Page 45 of Blind Spot
“You’re dead,” he said, low, just for me.
“You didn’t even shoot me.”
“You’re dead anyway.” His hand was still on my chest.
“That’s not the rules.”
“It’s the rules now.”
“This is exactly the corruption that —“
He took his hand off me and shot my vest from four inches away. It died with the saddest chirp of the night, and he was already moving, gone over the half-wall back into his lane. I stayed crouched in the fog with a grin I was glad nobody could see.
Right after that, the lights flickered.
It was the house lights, half of them, coming up and signaling the end of a session. The fog thinned, and the music dropped a notch. In the sudden ordinary brightness near the entrance, a kid—a real kid, maybe fourteen—said, “Yo, that’s Lucas Varga. And, wait. That’s the Hawks. That’s like five Hawks.”
He raised his phone and started filming. Heath lifted his dead vest gun in a friendly little salute. Sully turned his head like a guy avoiding a bad photo. Kieran said something I couldn’t hear, and the kid laughed. Pratt, predictably, was gone—evaporated.
I had the Show loaded before the phone was up. “Gentlemen, we’ve been discovered. Everybody act natural. Rafe, smile, this is the most exciting thing to ever happen to a boy from Saskatchewan.” I was the loud guy stepping in front so nobody goes looking in the back. The only thing I know to do is fill the space until the danger gets bored and leaves.
Then I found Rook. He was eight feet away, in the half-light, and he was still. It was the same stillness I’d seen in our kitchen when he came in from the truck with wet eyes and told me a reporter had sources.
For everyone else in our group, the moment passed.
It didn’t pass for Rook. I stepped up close to him and didn’t think about who was watching. For once, I didn’t think about that at all.
I touched his arm. “Hey. Old man. You alive?” It was loud enough for everyone to hear.
It worked. His weight came back down off the balls of his feet, and his hands settled. The color returned to his face.
“I’m good,” he said.
“You’re a pylon,” I said. “You got recognized standing in one spot. Classic pylon behavior.”
“I tagged you out from four inches.”
“That was a war crime, and I’m calling for a trial.”
In the parking lot, everybody peeled off. Heath and Kieran went home together. Pratt and Sully drove Rafe, and I told the kid I expected a full report on whether Pratt spoke. Rook and I had come in separate cars, as always, and we left in separate cars. We’d meet later at the house when the garage door came down behind each of us.
I let him pull out first. Then I sat in my car in the dark lot for a second before I started it. For everyone else, it was a fun Tuesday night. A fourteen-year-old filmed us, including Heath and Kieran with their arms around each other’s waists. The worst that would happen was somebody posting a clip of two engaged hockey players at laser tag, and the internet would saygood for themand scroll on.
That was the prize I wanted. It was the unglamorous, idiotic, enormous thing I wanted.
I’d watched my man stand in the safest room he was ever going to be in and still not relax. He braced against a kid’s phone like a slap shot had hit him in the teeth. He wasn’t keeping the danger out. The danger was somewhere inside him.
The next thought arrived fully formed:
I want to give him a life where a phone doesn’t do that to his body anymore.
I’d built a skill at nine years old, in a country where I didn’t have the words yet—be enormous in front so nobody looksbehind. I’d used it my whole life to keep people off me. For once I wanted to use it to turn away the thing trying to get to him.
He didn’t know I wanted that, and he thought he was the one doing the protecting. He’d told me so, basically, with his hand on my chest in the fog.You’re dead anyway. It’s the rules now.He’d been making the rules for both of us, and I’d let him, the way you let the sun decide when it’s morning.
I started the car.
We were going to do six cities in ten days, then come home the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Ten nights in separate rooms. Soft curfew at midnight; hard one at one. Ten times I’d send him back across a hotel hallway to wait the thirty seconds forI’m back.
