Page 99 of The Maverick
Plan, then.
I'd play nice. I'd come downstairs in jeans and a t-shirt and an open face, and I'd find Lucas in whatever parlor Lucas was in, and I'd thank him for the helicopter and the limo and the candles in the suite and the staff who'd kept their mouths shut, and I'd make the small, easy, friendly small talk that men in our lineof work made when they were working out what to say to each other next.
And then I'd ask the question.
I'd ask it flat. I'd ask it without prelude.Is my father alive?
I'd watch his face.
That was the plan.
I shut off the water. Dried off. Walked into the dressing room with the towel around my waist, and found, exactly as the butler had promised, jeans in my size folded on a shelf, a charcoal t-shirt above them, fresh socks, and a pair of boots that fit me perfectly. A leather belt rolled neatly beside the jeans.
I dressed.
I checked myself in the mirror once, because I needed to know what face I was bringing to Lucas, and the face was a face I recognized from before I'd put on a uniform—Tommy Dane from Valentine, Texas, in jeans and a t-shirt and a pair of new boots, with no joke ready and his mother's eyes looking back at him out of his own.
There was a knock at the door.
I crossed the suite.
I'd assumed the butler, or the man he'd promised. I had, somewhere in the back of my head, the hope that whoever was on the other side would walk me to the armory first and to Lucas second, because I wanted to be a man with a sidearm when I asked the question I was about to ask.
I opened the door.
The man on the other side was not the butler.
He was not the man the butler had promised.
He was a middle-aged man, weather-cured the way Texas men got weather-cured, with my hairline and my jaw and my hands, standing in the hallway of a Charleston mansion in clean denim and a snap-button shirt with the cuffs rolled twice.
I knew his face.
I had known it before I'd known my own. I had looked at it across the kitchen table in the spring of my eleventh year and gone to bed that night not knowing it would be the last time I'd see it.
Now, it was here.
Now, it was on my doorstep.
Now, it was looking at me with eyes that were filling, slow, with something I would have to take a long time to name.
He opened his mouth.
He didn't get a word out.
I stood in the open door of a suite in Dominion Hall and looked at my father, and the world went very still.
Meanwhile, my phone buzzed in the bedroom. I never heard it.
27
REBECCA
Iwalked fast.
Not because I had anywhere to be—the apartment was close and I knew the way and there was no particular reason to hurry toward a night that was going to be exactly what it was going to be regardless of how quickly I arrived at it.
I walked fast because walking fast was what my body wanted to do with the energy that had nowhere else to go, the electrical current of humiliation that needed movement or it would turn into something worse.
