Chapter 5: Bible and Black Car

 Zariah

The back hallway of Providence Missionary Baptist smelled of mildew and hymnals and the ghost of every fish fry the church had ever thrown. I'd run down this hallway in patent-leather shoes as a little girl, chasing other little girls, my father's laugh somewhere behind me in the fellowship hall. I ran down it now in a funeral dress I'd bought that morning, a stranger's cedar-and-danger smell at my shoulder, a crash and a scream fading behind me, and I thought, with the strange clean lucidity that comes when the body decides it's going to survive, I will never be able to come back to this church.

A woman was waiting at the back door.

Not what I expected. I'd built a picture, in the ninety seconds I'd had to build it, of the men who worked for a man like Malik St. James: thick necks, dark glasses, gun-shaped bulges. The woman at the door was maybe five-six, lean, in slacks and a fitted blazer and flat shoes made for running or kicking, with her hair pulled back so severely it looked like a decision. She had a face that gave nothing away and eyes that took everything in, and she'd already propped the door with her foot and had a hand resting flat against her own ribs, under the blazer, where I did not need to be told there was a gun.

"Clear on this side," the woman said to Malik, low, flat. Her eyes flicked to me and did a fast head-to-toe read, the same read Malik had done in the yellow room, an appraisal so professional it wasn't even rude. "She walking on her own?"

"She's walking on her own," I said, before Malik could, because if these people were going to talk about me like furniture in transit I was at least going to insert myself into the conversation. "She's got a mouth, too, and a name. Zariah."

The woman's expression did not change, but something behind her eyes did, a flicker, the smallest recalibration, the same one I'd caught on Malik twice now. That's twice these people have looked at me and revised. I filed it, the way I was starting to file everything, in the growing case file at the back of my mind titled these are not who they think they are.

"Noe," the woman said, which was apparently all I was getting. "Car's forty feet. Move like you belong and nobody looks twice." She said it to me directly, which I appreciated more than I wanted to. "You freeze, you make us all interesting. Don't be interesting."

The lot behind the church baked under the two-o'clock sun. Heat rose off the blacktop in visible sheets, and somewhere on the far side of the building a car alarm had started up, an outraged electronic bleating that I understood, distantly, to be a distraction someone had arranged. There were two cars near the back door. One was low and black and long, engine running, exhaust ghosting in the heat, the kind of car that cost more than the church.

The other was my rental. A gray Nissan with a dented rear quarter panel and a hundred and ten dollars a day I could not afford on the credit card I'd maxed getting here.

And in its trunk, in a cardboard box with my father's reading glasses and his good watch and the photo albums and the three coffee mugs I hadn't been able to leave in the empty duplex, was his Bible.

I stopped walking.

"Keep moving," Noe said, not unkindly, a hand landing light between my shoulder blades.

"My father's Bible is in that car." I pointed at the Nissan. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I'm not leaving it."

Malik didn't slow, didn't turn all the way around, just angled his head. "We'll replace-"

"It's not a thing you replace." I heard my own voice crack across the word and hated it, hauled it back down. "It's the one thing in this parking lot that's actually mine. You want me in your car? I'm getting the Bible."

For a moment nobody moved, and the car alarm wailed, and somewhere inside the church a man's voice was raised now, Deacon Freeman, or one of Crowe's, I couldn't tell, and I stood my ground in the blacktop heat with my hand out toward a dented rental like it was the last solid thing on earth. Which, in a way I could not have explained to a soul, it was. Everything else I owned had already been repossessed by the morning, my father, my clean life, my belief that I knew who he'd been. The Bible was the one asset the day hadn't taken yet, and I was not going to let it go without making a man like this stop and give it to me.

Malik looked at me for exactly one second longer than the situation allowed. Then, to Noe, without inflection: "Get it."

Noe was at the Nissan before I finished blinking, popping the trunk with the fob I didn't remember handing her, she took my keys in the church, when, when did she, and coming up with the cardboard box in both arms in a smooth economical motion, and steering me by the elbow toward the black car with the box shoved into my arms so fast I had no choice but to hold it.

The rear door was open. The interior was cool and dim and smelled of leather and, faintly, of the same cedar. I folded myself in with the box on my lap, the Bible right there on top where Noe had set it, cracked white spine, gilt edges gone soft with handling, and Malik came around and got in beside me, not up front, beside me, in the back, close enough that the whole width of the seat did not feel like enough width, and Noe dropped into the driver's seat and the doors thunked shut with the heavy finality of a vault, and the car was moving before I'd found the seatbelt.

Behind us, through the tinted rear glass, the church shrank. Two men came out the front doors into the sun, big men, moving fast, one of them talking into a phone, and neither of them so much as glanced at the black car sliding out the back of the lot, and that, the fact that a nine-thousand-dollar-a-month vehicle could roll past two hunting men and simply not be seen, told me more about the difference between Malik St. James and Isaiah Crowe than anything either man could have said.

I pressed the box against my chest and did not look at the man beside me and worked, hard, on breathing.

We drove.

Nobody spoke. That was the thing I hadn't expected, I'd braced for the speech, the terms, the here is how it's going to be, the villain monologue every part of my training had prepared me to dismantle. Instead there was silence, and the silence was worse, because it left me alone with the fact of him beside me.

I was aware of him the way you're aware of a fire in a room, not looking at it, but knowing precisely where it is, tracking the heat of it against your skin. His thigh was a foot from mine, less. His scarred hand rested loose on his own knee. He was looking out his own window at the city sliding by, and he'd gone somewhere behind his face, some interior room of his own, and it should have been a relief that he wasn't looking at me, and it wasn't.

Because now I could look at him. And looking at him was its own kind of danger I hadn't budgeted for.

I made myself stop. I looked down at the Bible instead, ran my thumb along the soft gilt edge of it the way my father used to, and thought about the man under the trees and the two men who'd come out the front doors, and then, because my hands needed something to do and because I was still, under everything, a person who read documents, I opened my purse to find a tissue and found, instead, the card.

Cream cardstock. Embossed edge. No florist's mark. I'd taken it off the flowers at the front of the church that afternoon without thinking, tucked it in my bag with the folded program, assumed it was from one of the church societies. I opened it now with my thumb.

Inside, printed, the standard nothing: With Deepest Sympathy.

And under it, in a hand I didn't know, in ballpoint pressed so hard it had scored the paper:

The ledger belongs to Atlanta. He knew what happens to people who forget that. Ask her where her father kept his Bible.

The car went cold around me, or I did. I read it twice. Ask her. Not ask yourself. Written to a third party. Written to be read by someone who would come looking for me, a message left at a funeral for a hunter to find. And my father had kept a Bible on his nightstand my whole childhood, spine cracked white from Sunday-morning use, and it was in the box on my lap right now, six inches from my hands, because I hadn't been able to leave it in the empty duplex.

I looked up.

Malik St. James had turned from his window at some point and was watching me read it. Of course he was. He'd probably read it before I had; he'd probably had it read to him over the phone while I was still shaking hands at the graveside.

"Who's it from," I said. My voice came out very small in the leather quiet.

"I don't know." And I believed him, because it was the first thing all day he'd said like it cost him something, the first sentence out of him with no floor under it. "But I want to. And I think," he said, his eyes dropping to the cracked white Bible on the box in my lap and lingering there, "that so do you."

My hand closed flat over the Bible's cover, protective, as if the card had reached across the seat to take it. I did not let myself look at where his eyes had gone. I did not let myself think about what a man like this would do with a book a dead man's killer had gone out of his way to point at. I only knew, in the cold clean animal part of me, that whatever was in it belonged to me before it belonged to anyone in this car.

And that was the moment the black car left the surface streets and swung up onto the interstate, and Buckhead rose in the windshield in a wall of black glass and gold light, the towers, the towers my father had disappeared into for nine years, the towers I'd never once wondered about, and Malik St. James said, quietly, to the glass, "Almost home," as though it were my home too, as though he'd already decided that it was.