Come and get it

Raven

"I wasn't following you." He said it to the windshield, as if the windshield had asked.

"You were two hundred yards behind me for eleven miles," I said.

"Same road."

"For eleven miles?"

"It's a long road."

I stared at him. He stared at the rain.

Water ran off the ends of my hair and down my spine, and his air-conditioning was set somewhere between morgue and meat locker.

Behind us, the dark lit up.

Two sets of headlights swung onto the far end of the road, high and wide, the way only one kind of car sits. They slowed when they reached the BMW lying on its side across both lanes. Then they didn't.

Briggs. Briggs always drove the lead car.

"That's my father's security," I said. "In about thirty seconds, they're going to find Senator Vance's runaway daughter soaking wet in the passenger seat of the CEO of Empire Group. At midnight. In the rail yards." I tilted my head. "You're a smart man. Write me the headline."

He turned and looked at me. Really looked, for the first time since I had gotten in, and it was like standing too close to a running engine. All that heat, and not a single wasted movement.

"You are blackmailing me."

"I am informing you."

His eyes stayed on my face one second too long. Then the headlights filled his mirror, and he put the car in drive.

"Seatbelt."

The Aston came off the line like it had been insulted. He swung around the fallen BMW with a flick of his wrist. Somewhere behind us, a very nice motorcycle was lying on its side in the rain. I would feel bad about that tomorrow.

Probably.

The SUVs came after us.

Of course they did.

Four hundred yards. Three hundred. They knew these roads.

So did I.

"Left," I said. "Up here. There is a cut-through behind the scrap yard."

"No."

"It comes out right at the river…"

"No."

"Are you even…"

Then I heard it. Under the rain, under the engine. A long, low horn.

Ahead, where the road crossed the tracks, red lights began to flash. Bells. The crossing arm started to come down. And off to the right, a single headlight the size of the moon was coming down the line.

A freight train.

"No," I said. "No, no, no…"

He dropped a gear and floored it.

The crossing arm came down toward our roof like a guillotine. The train's headlight filled my whole window, white and screaming, and the horn got so loud it stopped being a sound and became pressure.

I grabbed the dash. I think I said his name. I think I said God's.

We went under the arm with nothing to spare and over the tracks with less.

Then the train arrived.

A mile of steel slammed through the crossing behind us, car after car after car, and on the far side of it two sets of headlights sat very, very still.

He didn't slow down. He killed his lights and turned into the maze of shipping containers, left, right, right again, down lanes that weren't roads so much as the spaces between things.

A minute later, we slid out onto a quiet street by the water.

Headlights on. Speed limit. Turn signal blinking for a turn nobody was there to see.

My side mirror was empty.

I realized I was still gripping the dashboard. I let go. My fingers had left prints on it.

In the quiet, the fear caught up with me.

Not the fear of the train. The fear of my father.

Marcus Vance didn't lose. He didn't know how. And tonight I had made him lose in front of three hundred people and every phone in the room. He wouldn't come after me. He never came after me. He came after the things I loved.

Somewhere across the river, Jace was asleep on a cot in a garage with a crooked sign, and he had no idea what I had just done to his life.

I pressed my thumb into the cord on my wrist. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.

Something heavy landed in my lap.

His jacket. Charcoal wool, still warm.

I looked at him. He was looking at the road.

"Don't drip on my seats." He said.

I put it on.

It swallowed me. The sleeves went past my fingertips. The collar smelled like cedar and rain and something warmer underneath, and the lining still held the heat of his body. For one second I forgot to be afraid of anything.

That was dangerous.

To give my hands something to do, I opened his glove box.

He glanced at it. Said nothing. Somehow that was worse.

Registration. A tire gauge still in its packaging. And a pack of cigarettes, unopened, the cellophane gone soft with age.

I held it up. "Quit?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"Eleven years ago."

"So why carry them?"

"Reminder."

"Of what?"

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

A man who kept a full pack of cigarettes in his car for eleven years just to prove he would never open it. That told me everything I needed to know about Aaron Wylder.

It also told me he was insane.

I put the pack back exactly where I had found it. Then I propped my boots up on his dashboard.

He looked at the boots. "Down."

"Make me."

He didn't say a word. He just took the next corner a little harder than he needed to, and both my boots slid off the dash and hit the floor.

I stared at him.

He signaled. For nobody.

The laugh came out of me before I could stop it. Loud and a little wild, the first real laugh I had had in a week, and it filled the whole car.

At the corner of his mouth, for one second, a line appeared that hadn't been there before.

It was gone before I could prove it.

"You have done this before," I said.

"No."

"Liar."

He stayed quiet. The wipers swept once. Twice.

"Next exit," I said. "Toward the shipyards."

The city fell away behind us. Glass turned into steel. Steel turned into rust. The streetlights got farther apart and then gave up entirely.

My side of town.

"There." I pointed at a cinder-block warehouse sitting alone at the end of a dead-end road. No sign. No lights. Nothing to say anyone had been inside since the nineties.

He stopped in front of the steel roll-up door and considered it.

"Charming."

The door rumbled up.

Light spilled across the wet concrete. Bikes in rows, chrome catching fire. Harleys. Indians. Somebody's Triumph painted a purple that should have been illegal.

A dozen men and women in leather cuts stood around a pool table, and every one of them turned to look at the black Aston Martin idling in their driveway at midnight.

I opened the door and stepped out into the rain. Somebody whooped. Somebody else yelled that I owed him twenty bucks, which was a lie.

I leaned back down into the car.

He was sitting exactly the way he had sat all night. Both hands on the wheel. Face unreadable. Rain running off the edge of the roof between us.

"Thanks for the ride."

"The jacket."

Two words, in the same voice he had used in the dark eight days ago, with my back against his car. The keys.

I pulled the lapels tighter around me.

"Come and get it," I said.

I shut his door, turned my back on him and walked into the light in his jacket.