Page 3 of Taking Savannah
I paid the check and took the take-out I ordered for Carmelo. She watched me count out cash, leave a tip that was too big, fold the receipt into my pocket.
In the car, Carmelo was in the back seat with his arms crossed and his chin on his chest. I handed him his doggy bag and got in the driver’s seat.
Savannah got in the passenger side this time. Didn't ask. Just opened the door and sat down and buckled her belt and looked straight ahead.
"The compound," she said. "How far?"
"Three hours."
"Fine."
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the thing she'd been rolling between her fingers. A bottle cap. Silver, bent at the edges from years of handling. She set it on her thigh and pressed her thumb into the center of it until her finger went white.
I started the engine. The highway opened up in front of us, dark and empty, and the woman beside me stared through the windshield with a bottle cap under her thumb and two weeks of captivity sitting behind her eyes.
I should have been thinking about the mission. The debrief with Leone. The intelligence she carried that could crack Kreiss's network open.
Instead, I was thinking about the lamp. How heavy it was, how close it came, the fact that she'd been locked in a room for fourteen days and her first move was to fight.
The compound at four a.m. runs on a different frequency than the compound at noon.
At noon, it's soldiers and strategy and Leone holding the operation together with the stubbornness of a man who refusesto let the Don down. Aurelio's presence fills the upper floors, and the guards stand taller, and the hallways are always busy.
Now, it's corridors and the hum of lights nobody ever replaces and the occasional guard who straightens when he sees me coming and then relaxes when he realizes it's the twin who doesn't inspect their posture. The place seems colder. The kitchen carries last night's garlic and the coffee someone left on too long. The compound breathes at this hour, generators and ventilation and the low murmur of men who can't sleep properly after years of seeing death.
I got Savannah through the east entrance. Carmelo peeled off toward his quarters without a word. The man communicates primarily through the absence of communication. Leone had arranged a room on the second floor. Private bathroom, clean sheets, lock on the door that worked from the inside because we weren't animals.
Not entirely animals, that is.
I walked her up the stairs. She counted them. I saw her lips move. Fourteen steps to the second floor, a left turn, six doors down on the right. She was memorizing the route before I'd finished leading it.
Good girl.
"This one." I swiped the keycard and pushed the door open.
She walked in and stopped. She took in the window first, then door, then bathroom, then bed. Four seconds. She'd know this room in the dark by the end of the night, and the fact that she was already building that knowledge told me more about what the Delaware apartment had done to her than anything she'd said at the diner.
Then she looked at me, standing in the doorway, and something in her face opened for half a second. Not softness, that's the wrong word. But the hard front dropped, and underneath was exhaustion so deep it pulled at her whole body. The kind of tired that isn't about sleep.
"Thank you," she sighed.
"There's water in the fridge, towels in the bathroom. If you need anything, I'm down the hall. Room seven."
"Room seven."
"Yeah."
"And the lock works?"
"From the inside. You're not a prisoner, Savannah. You're a guest."
"A guest." She tasted the word and didn't like it. "Guests can leave."
"You can leave whenever you want. But the men who locked you in that apartment are still out there, and they know you heard what you heard, and this compound is the safest place you're going to find until we deal with that."
"Deal with it how?"
"The way we deal with everything."
