Page 32 of A Wolf's Revenge

Thirty-four years.

He’d been a big man once, broad through the shoulders, quick. The man at the table was smaller than that, sanded down, gray at the temples and gray in the face, with the loose skin of someone who’d lost weight he hadn’t meant to lose. But it was Jeff. The eyes were Jeff’s. He looked up at me and something moved across his face that I’d waited three decades to see. I found, now that it was in front of me, that I didn’t want, because it was grief, and grief implied a debt I wasn’t ready to let him start paying down.

“You look like your father,” he said. “Around the eyes.”

“Don’t.” My voice came out flat and final. “Don’t do the thing where we talk like men who knew each other. We knew each other. Then you killed her.”

He didn’t flinch from it. That was the worst part. He absorbed it like a man who’d said it to himself ten thousand times in worse words.

“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

The wolf wanted the table out of the way and my hands on him. I stood across the room and let it want.

“Sit down, Z.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Then I’ll talk and you stand.” He turned the water bottle a quarter-turn, the small fidget of a man who used to smoke. “You came for two things. Voss and me. You can have both. But you’re going to get the second one in an order I choose, because I’ve been carrying it for thirty-four years, and I’m not going to die without setting it down. From the look of you and the look of the city, one of us is dying soon.” He met my eyes. “So. Me first.”

“I don’t want your confession.”

“I know you don’t. You want to put me through that wall.” He nodded at it. “You can, after. I won’t lift a hand. But you’ll get the wall and nothing else, and you came here for more than the wall, or you’d have brought it to me already, instead of standing there letting me talk.” He waited a beat. “Sit down.”

I sat. The chair was cold. The wolf settled into a crouch inside me, not gone, just waiting, and I let Jeff Alli have the thing he’d called me here to give.

23

“I called your father that night because I was afraid,” Jeff said. “Not of him. Of losing you. You were going to take the money, the tickets, the girl, and disappear into Sweden and I was going to be left running the eastern district for a man who’d never once looked at me the way he looked at you, and I told myself I was saving you. I told myself she was a Conti, she was always going to be the enemy, you were throwing your whole life away over a girl who’d turn on you the second she found out what you were.” He turned the bottle again. “I believed all of it. That’s the part I can’t get clean of. I didn’t lie to myself to do it. I believed it, right up until I was crouched next to her in that dining room and she looked at me and asked where you were. I understood she wasn’t an enemy, she was a scared nineteen-year-old who loved my best friend, I’d already made the call, and there was no unmaking it.”

“She was pregnant,” I said. “And you didn’t know, and you’ve been telling yourself for thirty-four years that not knowing makes it smaller.”

“No.” He shook his head slowly. “I stopped telling myself that a long time ago. Not knowing doesn’t make it smaller. It just makes it mine, instead of your father’s. I made the call. I decided I knew better than you what you could afford to lose.” His eyes came up, and they were wet, and he didn’t bother to hide it. “Then I spent thirty-four years watching myself do smaller versions of the same thing to other people, because it turns out once you’ve done it once and lived, you can do it again. You can always do it again. That’s the thing nobody tells you.”

The room was very quiet. A truck went by on Fourth Avenue and the boarded window held the light out.

“Which brings us to three weeks ago,” I said.

“Which brings us to three weeks ago.” He drew a breath, and it caught, that sick thinness pulling at it. “A man came to me. Broker work — I broker now, Z, I’m the guy who knows the guy.It’s what’s left when you’re too old to be muscle and too dirty to be clean. He wanted a high-value subject located. Full pattern-of-life, deep background. The money was Conti money, routed careful. I knew the shape of it. I knew it was the family settling something old.” He looked at me. “I didn’t know the subject was you. I want that on the record between us, even though I know exactly what it’s worth, which is nothing. The file came to me with a target profile and no name, and I built the package the way I build any package. Somewhere in week two, I was cross-referencing a school record and a property history and I realized I was looking at Logan Zorander.”

“And you finished the job.”

“And I finished the job.” His voice didn’t waver. He’d promised himself, I think, that whatever else he did in this room, he wasn’t going to flinch from any of it. “I told myself the same thing I told myself in 1989. That it was already in motion. That if I didn’t deliver it somebody else would, cleaner, and at least if it was me, I could — I don’t know. Steer it. Soften it. Be close enough to do something if it went bad.” He laughed, and it was an awful sound. “Thirty-four years and I’m still the man who decides he knows better than you what you can afford to lose. I sold them your patterns. I told myself I’d find a way to protect the woman and the kid if it came to that.” A pause. “I didn’t know about the bombs, Z. I swear to you on a thing I don’t deserve to swear on. The day I heard they’d put devices on a six-year-old, I went into a bathroom and was sick. Then I sat down and started figuring out how to undo it, which is the only reason you’re sitting in this room instead of in the ground, because I’m the one who told a certain cutout where the Contis would walk you out, when they’d do it, and how to be there at two in the morning.”

The world tilted half a degree.

“Marr’s man,” I said.

“Marr’s man works a chain that runs back through me,” Jeff said. “I’m one of the cutouts. Marr’s been paying me for eight months to watch the Contis watch you, because Marr knew this was coming before you did, and he wanted eyes inside the broker network when it started. So when it went bad — when they took your family — I had a way to move, and I used it. I got you a car in a dark lot, a hotel, and a phone, and it’s the first thing in thirty-four years I’ve done that I can look at without wanting to die.” He spread his hands flat on the table again. “I didn’t save her. So I saved them. It’s not a trade. There’s no trade for Kerra. But it’s the only currency I’ve got and I spent all of it, and I’d spend it again.”

I sat across a card table in a dead social club from the man who had destroyed my life twice, and I understood that he had also, in the same breath, just told me he was the reason my wife and son were alive.

I didn’t know what to do with it. There isn’t a shape for it. You can hate a man and owe him your family in the same heartbeat. The heart does not resolve it, it just holds both, and you live inside the holding.

“Why the planetarium, man,” I said, when I could speak. “Why didn’t you just come to me yourself, at the start.”

“Because you’d have killed me before I got three words out,” Jeff said simply. “And you’d have been right to, and your family would be dead. So I worked in the dark and let you hate a faceless cutout, because a faceless cutout could keep you alive, and Jeff Alli couldn’t.” He looked at me. “I only surfaced now because you’re a day, maybe less, from getting all three of you killed by being too loud. Because you need Voss and you can’t reach her in this climate without somebody she trusts, and because I am out of road. I’m dying, Z.” He said it the way you’d report the weather. “Six months, the doctors say, give or take, and they’ve been wrong before, but not by much. So I’m spending what’s left. I’d rather spend it on you than on a hospital bed.”

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