Page 16 of Angel’s Doll

He stands, and for a second, the old fear lifts its head, but no … Boots off, set square by the door, heels out. He crosses to the lamp and leaves it on. Then he stretches out on top of the covers, all that lethal size arranged deliberate and harmless on half a bed, and lays one arm flat across the pillows. An invitation with no pull in it.

I land in it.

My cheek finds the flat of his chest, his heart slowing under my ear, his hand settling into my hair with no hesitation in it anywhere. Through the wall, faint, the clubhouse ticks and settles. Somewhere down there is a plan with his name on it, a garage across the city, two taped boxes under a bed I’ll never sleep in again. Before dawn this warmth will be gone, riding toward my uncle, and I should be afraid of that.

Tomorrow I will be.

Tonight I’m behind a fence I chose, in a shirt I was given, next to a name I was trusted with. His chest rises. Falls. The lamp hums.

I mean to say thank you. I get as far as opening my mouth against his shirt.

His hand stays in my hair and I remain silent.

9

ANGEL

She sleeps with her fist closed in my shirt.

I don’t sleep at all. Two tours taught me to rest with one ear on the door. Club life never untaught it. So I lie still under a hundred and twenty pounds of trust I did nothing to deserve yet and watch the window go from black to a thinner black. I learn her breathing.

At half past four, I start the extraction. Slow trade, my chest for the pillow, one limb at a time. I’ve cleared buildings with less care.

Her eyes open anyway. Half of one, anyway.

“Boxes,” I tell her. “Sleep.”

“Jericho,” she says, already gone again. Nobody’s said that name half asleep since my mother. I stand there one second longer than the op allows.

The prospect comes off his chair when I step into the hall. I point him at her door and hold up one finger. One job. He nods like it’s a patch vote.

Downstairs the kitchen light is on. Nobody went to bed.

Bishop sits at the long table with coffee and Cash’s laptop, looking like a man who also didn’t bother with sleep. Smoke leans on the bar working a toothpick, dressed for weather. Cash has one ear in a headset, Glitch on the other end from wherever he’s parked this month, deep in Halcyon’s alarm contractor since midnight.

“Here’s how it rides,” Bishop says. No good morning. “You take the truck, not the bikes. Pipes announce. Smoke drives. Cameras on the house loop at five, hold for twenty minutes, that’s your whole window. Hale keeps a housekeeper, she badges in at seven, so you’re gone long before. You go up, you get the boxes, you come home.”

“Fine.”

“I’m not done. No contact. Hale wakes up, you walk. He comes outside, you walk. He stands on the boxes and recites poetry, you walk around him.” He turns the laptop dark and looks at me straight. “Smoke’s truck, Smoke’s clock. He says leave, you’re already leaving. That’s the plan, and this time you’re going to be on it.”

There it is. Twenty years of brotherhood, and I’ve earned myself a chaperone and a bell. It stings the exact amount he wants it to sting. I take it standing, because the alternative is arguing that I can be trusted around Victor Hale, and yesterday morning I sat on the man’s building with gloves in my pocket.

“Understood.”

“Jericho.” Quieter. The name again, but out here it isn’t the knife. “You’re doing a good thing. Do only the good thing.”

The truck is gray, ten years old, forgettable on purpose. Smoke drives it like a man delivering flowers. The city runs past wet and empty, and neither of us talks until the road tips uphill into the kind of neighborhood where the trees are older than the money pretends to be.

“You good?” Smoke asks at the last light.

“I’m good.”

“You’re flexing your hands.”

I stop flexing my hands.

Hale’s house sits behind a brick wall with an iron gate that Glitch opens for us from a hundred miles away.