Rafferty smiles, fills his lungs with air, and goes through the door.
The day is even brighter than it had seemed through the tinted windows of the bank. It takes him a second to adjust to the glare and scan the sidewalk. The man leaning against the car turns away as Rafferty’s eyes find him. Rafferty looks left and sees one of the men who had been waiting outside the apartment building coming toward him, one hand in his pocket. This one doesn’t look away. His eyes drift beyond Rafferty, who turns to see a third man coming from the other direction. The third man doesn’t have a hand hidden in a pocket, so Rafferty heads toward him, moving briskly, and then something catches his eye from the left, and he sees Captain Teeth getting out of a cab.
Captain Teeth is shorter than Rafferty remembers him, and wider. He’s got the chest and shoulders of someone who bench-presses Chevrolets. All that overdeveloped muscle tissue has been wrapped in a sport coat, and in this heat he might just as well be wearing a sandwich board that says HEAVILY ARMED. He throws some bills at the cabdriver and makes for the curb.
Rafferty carefully slips the bag over the bandaged hand, slides it up his arm, and crooks his elbow so the money dangles from his forearm. He puts his good hand under his shirt and leaves it there, at waistband level, and strides forward purposefully. The man who is coming toward him falters, his eyes on the concealed hand. The question is clear in his face: keep moving toward Rafferty and maybe get shot now or back off and maybe get shot later by his friends? Getting shot later wins, and the man veers off to his right, toward the parked cars.
That leaves the other two and Captain Teeth, and Rafferty doesn’t think Captain Teeth is going to be so easy to bluff.
When in doubt, take the offensive.
Rafferty moves left, on a course to intercept the man who chose being shot later. The man works farther to his right, his eyes flicking side to side, until he’s almost brushing a parked car, and then Rafferty cuts behind him and steps up against him, circling the man’s neck with the arm that has the bag hanging from it and pushing the index finger of his good hand hard into the man’s back. The man throws his hands into the air spasmodically, striking a glancing blow off Rafferty’s bandaged left, and Rafferty emits a hiss of pain that loosens the other man’s knees. Rafferty has to hold him up until the man can get his feet under him again. Captain Teeth is closing fast, reaching back beneath his sport coat, undoubtedly for a gun.
“Stop there,” Rafferty says.
Captain Teeth comes to a halt about five feet away. He keeps his hand hidden. “You think I care if he dies? Shoot him. When he falls, I’ll have a target.”
“Move that hand,” Rafferty says, “and I’ll shoot you instead.”
Captain Teeth bares his awful incisors in a grin and says, “Watch the hand move,” and then his eyes lift and widen, focused behind Rafferty, the teeth disappear, and his hand comes out empty and open. He takes a few steps back. Something cold noses the nape of Rafferty’s neck.
“Drop the gun.” The tone is businesslike.
“Love to,” Rafferty says. “But I haven’t got one.”
“Hands behind you.” The gun is pushed half an inch forward. “
“Okay, okay.” He lets go of the man he’s been holding, who stumbles away and then turns to face him. Whatever he sees over Rafferty’s shoulder, it freezes him.
“Don’t move,” says the man behind Rafferty. The bag is lifted from his arm, and something circles his wrists, and he hears a sharp
“You’re going to turn around, and I’m going to stay behind you,” the man says. “Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do anything I might
A sharp tug yanks Rafferty’s cuffed hands to one side, and he turns, the other man pivoting with him so the gun never loses contact with the back of Rafferty’s neck. A circle of people has gathered around them, a safe five or six paces away, their eyes wide. “Walk now. Toward the van.”
Rafferty heads for a vehicle that’s double-parked in the first traffic lane. It’s a police van, its windows covered in a silvery reflective coating. The rear door has been slid open. Another man in a police uniform comes around the front end of the van. It takes Rafferty a moment to recognize him as Kosit.
“Hey,” Rafferty says, and the gun probes the back of his neck as though it’s looking for a path between the vertebrae.
“
The face Kosit turns to Rafferty as he approaches the van is all cop. Without a glimmer of recognition, he yanks hold of Rafferty’s shirt and pulls him toward the open door, and Rafferty sees another man in the van, hunched down on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He tries to stop, but the man behind him adds a shove to Kosit’s pull, and with his wrists cuffed, all Rafferty can manage is a stagger-step to keep from falling forward. Kosit grabs his shoulders, puts an expert hand on top of his head, and pushes him down onto the seat of the van, and as the door slams shut, the man crouched behind the driver’s seat brings his head up and regards Rafferty.
It’s Arthit.
43
From the corner where she had folded the cashmere shawl to give her something to sit on-Rafferty was right, it had come in handy-Rose watches the kids. The younger ones are manic, adrenaline-jacked from the adventure of the escape. They’ve replayed the chase, argued over their speed and their acting skills, and they’ve had occasional words about the value of their individual contributions. A couple of these ended in minor tussles, broken up by the older kids, who are maintaining a disdainful cool that’s either assumed or, in the case of a few of the more frayed and weathered of them, hard-earned.
Miaow had tried to join in the roughhousing for a while, but the kids kept their distance from her. None of them had been with Boo when she was, and they’re all strangers to her. It’s obvious that they don’t see her as one of them. They skirmished with one another, but they treated her as though she were made of glass and already chipped. Watching them, watching her daughter try to enter the field of play, Rose is struck by how much Miaow has changed. The filthy, tattered clothes can’t conceal the differences between her and the others. It’s not just the weight she has gained, although she probably weighs 20 percent more than any other kid her height in the room. It’s not just the newly colored and carefully cut hair, or her obvious cleanliness. She moves differently than they do. Her reactions aren’t as fast, and she seems to have a narrower awareness. Boo’s kids appear to be able to track simultaneously everything that’s happening in the big room, while Miaow focuses only on what’s in front of her. Rose sees the kids behind her and on either side exchange glances, and it’s obvious that the unspoken topic is Miaow.
Now Miaow is sitting beside Rose, her head lowered, plucking at the shawl. Her lower lip protrudes, and there are little dimples in her chin. Her end of the conversation, when Rose attempts to start one, is limited to monosyllables, some of them not even words. Looking down at the top of her adopted daughter’s head, at the part in her hair, straighter-as Rafferty once said-than the path of a subatomic particle, Rose feels her heart swell. She feels as if her heart has a color, a kind of sad, bruised purple. She slides a hand over Miaow’s, but Miaow pulls away and puts her hand in her lap. It looks lonely there.
Rose gives up and rests her back against the wall. The kids are settling down now, and the temperature in the room, which was fearsome when they arrived, is dropping slightly as the light outside dims. Rose looks at her watch-four o’clock.
Where is Poke?
She pulls out her phone to dial him and then thinks better of it. He was going to buy a stolen phone and use that to call her, in case they-whoever “they” are-are triangulating on his old number. Maybe he just hasn’t bought the new phone yet. She’s trying to visualize “triangulating” when the door to the shack opens and Boo and Da come in, Boo carrying Peep in the crook of one arm as if he’s had a baby in his arms his entire life. The other hand is full
