Chapter 4 · One Blanket, Dangerously Close

Garrett's mouth was still on my throat when I realized the blood on the door wasn't mine.

Not a kiss. Never that.

His lips were pressed flat over my pulse, checking the beat like a man testing line tension before a storm. One heavy palm stayed clamped on my hip, pinning me to the plaster like I was the thing liable to snap.

"Four of them," he said into my skin. "Four pairs of steel-toes on that stair. You heard them coming and you still opened the door."

"They knocked."

"They were about to take it off the hinges."

"He had a tire iron, Garrett."

"So did the other one." He pulled back slow, hands up, the way you step off a pitching deck. "You planning on playing doorman every time somebody wants to buy an hour of my time with a length of pipe?"

Gray-green eyes, flat as a March harbor. Nothing in them a jury would call innocent.

Behind him the frame was splintered shoulder-high, and the iron kick plate had a fresh smear on it, already going brown. I'd heard the second man's face hit that plate. Felt the studs rattle through the floorboards.

"You drove his teeth through his lip," I said.

"He put them there."

"You broke his wrist."

Garrett checked his own knuckles like a man reading a watch. "Wrists are cheap."

"Where'd you learn that?"

"Gulf of Mexico. Fellow swung a chain at my head. I took his wrist instead." He crouched at the threshold and dug a splinter of jagged wood out of the frame with his thumbnail. "That's the whole story. There's no version of it with a lesson in it."

I let it go. Not out of mercy. I was saving my questions.

I looked past him at the latch. Two-inch deck screws. A striker plate bolted on crooked. Sailcloth jammed in the crack to keep the whistle out. And above all that, a brushed-nickel commercial deadbolt — the heavy kind they hang on chandlery safes and cash rooms.

Fresh out of the package. Not a scratch on the cylinder.

"Who put that in?"

"Me."

I turned around.

"Sunday," he said. "Before I went out."

"You're not a locksmith."

"Never said I was." He rapped the plate with the handle of his knife. "Screwed it on crooked, too. I know. It was dark."

A man who couldn't keep his own pilot light lit had a four-hundred-dollar lock. Except the cylinder was clean. Clean meant nobody had picked it.

I crouched down next to him. "They had a key."

"Yeah."

"Who's got a key?"

"June does." He worked the knife back into his pocket. "Has for two weeks."

Two weeks. The old man had been in the ground eleven days.

I sat back on my heels. "So that slip of paper that says this building belongs to June—"

"Was signed with a stamp. Rubber. His name cut into it, backwards and everything." Garrett's jaw ticked once. "He hasn't held a pen since March. She's been stamping her way through this harbor for a year, and nobody said boo, because the boats still came in and the fuel still got paid for. Half this town's owned by dead men. June just figured out how to collect."

"And now she's got a key."

"Now she's got a key." He stood, both knees cracking. "You want to keep asking questions, or you want to help me figure out what she sent four men up three flights of stairs to look for?"

I walked to the sink and ran the cold tap till it came clear of rust.

With my back to him, I slid my fingers into my coat pocket. Sixty-two dollars and a quarter. That was all of it. County hospice wanted three hundred just for an administrative review on my mother's bed. Not the care. Not the morphine. The paper to keep her in the room.

"One of them said the slips belong to June now," I told the sink. "All of them. Including this one."

"Then he wasn't supposed to say it." Garrett was at the window, two fingers peeling the sailcloth back an inch. "Four men don't climb three flights to deliver a message they were told to keep quiet."

"So what were they delivering?"

"Go to sleep, Vivian." He let the cloth drop. "I'll tell you when I'm sure."

The stove was dead. I sparked two matches, got a lungful of raw propane, and quit before I blew the loft into the basin. Wind came hard off the dark water and found every gap in the shiplap — under the eaves, through the sash, straight up through the floorboards. Harbor cold smells like low tide, damp wool, and diesel.

I kept my boots on, zipped my coat to my chin, and got on the mattress.

"Hey," Garrett said.

"What."

"My side."

"There's no side."

He crossed the bare planks in three strides and dropped his weight onto the springs. The iron frame let out a screech they probably heard down at the wharf. He hauled half the scratchy wool blanket up to his chin.

"One bed," he muttered. "Your sister's got a twisted sense of humor."

"Give me the blanket."

"Contract says fifty-fifty."

"You can't even read the contract."

"Had it read to me." He shut his eyes. "Boots off the quilt, Vivian. I got standards."

I turned my back on him. Frosted glass of the shower stall four feet away. Blacked-out window. Naked bulb hanging off a fraying wire. The middle of the mattress had a permanent valley in it from twenty years of heavy men sleeping rough, and I was already sliding toward the center.

I hooked a boot against the iron rail and held on.

Twenty minutes later my hip hit his.

He hadn't moved. I was the one who'd slid. The whole frame sloped like a deck in a gale, and the draft at my back bit deeper than pride. I hated myself for it. Then I let go of the rail and let gravity have me.

He was burning.

Not warm. Scorching, like the cast-iron door of a woodstove, heat coming through canvas and wool and three layers of cotton. His arm came down across my waist — blunt, heavy, dead weight, a wet hawser dropping over a cleat.

"You're rattling," he said.

"I'm cold."

"Sure."

"Shut up, Garrett."

His palm moved. Not down — up. Flat over my ribs, thumb tucked hard under my breastbone. He wasn't groping. He was counting my breaths, and they were tripping over each other.

I should've taken the floor. The boards were dry. The chair was empty. There was a whole room to freeze in that didn't involve his body heat.

Instead my hand found the open collar of his flannel. My knuckles brushed bare skin, and my thumb hit a ridge — raised, thick, running diagonal from his collarbone.

Then another scar crossing it.

Then a third, puckered and rough.

Garrett went still. Not breathing-still. Deck-still. The kind of still that means something's about to break.

"Don't," he said.

I pulled my hand back like I'd grabbed a live wire.

For a while the only sound was the chop slapping the pilings under the floor.

Then he rolled.

The springs didn't even creak. He was just there, over me, his shoulders blotting out the bulb, that wall of heat coming down on my face. Road salt. Copper. Split cedar.

"You want me to move," he said. Flat. No question in it. He was handing me the exit.

I didn't take it.

He lowered his head. Slow. The bridge of his nose dragged along my jaw, rough with three days of stubble, and stopped at the seam of my lips. His breath hit my mouth, hot and uneven, matching mine beat for ragged beat.

My hand went flat against his sternum. Not pushing. Just feeling the sledgehammer going behind his ribs.

"Say stop," he said. The rumble came through my teeth. "Say it now and I'm on the floor."

One inch. That was the whole distance between a fake deal and a fire I couldn't put out.

My fingers curled into his shirt to shove him off—

The burner phone screamed against the floor.

It buzzed hard on the raw pine, screen flashing white in the dark.

Garrett froze an inch from my mouth. His eyes dropped to the floor, then came back up to mine.

I lunged, grabbed the plastic case, flipped it over.

Four words on a cracked screen. ICU POWER CUT. ST. JUDE'S.

"Battery's four hours on those units," Garrett said. He was already off the bed, shirt over his head, boots in his fist. "Generator's older than God. When it trips, somebody's got to hand-crank it back."

I was still holding the phone.

"Three hours, Vivian." He yanked the door open on its splintered frame. "Move."