Page 39 of The Maverick
I was getting good at holding two true things at once.
I got my guitar from where I'd left it by the door and brought it back to the bed, then I took it out of the case and held it in my lap without playing it. Just held it.
Dolly would know what to do.
That was the thing about Dolly—she always knew. Not because her life had been easy, because it hadn't, everybody knew it hadn't, she'd grown up with less than me and in a smaller holler and with more mouths to feed and she'd walked out of those mountains, anyway, with nothing but her voice and her nerve and an absolute refusal to let the size of where she started determine the size of where she ended up. She hadn't waited until she could afford it. She hadn't waited until she was sure. She'd just gone.
And if a man who looked like Tommy had walked across a room and fixed her guitar and kissed her in a donut shop, Dolly would not be lying on a bed in a sweatshirt doing subtraction.
Dolly would put on her best dress and figure out the rest later.
I looked at the ceiling.
I didn't own a best dress.
But I thought, maybe, for the first time, that I understood the impulse.
12
TOMMY
The cab took the curve off East Bay, and the city peeled back, and there it was.
I'd seen a lot of houses in my life. I'd seen oligarch dachas outside Sochi and oilman compounds outside Houston. I'd seen the cartel ranch in Sinaloa where the swimming pool was built around a cottonwood older than the country it was in. I'd seen money that decorated and money that disappeared.
Dominion Hall did neither.
It sat back from the road behind a massive wrought iron gate that opened on a current it picked up out of the air, the way gates did when the men who'd installed them didn't want anyone touching anything.
The drive curved long through live oaks older than the country I served, Spanish moss hanging off them in slow, heavy ropes. Past the trees, the house came up out of the ground like it had grown there—antebellum stone, multiple stories, ivy on two walls and the third left clean, verandas wrapping the place at every floor. The windows had the modern depth that told you they were rated for blast and impact, and the cameras werewhere they were supposed to be, which was nowhere you'd find them unless you knew where to look.
"Lord almighty," the driver said.
"First time through these gates?"
"In thirty years of driving in this town."
"Lucky you."
He glanced at me in the mirror like he was deciding what kind of man rode through gates like that. I didn't help him decide.
I tipped him forty on a fifteen-dollar fare, because the man had given me a real reaction to something I was about to need a real reaction to, and got out.
I stood and looked up at the house.
The man at the front door had been watching me come up the drive. I'd clocked him from forty yards out—loose stance, hands free, weight on the balls of his feet like a fighter who'd never fully retired the habit. Auburn hair. Mid-thirties. Build I recognized before he'd opened his mouth, because it was the build of a man whose fitness wasn't a hobby, but a job requirement.
He stepped out at the top of the steps.
"Tommy Dane."
"That's the name."
"Lucas."
He held out a hand. I took it. The grip was what I expected—firm, brief, no message in it. The man had nothing to prove to me, which told me he'd had to prove it to people more dangerous, recently, and didn't feel the need to do it twice in the same week.
"My brothers in there?"
