Her brown hair tangled and damp at the edges, her sneakers mismatched. One white, one gray, as though she’d grabbed them in the dark. Her blue eyes swept the room in a single, desperate arc, the way eyes move when they’re calculating exits and not looking for a friendly face. Nobody in the room moved. The two men at the bar turned slowly on their stools.
The woman in the denim jacket lowered her phone. Pete opened his mouth and then closed it again, unsure what the correct response to this was. Duke Callahan set down his bourbon. The girl’s eyes locked onto him for exactly one second on the patch, on the beard, on the size of him, and then she made a decision that no adult in that room could have predicted.
She crossed the floor in eight quick steps, dropped to her knees, and disappeared under his table. The bar held its breath. Duke looked down at the small shape pressed against the table leg beside his boot. He could see the top of her head, the rise and fall of her shoulders, too fast, too shallow. She was trying not to make a sound, and almost succeeding.
Her fingers were wrapped around the table leg like it was the only solid thing left in the world. He looked up, met Pete’s eyes across the bar. Pete gave a small, bewildered shrug. Duke reached for his bourbon, took a slow sip, set it back down. “You want something to drink?” he said quietly to the table.
A pause, then from below. Water. Pete, Duke said without raising his voice. Glass. >> He filled a glass and brought it over, setting it at the edge of the table without a word. Duke lowered it to the floor beside his boot. A small hand reached out and took it. Duke leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and looked at the front door.
He didn’t know what was coming through it, but he had been alive long enough to know that something was. And he had been in enough situations to know that what you did in the 10 seconds before everything changed was usually the only thing that mattered. He waited. Outside, the wind pushed a plastic bag down Paxton Street, and the neon sign buzzed and flickered, and the lowg gray sky pressed down on Harrisburg like it had somewhere to be.
3 minutes later, Craig Bowman kicked open the front door. Craig Bowman was 39 years old and had spent most of those years being the biggest presence in whatever room he entered. He stood six feet even in work boots, broad in the chest and neck, with the particular build of a man who had been strong when young, and had let that strength curdle slightly into something bluntter and less controlled.
His face was red from the cold, from the walk, from whatever had been building in him since he’d looked up from the couch and realized Lily wasn’t in the apartment. His gray jacket was unzipped despite the temperature. He didn’t seem to feel it. He stood in the doorway of the rusty spoke and let his eyes drag across the room the way a flood light drags across a yard.
Pete Harlow had the particular skill developed over two decades behind bars in rough neighborhoods of making his face reveal absolutely nothing. He finished wiping the counter. He folded the rag. He set it down. Help you, he said. I’m looking for a little girl. Craig’s voice was controlled, but only just the way a fist is controlled when it’s pressed flat against a surface.
Brown hair, pink jacket. 7 years old. She come in here. Haven’t seen any kids tonight, Pete said. Craig’s jaw moved. He stepped further into the bar, and the two older men at the stools shifted almost imperceptibly. the small unconscious adjustment of bodies that have learned to create distance from certain kinds of energy.
