Twenty-one
He looked near exhaustion. His hair, tied back in a ponytail and held with a thick rubber band, was limp and greasy. His face was grayish around the eyes, like someone who's been working around smoke and soot so long it's been ground into the pores. Without the glamour, he was wearing a white shirt that looked as worn as he did, with old jeans and black boots.
I crossed my arms.
"I'm doing what we should have done from the start," I shouted. "You want to kill the engine on that thing, or should we talk about this really loud and in public?"
His expression soured further and he nodded to the back of the cycle, ordering me on. I raised an eyebrow and didn't move.
"I'm not having this conversation here," he said.
I turned and spat on the ground, then walked back to Aaron, Candace, and Kim. They were still hunkered down behind parked cars, but the fact that I had talked to the mysterious stranger without the pair of us devolving into a street fight seemed to reassure them all.
"It's Ex," I said. "You three get back to the house. I need to talk to him. I'll meet you there in an hour."
"You're sure?" Aaron said. The gun was still in his hand, though pointed professionally away from anyone. His glance over my shoulder offered to beat the living shit out of Ex. Part of me appreciated the thought.
"I'll be fine," I said. "I want you guys to talk to Midian and Chogyi Jake. Tell them about the Calling Malkuth plan, and see what you can brainstorm as far as strategies."
"We're doing it?" Candace asked. "Tuesday night is the time?"
"I don't know yet," I said. "See what you can work out. I'll see what I can do about getting Ex over whatever his problem is."
The others looked at one another for a moment, then Aaron slid the gun back into an ankle holster I hadn't noticed before. I walked back to Ex. He reached into a small side bag and pulled out a black helmet, holding it out to me as I came near.
"Where's yours?" I asked.
"I'll be fine," he said. "Put it on and we'll go."
I got on the back of the bike, the helmet weighing down on my neck, and tucked my leather backpack into the side bag. Ex leaned forward, gunning the engine. Resenting the physical contact, I leaned forward, put my hands on his sides, and got ready for launch.
I hadn't been on the back of a motorcycle since I was sixteen, and even then it hadn't been more than a few slow blocks with a guy from church. Ex's launch felt like an amusement park ride without the amusement. Before we'd gotten out of the parking structure, I'd forgotten all about Coin and the Invisible College, Kim and Aubrey, and riders in general. All my attention was on shifting my weight the right way so that the pavement wouldn't rise up and rip my skin off. My arms slid forward, and within a couple blocks, I was holding Ex closer than I'd ever held anyone I wasn't looking to sleep with.
The streets slid by, the wind of our passage drying the sweat off my arms almost before it was there. Despite the heat of the day and the punishing weight of sunlight, I felt cool. I only wished that I had refused the helmet. The air would have felt good against my face.
Ex turned us onto Colfax, and then, to my unease, onto I-25 heading north. The Sunday traffic was light, and speed turned the asphalt to a gray blur beside me. I found I could tell from the subtle movement of Ex's body when we were going to change lanes or shift direction. Before long, I was matching him without thinking.
Back on the surface streets, the houses were low and comfortable looking, the shops mostly strip malls. I felt sure enough of myself at the slower-than-highway speeds to lean back and allow a little air space between me and Ex's back. The front of my T-shirt where I'd pressed close to him was sweat-soaked and I suspected less opaque than I would have liked. I didn't want to have the coming showdown looking like I was trying to win a contest at a sports bar.
I didn't need to worry about it. By the time Ex slowed the cycle down to a putter and angled us down a long dirt driveway, I was back to myself and sure of my dignity. The house on our right was a one-story ranch, white paint flaking at the eaves. It was the sort of place where I expected to see a family living. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a swing set out back and children in the yard. Ex coasted past it.
The garage in back was huge. Three cars would have fit in it easily. But instead, it was fitted out as a little apartment. Ex's shining black sports car sat close to the eastern wall. A canvas cot that looked like it came from World War II rested against the back wall beside the open door of a bathroom almost too small to turn around in. Ex killed the engine, dropped the kickstand, and got off the bike. I got off too, pulling the helmet off as I did. My legs were trembling.
The smaller details of the space began to register with me. The books in Latin and French stacked under the cot. The crucifix reverently hung by a small, dirty window. The mixed smells of dust, motor oil, and old laundry. Ex leaned against his car, his arms folded, his expression stern. In context, it was all I could do not to laugh.
"Okay, I need to know two things," I said. "First, tell me that's not your parents' house up front. Second, tell me you didn't spend all your money on the cool car just to impress girls."
Ex looked puzzled for a second, then glanced around at the ad hoc apartment as if seeing it for the first time. He seemed chagrined, but he covered it quickly.
"The house belongs to a friend. He lets me rent this when I need a place to stay."
"When you need a place to stay?"
"It's not like I'm carrying a mortgage," Ex said.
I couldn't help it. I laughed. Big, strong, authoritarian Ex, with his black clothes and shining sports car, lived in a garage. Ex's expression darkened.
"Let it go, Jayn¨¦," he said. "You are risking your own life and the lives of everyone who was at that restaurant with you today. The first thing you need to do is tell me what you're planning, and the next thing you need to do is call it off."
"How is it," I said, ignoring him, "that Eric has enough money to buy a small island, and the rest of you are living like college students?"
"That's what I'm telling you! Will you listen to me? Eric was the real deal. He'd been doing this for years. He was connected. Chogyi Jake, Aubrey, me. We were his gophers. We were the day labor he took on when he needed an extra pair of hands."
There was real pain in his voice. It sobered me. I looked at the cot, the books, the crucifix. I tried to see beauty in it.
"Why are you following me?" I asked.
"Because someone has to keep you safe."
"They know you've left me," I said. "The Invisible College? They know you left."
"They caught sight of me a couple times," he said. "And now that I'm out of the house, I'm not under Eric's wards and protections. Even if they don't know exactly where I am, they can tell that much."
"And yet you're still alive," I said.
"I am."
"Luck?"
"Partly," he said. "I've got a talent for not being found."
"You're going to stop following me," I said. "You're in or you're out, but not this halfway crap. It's creepy. You scared me today. I thought you were them."
"I could have been. Coin has his people all over the city looking for you. He knows you're up to something."
"He doesn't know what," I said.
I walked to the window. A simple weeping Christ on a rough wooden cross. The floor before it was cleaner than the rest of the place. Like someone had knelt there often.
"We were idiots to think we could win where Eric failed," Ex said. "We were blind and proud, and we've paid the price for it. You have to stop this before it gets worse."
"Pride?" I said. "You think that's what went wrong? We were too full of ourselves, and so God saw to it that we didn't win?"
"I didn't say that."
"But it's what you meant."
I gave him a few seconds to object. He didn't. Instead, he walked toward me, his hands out to his side, unconsciously echoing the figure on the cross. I'd spent a fair part of my childhood watching my father work himself into rages, and the feel of this was different. This was desperation.
"Eric overestimated, and he got killed for it," Ex said. "We overestimated, and Aubrey paid the price. I'm not going to see you be the third."
"I might win," I said.
"You won't. You'll plan the best that you can, and be as clever as you can be, and call on all the help you can find, and Coin will still beat you. You know it, and you're ignoring it because you're in love with the man in that hospital bed, and you think that maybe, maybe, you can pull off a miracle and get him back."
He paused. I waited.
"You don't have to prove anything," he said. "Not to anyone."
Ex was close to me now. The smell of his body wasn't unpleasant. He seemed to shake with the force of his emotion, a controlled violence that was pounding through him like a deep internal storm. I didn't feel threatened by him at all. I was oddly touched.
"I'm not taking Coin out because of some kind of sick, desperate love for Aubrey. I'm doing it because I think he'd have done it for me. And because Eric was the only one in my whole life who ever really looked out for me. And I'm doing it for myself. Because I can."
"Don't," Ex said. "Don't try. Be safe."
I stepped into his open arms and hugged him. His body went stiff with shock, and then softened. He wrapped his arms around me. I felt him sigh deeply, his ribs expanding and falling back. I rested my head on his broad shoulder. Through the dirty window, I saw a sparrow take wing, a brown-gray blur rising into the sky.
"Thank you," I said.
He nodded, his cheek against my forehead. I squeezed him tight, then stepped back and let him go.
"You should take me home," I said.
"You're dropping this," he said. "You're walking away."
"Nope," I said. "If I go down, I'm going down with my teeth around that fucker Coin's throat."
His eyes widened, his face went a shade paler. He looked past me to the crucifix like an actor who needs someone to feed him his next line.
"I know you're trying to take care of me," I said. "In your stupid, patriarchal, Neanderthal way, you think this is how you treat your friends. But I've already got a daddy, and I walked away from his bullshit too. Now take me home."
"You don't understand," he said as I stepped past him toward the bike.
"I do," I said. "I just disagree."
BACK AT the house, I stood on the porch, sweat cooling on the back of my neck, and watched Ex drive away. I thought maybe he turned and looked over his shoulder at the last moment, but I might have been making that up. I went inside.
Voices came from the living room, Midian and Kim talking over each other. For a second, it sounded like a fight. Then it only sounded like excitement.
When I stepped in the room, all eyes turned to me. Kim and Chogyi Jake were sitting on the floor off to one side, a notebook open between them with designs and symbols that seemed to shift and move when I wasn't looking straight at them. Midian was sitting on the coffee table, Candace and Aaron on the couch.
"Hey, kid," Midian croaked. "We were wondering if you were coming back."
"I live here," I said.
"How's the padre?" Midian asked.
I shook my head.
"Yeah, well," Midian said. "Probably for the best. He got on my nerves."
"What have we got?" I asked.
Aaron cleared his throat, leaned forward, and started talking. The initial plan to take Coin out close to the convention center had hit some snags. We'd been working under the assumption that Coin would be heading back to his place, but Midian had pointed out that that wasn't necessarily true. So they'd been working out other strategies.
All the plans made some assumptions. First, that we could draw off the vast majority of Coin's minions, both by Midian and Chogyi Jake picking the right moment to break cover and get themselves chased and by feeding a little clever misdirection to the fake Ex. All of that was just to get Coin and his bodyguard out where we could take a crack at them.
The best-looking option thus far involved getting two cars, one with Candace at the wheel and Kim in the back, the other with Aaron and me. We could follow Coin when he left the convention center. Once we were sure where he was going, it wouldn't be hard to get the two cars close to him. Kim would damp out Coin's powers, Aaron would run him off the road (he'd been trained in that sort of thing and had no lack of confidence in his ability), and then he and I would finish things off with the bullets I'd recovered from our first attempt. Candace and Kim would pick us up, and we'd vanish into the night.
"It's cleaner than it looks," Aaron said. "There were three guys that got killed in the last five or so years with the same MO. They were all traffickers. Coin's a higher tax bracket than those guys were, but the chances are when the Denver cops see this, they'll assume he was involved and not look at it too hard."
"Hey," Midian said, tapping Aaron on the knee with one skeletal hand. "Tell her what they call that. This is great, kid. You know what the cops call it when some mad fuck who needs to die gets aced by a civilian?"
"What do they call it?" I asked.
"Misdemeanor murder," Aaron said. "It happens. We get someone who everyone knows has been selling crack in the school yard, but we could never prove it. Someone does the obvious thing. There's just not much point in spending the resources on the investigation."
"Don't you just love that there's a name for that?" Midian cackled. "Renews my faith in mankind."
Actually, it creeped me out, but I put my reaction aside.
"Are you sure we can make this look like a drug hit?" I asked.
"I'm sure," Aaron said. "I'm going to borrow some things from the evidence store back at home. We can drop it in Coin's car when we leave. Or in the one we're driving. If it's on the scene, the guys down here will put it together. They're not dumb."
I nodded. It occurred to me for the first time that I had put all my time and concentration into killing Randolph Coin, and none at all into getting away with it. This was going to look like murder, and I couldn't really tell the judge about riders from the Pleroma unless I was pushing for an insanity plea. Sobering thought.
"But the car that we use to run him off the road," I said. "That's an issue, right?"
"Actually," Candace said, "we can kind of kill two birds with one stone."
"There's a place just north of Boulder," Aaron said. "There's no business going on there, but we're all pretty sure it's a way station. A safe house the bad guys use to move drugs and girls from the West Coast out east. We've never had enough to get a warrant, dig into things."
"Okay," I said, pulling the word out to three syllables.
"So the second car," Aaron said. "I'm going to borrow it from the guy who owns the house. If it's involved in a homicide in Denver, I'm pretty sure we can shut down everything else the fuckhead's up to too."
I laughed and sat down on the hearth.
"We may be a force for good in the world after all," I said. "What about the Calling Malkuth thing?"
"I think it will work," Chogyi Jake said. "It isn't a configuration I'd seen before, but everything that Kim's showed me fits together well."
"There is a problem," Kim said, her head turned to Chogyi and away from me. "Jayn¨¦'s protections. I don't know what this will do."
"Don't worry about it," I said.
"It is a consideration," Chogyi Jake said.
"It really isn't," I said. "Are we thinking we'll have two rifles?"
"One for each of us," Aaron said, nodding.
"One per bullet," Midian said. Then, "You know, kid, you aren't the world's best shot. And the last time you were looking down a barrel at Coin..."
"That was last time," I said. "This is point-blank. I can't miss." And this time, I was going to pull the trigger.
"So we're on?" Midian asked.
I hesitated, wondering what Ex would have thought if he'd come in. If he would have been swayed by it. If he would have thought I stood a chance, or been just as certain that I was fooling myself. I couldn't answer those questions, and they didn't matter anymore. Ex's opinion wasn't as important as mine.
"We're on," I said. And then a moment later, "Hey, can you guys ride motorcycles?"
