Chương 1
"The fourth man’s forearm tightened across my throat while the first man reached inside his jacket.
I caught the fourth man’s wrist with both hands, dropped my weight, and turned hard enough to pull his elbow over my shoulder.
He stumbled forward, surprised more than hurt, and that half second gave me room to drive backward into him.
His spine struck the Civic’s rear quarter panel with a hollow thump.
The first man’s hand came out of his jacket holding a folding knife.
It was cheap, silver, and already open.
“Put it down,” I said.
Nobody laughed this time.
The tall man was still holding his phone, but he had forgotten about recording.
His mouth hung slightly open.
The youngest man had my keys clenched in one fist.
He looked from the knife to me as if the situation had suddenly violated some agreement he had not known he was making.
“Derek,” he said.
The man with the knife ignored him.
His face had changed.
Embarrassment does strange things to men who build their lives around being watched.
Thirty seconds earlier, Derek had been performing for his friends.
Now one of those friends was on the pavement, another was wheezing against my car, and the tired Walmart clerk had made all of them look foolish.
He took a step toward me.
“Derek,” the kid said again, quieter.
I released the man I had thrown against the car and moved sideways so no one was directly behind me.
My left wrist burned where Derek had grabbed it.
The metal band of my watch had slipped halfway toward my hand.
I pushed it back without thinking.
Too late.
Headlights swept across the row.
A white Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office SUV turned into the lane, moving slowly at first, then accelerating when the deputy behind the wheel saw the knife.
Red and blue lights burst across the parked cars.
Derek froze.
“Knife down,” a voice boomed through the open driver’s window.
Derek dropped it.
The knife bounced once and skittered beneath a shopping cart.
“Hands where I can see them.”
Two deputies got out.
One was young enough that his uniform still seemed to wear him instead of the other way around.
The second deputy moved with the deliberate economy of somebody who had stopped confusing speed with control years ago.
He was broad through the shoulders, gray at the temples, and halfway around the hood when he looked at me.
His eyes went first to my face.
Then to my exposed wrist.
He stopped.
For six years I had worn a watch wide enough to cover the small black trident tattoo there.
It was faded now, the edges softened by time, but there was no mistaking it if you knew what you were looking at.
The older deputy knew.
“Morgan?”
The name sounded wrong in his voice.
Not because he said it badly.
Because he said it like he had been looking for me.
I pulled my sleeve down.
“Sheriff.”
The younger deputy glanced between us.
The older man was not wearing a sheriff’s uniform because sheriffs had special uniforms.
He was wearing the same brown and tan as his deputy, but I recognized him from campaign signs outside feed stores and photographs taped beside the customer-service desk after community events.
Daniel Mercer had become county sheriff three years earlier.
The last time I had seen him in person, neither of us had been in North Carolina.
“Everybody stay exactly where you are,” Mercer said.
Derek lifted both hands higher.
“She attacked us.”
Mercer did not look at him.
“Deputy Collins, separate them.”
The young deputy ordered the four men toward the curb one at a time.
The youngest immediately placed my keys on the pavement.
“I didn’t touch her,” he said.
“You can tell me in a minute,” Collins replied.
“She broke my arm,” the first man complained.
I looked at him.
His arm was not broken.
He was using it to point at me.
Collins noticed too.
“Sit down.”
A Walmart cart attendant had appeared near the entrance, still wearing his reflective vest.
Behind the glass doors, two employees stood watching.
One of them was Teresa from customer service.
She had brought me banana bread three nights earlier because she said living alone was no excuse for eating vending-machine crackers for dinner.
Her hand covered her mouth.
I hated that more than the knife.
Mercer approached me slowly.
He stopped several feet away.
“You hurt?”
“No.”
He looked at the red marks around my wrist.
“That answer hasn’t improved with age.”
“I’m fine.”
“That one either.”
For an instant, the parking lot disappeared beneath a different kind of silence.
Mercer had once said almost the same thing while pressing gauze against my ribs inside a concrete building outside Mosul.
I had been thirty-eight then and furious at the blood for making everybody worry.
Six years had not changed that part of me.
A phone started ringing on the pavement.
One of the men had dropped it during the fight.
Nobody moved to answer.
The ringtone was an absurdly cheerful banjo tune.
Collins stared down at it.
“Of course it is,” he muttered.
Despite myself, I almost smiled.
Mercer saw it.
That made me stop.
He lowered his voice.
“Where have you been?”
“Working.”
“I can see that.”
“Then you have your answer.”
His jaw tightened.
There were at least twenty questions behind his eyes, and I wanted none of them asked in a Walmart parking lot beneath flickering lights with four strangers handcuffed beside a cart return.
Derek found his courage again once Collins had secured the knife.
“She jumped us for no reason.”
The man beside him nodded rapidly.
“We were joking around.”
“You took my keys,” I said.
The youngest man looked sick.
“I gave them back.”
“After a deputy arrived.”
“I never wanted the knife.”
Derek turned on him.
“Shut up, Evan.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up.”
May you like
“Both of you,” Collins said.
Evan rubbed his palms against his jeans despite being handcuffed.
