Page 9 of Irish Oath
Both fine with me.
Across the street, Madigan's went dark twenty minutes back. Last customer at half twelve. The part-time girl gone soon after. Young. Good. Three years in, by the ease between her and the owner. Then the owner closed alone.
I took her measure. I take everyone's.
She closed like a careful person closes, and I read the order of it. Back bar lights first. Float counted twice, carried low against her body, not left on the wood where a window could read it. Then the street. She checked it before she killed the front lights.To anyone who didn't do what I do it would have looked like nothing. A woman making sure the night was quiet.
It wasn't nothing. It was a sweep. Pavement both ways. The parked cars. The dark of the doorways. Mine included, though I was set too far back for her to find me. She started on the side the wind came from, because wind is the side a sound carries from.
Nobody teaches that. You learn it young and hard, or you don't learn it at all.
Then the last light died and she crossed the room without reaching for a switch. Had the floor by heart. Nobody memorizes the dark of a place unless they've planned, at least once, to cross it fast and blind. I do it in every room I sleep in. You don't, unless some part of you is always half packed to leave.
Tiernan told me on the walk to the car. All of it, low, in the careful voice he uses when he's carrying more than he wants on his face. I listened. Didn't interrupt.
When he finished I asked one thing. "Does Ronan know."
"Calling him now."
"I'll watch the bar."
He looked at me a beat too long. "Cormac."
"Someone should," I said. "In case she runs."
He peeled off to make the call. I found my doorway. That was two hours ago.
She didn't run.
The light in the second-floor flat came on when she went up. Stayed on. She lived above the bar. That told me things I didn't have to be told. No movement at the windows. No bags out the back. No car brought around. She was up there, and she was staying.
A woman who hides clean that long doesn't sit still the night she's found. Not without a reason.
Two possibilities. Either she didn't know she'd been found, or she knew and had already decided what to do about it.
She knew. Tiernan's good at a great many things. Walking into a room as no one and leaving nothing of himself on it isn't one of them. Too warm. Too present. People remember Tiernan. A woman who'd stayed alive this long on instinct would have felt it, even if she couldn't name it yet.
She'd have named it by now.
So she was staying anyway.
I turned it over. Hands in my pockets. The October night doing what those do here, cold and damp, carrying the smell of a city that's stood a long time and has no plans to stop.
My phone buzzed. Tiernan.
Ronan's on the first flight. Six a.m. Meet him at O'Hare.
I sent back: Understood.
Then he asked: She still there?
Yes.
A pause. Then: How does she look?
I considered the lit window over Madigan's. I'd seen her through glass, at a distance, in the low light of a bar being closed. I read her like anyone else. No sentiment. Building the picture out of the pieces. Height, build, how she moved, how she held herself, the quality of her attention when something caught it.
Careful. That was the first thing. The kind of careful that's learned, not taught. Lives in the body, not the head. She watched the room without looking like she watched it. Caught things, us coming in, the change in the air, the accent, and gave nothing back. Most people can't do that. Can't fake it either.
