The PowWow

Roiya paid out the later two nights after the gallery, in my living room, standing in front of the wall like she'd come home to it.

That's the detail I can't get past, looking back. Not what she said. Where she stood to say it. She came in without knocking — she had a key, we all had each other's keys, that was the family — and she walked straight to the east wall, the one with the red string and the good morning light, the one my brother used to kneel against, and she stood in front of it with her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at it the way you look at a thing you approve of. Like it was a job well begun. And I felt, seeing her stand there, a flush of something I'm ashamed to name, which was gratitude that someone finally understood the wall. 

"It's confirmed," she said.

I didn't ask what. There was only one what left in me.

"Byron Hawk fired the shot." She said it flat, no ceremony, the way you'd read a lab result. "At the wedding. Him. It's not a theory anymore, Levi. It's a fact."

The room went very quiet and very bright, the way a room does when the thing you've been starving for finally arrives and you discover it doesn't fill you, it just turns the hunger into something with an edge.

"How," I said. The old machine, one last flicker. How do you know. Who told you. What's the sourcing. 

"Does it matter?"

And there it was — the question the old me would have gone to war over, because how you know is the entire job, because a name is not evidence and a confession is worth exactly what was done to extract it, and a thing beaten out of a frightened man in the dark tells you about the beating, not the truth. Roiya’s knuckles that were still healing. Whatever she'd gotten, she'd gotten the way you get things when your hands have started answering questions your mouth used to ask. The provenance was rotten. I knew it was rotten. I'd have thrown it out of any case I'd ever worked.

"No," I heard myself say. "It doesn't matter."

Because it fit. That was all the black hole required — the puzzle pieces had to fit, even if the tabs were beaten into another shape. Roiya laid the rest of it out and every piece dropped into a slot that had been machined to receive it. The motive. The press conference — Rachel's press conference, a year gone now, back when Byron was her white whale and she'd stood at a podium with his booking photo blown up on an easel beside her and told a bank of cameras that the department would not rest until this man was in custody. She'd put his face on every television in the city. And a man like Byron Hawk, a man who was smoke precisely because no one could ever prove he'd been anywhere, does not forgive being seen. She'd made him visible. And he'd waited, the way patient ugly men wait, and he'd made her a target the day she made him one, and he'd collected on it in a garden strung with lanterns while a string quartet played in the most joyous day of my brother’s life.

Revenge. Plain and ugly and small. No mystery in it at all, in the end. Just a man who'd been embarrassed and had a gun and a long memory. Now the revenge was transferred to me and I would die on that hill.

I stood in my living room and felt my grief finish becoming what it had been turning into for three months. It had been so many things by then — the flood in the waiting room, the flatness after, the cold organized thing that found its footing in the dark. Now it arrived at its final form, and its final form had teeth, and the teeth had a name to close on, and I felt — God forgive me, I felt relief. Relief that the shapeless thing finally had a shape. Relief the way a fever feels relief the moment it decides to become the thing that kills you.

Here is what I did not see, standing there.

I did not see that I was looking at Rachel's wall.

Not a wall like Rachel's. Rachel's. The same photographs, more or less — I'd have recognized half of them from the room at the precinct if I'd ever once let myself really look. The same red string. The same booking photo at the center, the same partial timeline, the same fever made visible on plaster. A year before, almost to the season, I had walked into a dedicated room at the station and found the woman I loved disappearing into exactly this, narrowing to a single point of light, and I had sat her down and I had said to her, gently, with everything I had, that somewhere along the way it had stopped being something she was doing and started being something that was doing her. I'd quoted her Martha and Mary. I'd talked about treasure and where the heart follows. I'd been right. She'd heard me. She'd handed the case to Delgado and taken a day off and come back to herself, and it had been one of the truest things I ever got to do for another person.

And then I built the same wall in my own living room, with the same string, over the same man, and I never once saw it. I stood in front of it every night. I had become, in every particular, feature for feature, the exact person I had loved her enough to talk down off the ledge of — and the blindness was so total, so seamless, that when my sister stood in front of my version of Rachel's wall and told me it was good work, the only thing I felt was seen. 

That's what the idol does. It doesn't just take your eyes. It takes the memory that you ever had them.

I called Curtis that night.

It wasn't a request for help so much as a recruitment, and some part of me knew the difference and made the call anyway. Curtis loved Rachel — had, in his own strange devoted way, since the day he'd first badgered me for her number. Tell Curtis that the man who'd put Rachel in a chair had a name and a face and a last known set of associates, and Curtis was going to open his laptop whether I asked nicely or not. I didn't have to convince him. I just had to point him. And now that I had confirmation, whether true or a fountain of lies to avoid a beating, I could point Curtis like the information weapon he was.

He came over the next day with two machines and a bag of cables and that particular focused hum he gets when the problem is worthy of him, and by evening the wall had grown a nervous system — Curtis's screens throwing light across the red string, cross-referencing Roiya's rotten source against everything a man like Curtis could reach, which was a frightening amount. Roiya worked the street side. Curtis worked the wire side. I stood in the middle and directed, and the three of us became a thing, an engine, a small dark efficient machine pointed at a single man.

Jacob came by while we were setting it up.

He stood in the doorway of the apartment that used to be half his and he looked at what his old living room had become — the screens, the string, the two people he loved bent over the work of hunting another human being — and he didn't say the thing. Any of the things. I braced for them and they didn't come. He just stood there, enormous and quiet, taking it in with a face that gave nothing back, and I understood, dimly, that his silence was costing him something.

He said one thing, near the end, when I walked him back to the door. Low. Just for me.

"When my strength was for me," he said, "and not for the Lord — I could not hear anyone tell me so. Not you. Not Jeremiah. I had to lose first." He looked at me, and there was no judgment in it, only a grief so old and so patient it had stopped looking like grief. "I am not going to waste words you cannot hear yet, brother. I am going to be here for when you can."

"Jacob—"

"'Vengeance is mine,'" he said. Quiet. Not preaching it. Just setting it down, the way you set down a key on a table for someone who isn't ready to pick it up. "'I will repay, saith the Lord.' You told me once that the Lord does His own collecting. You were right when you said it. You'll be right again when you can hear it. I only pray you won’t have to fall before you get the chance to get up."

Then he put his hand on my shoulder, tectonic and warm, and he left, and I filed what he'd said in the black hole with everything else, and got back to the screens. Somewhere, deep inside myself, a small voice screamed, but it was drowned out by a gunshot.

Jacob had been where I was. He'd known the words wouldn't land. He was right about that, too. He was right about all of it, and being right bought him exactly nothing, and he knew that going in, and he said it anyway and left it on the table and walked out into the night to go pray for me in a house I wasn't in.

As for me, the voice that fell to the gunshot, then got tied up and thrown into the deep end of despair. That would shut it up.

The thing with Curtis happened on the third night.

Roiya had gone — out, into the dark, on the street side of the hunt, and I'd watched her go and felt the wrongness of it and filed it, and then, because filing wasn't quite working on this particular wrongness, I made the mistake of pulling Curtis aside.

I wasn't all there. Half of me was on a burner phone's cell tower pings and half of me was nowhere, and it was out of that half-presence, that fog, that I said it — clumsy, offhand, a man kicking a door he should have knocked on.

"Hey," I said, low, while Roiya was gone. "What's going on with her? With Roiya. She's — something's off with her, she's been off for months, and you're the one she still talks to, so. What is it. What do you know."

I have known Curtis for years. I have seen Curtis flustered, Curtis vain, Curtis deflated by one of Jacob's gentle corrections, Curtis blinking twice at a doorway. I had never once seen what happened to his face then.

"None of your business."

It came out of him like something released. Savage. His hands had stopped over the keyboard and he wasn't looking at the screen anymore, he was looking at me, and there was a fury in it I had no map for, and under the fury — this is the part I should have caught, the part that should have stopped everything — under the fury there was fear. Real fear. The specific terror of a man guarding something he can't hold and can't put down.

"Curtis. I just want to—"

"You don't get to ask that." His voice dropped, which was worse than the shout. "You don't get to disappear into this — this wall, for three months, miss every dinner, let her run the streets alone doing God knows what to God knows who because it gets you what you want — and then pull me aside and play concerned brother about her when it's convenient. You want to know what's going on with Roiya? You do. You're a symptom of what's going on with Roiya. So no. Not to you. Not now."

I stood there.

"I'll walk," he said. Flat now, and I understood he meant it, which from Curtis — who had never once in his life walked away from a problem he found interesting, let alone from this family — was a thing of terrible weight. "You keep pushing on her, I'm gone. Off the case, off the wall, off all of it. I'll help you find Hawk because Rachel deserves that. I will not stand here and let you turn Roiya into one more thing you get to investigate. Drop it. Or I'm out."

And here is the sentence I have to live with, out of a chapter already full of them:

I dropped it.

Not because he was right, though he was, more right than either of us knew, standing in a dark room defending a door with something terrible behind it that neither of us could see the whole of yet. Not because I heard the fear under the fury and understood that my sister was in the kind of trouble Curtis couldn't name and I couldn't be trusted to. Not for any of the reasons a brother should drop it.

I dropped it because I needed Curtis on Hawk.

That was the whole of it. Curtis had drawn a line — ask about Roiya and I walk — and walking meant losing the wire side of the hunt, and losing the wire side of the hunt meant the wall stopped moving, and the wall could not stop moving, so I let go of the one thread in the entire tangle that led somewhere real. I traded my sister for a phantom, and I didn't even feel it as a trade. I felt it as a negotiation I'd won, because Curtis stayed.

"Okay," I said. "Dropped."

He held my eyes a second longer, checking. Then he turned back to the screens, and the fury folded away into that hard focused hum, and the light came back up on the red string, and we got back to hunting Byron Hawk. The wounded, drowning voice inside of me screamed out again and I almost heard it. Almost.

Somewhere out in the dark, my sister was doing God knew what to God knew who, and the one man who loved her enough to be afraid had just told me so to my face, and I had heard ask about Roiya and I walk and understood it only as a condition on my access to the thing I actually wanted.

The right hand kept working.

I kept watching the left.