“No,” Shaw moaned. “You shattered my ankle. I can’t walk. I’ll probably never walk again, not even after multiple reconstructive surgeries, and you’ll have to carry me everywhere out of guilt—”
“You know what? I’m feeling surprisingly guilt free.”
“—and when I have to go to the bathroom I’ll scream, ‘Nine-one-one, nine-one-one,’ and that’ll be code for a bathroom emergency—”
“Race you to the church.”
“What do I get—”
But North took off before Shaw had time to finish the question. There was no squawk of outrage or protest, and that was a bad sign; for the first hundred yards, charging across the lawn, North focused on breathing, on finding his stride. But the Red Wings—although amazingly well made and incredibly tough and excellent protection for his feet under basically every possible circumstance—were heavy. Worse, as the first hundred yards began to close, North discovered he was having a difficult time catching his breath, and he resolved for the thousandth time…to do more cardio. Fewer resistance days. More days hitting the streets. Sprints. High-intensity interval training. And then his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, so he had to stop planning and start focusing on not running like the Bride of Frankenstein. He pumped his arms. He pistoned his legs. He had the vague idea that he was supposed to engage his core, but that seemed like a fuckery of an expectation for someone whose entire body was shutting down under duress.
Shaw, of course, breezed past him and reached the small plaza in front of the church with seconds to spare.
Heaving for breath—and straddling that line between a stitch in his ribs and the need to puke—North finally reached him.
“What do I—”
North swatted him, or tried to, and then had to gasp for air, hands on knees.
“That bad?” Shaw asked with what might have been real sympathy. North needed more oxygen before he could decide. “You know, you might consider the fact that along with all the other terrible things it does to your body—”
North looked up. He was drooling, he realized. Only a tiny bit. He knuckled it away and sucked in some more air and, because God occasionally still performed miracles, managed to stand up straight.
“Er—” Shaw said. “That thing, you know. The one we don’t talk about.”
“Cardio,” North said flatly.
Shaw looked like he might argue, but he must have read something on North’s face because he nodded and said, “Yup. Cardio.”
“It’s the altitude,” North finally said, shuffling in a circle as he continued to catch his breath. “The altitude must be different here.”
“Yeah,” Shaw muttered, “we’re at sea level.” But when North stopped and turned, he began nodding enthusiastically. “Yes, the altitude. That’s got to be it.”
He was wearing one of those looks of overenthusiastic agreement, the way he did right after North finished explaining that there was nothing wrong with a well-rounded diet that included the occasional snack, treat, and/or indulgence, and right before he was about to purge their fridge of everything delicious. North scowled.
“What do I win?” Shaw asked.
“A fiver.”
“A fiver? I already get fivers—I mean that’s wonderful! And so romantic! I can’t wait!”
“God damn it,” North muttered and started toward the church’s main entrance.
From the street, the church had appeared dark and unoccupied, and nothing North saw now changed his opinion. When he tried the doors, they were locked. On the other side of the glass, an emergency light illuminated enough of the space for North to make out the shape of the lobby. But no one moved—no one responding to the sound of North trying the doors, and equally annoyingly, no one running away because two intrepid detectives had finally tracked him down.
North followed the perimeter of the building, but the rattle of machinery made him stop and look. The gate at the road was slowly opening, and a car was waiting to turn in. North motioned for Shaw to hunker down behind some of the bushes along the side of the church, and they crouched there and waited.
A minute later, tires hummed toward them, and in the distance, the gate rattled back into place. The car—a Ford Focus, dark—drove past them, and North snapped a picture of the license plate. North assumed that the vehicle was headed toward a private parking lot behind the church, but instead, it turned down what North had assumed, until now, was a service road. The car disappeared from view a moment later, and North realized that some sort of privacy fence or windscreen was there, blocking whatever was on the other side from view.
North took off at a jog—a light jog, what Shaw, when he wanted to be an asshole, might have called a lope, or even a brisk walk. Shaw kept pace with him, which was easy when you were skin and bird bones and had your underwear ventilated by an air elemental, or whatever the fuck Shaw had paid fifty dollars for. Not that Shaw even wore underwear. Not often. Not unless North ordered it on the grounds of not getting arrested.
The smell of pine sap and exhaust grew stronger as they approached the privacy barrier, and now North could make out the deeper darkness of a windscreen against the night. The road that the Focus had taken cut behind the windscreen, and as North came around the turn, he let out another string of swears. A hundred yards down the road was a house—a mansion, technically—with lights blazing.
It was hard to get all the details in the interplay of light and shadow, but North could tell enough: the house was stucco, with a mansard roof and lots of windows, all of them glowing. It crouched behind a second fence, which told North something about the people who lived here. Carriage house lanterns, manicured flower beds, copper accents—details, but details that became more and more suggestive as North considered the house. He summed it up as ten thousand square feet of a lot of naïve people’s money.
Ahead of them, the gate was sliding shut behind the Focus.
“That’s a big house,” Shaw said.
