Ronan opened the driver’s side door of the charcoal BMW hard enough that the car shook, then he threw himself in hard enough that the car kept shaking, and then he slammed the door hard enough that the car shook yet more. And then he left with enough speed to make the tires squeal.
“Hm,” said the Gray Man, already preferring this Lynch brother to the last.
The rental truck pulled out with rather more care than the BMW had and headed down the street in the same direction. Then, although the lot was empty, the Gray Man waited. Sure enough, the white Mitsubishi he’d spotted before pulled in, the bass from its stereo slowly liquefying the pavement beneath it. A kid climbed out, carrying a plastic baggie full of something like business cards. He was the sort the Gray Man preferred to steer clear of; he hummed with a restless, unpredictable energy. The Gray Man didn’t mind dangerous people, but he preferred sober dangerous people. He watched the kid enter the factory and return with only an empty bag. The Mitsubishi tore off, tires squalling.
Now the Gray Man turned off the Kinks, walked across the street, and climbed the stairs to the second-floor apartment. On the landing, he discovered the contents of Mitsubishi Boy’s bag: a pile of identical Virginia driver’s licenses. Each featured a sullen photograph of Ronan Lynch beside a birthdate that would’ve had him a few months away from celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday. Aside from the clearly facetious birthdate, they were very good forgeries. The Gray Man held one up to the light coming through the broken window. Its maker had done a tidy job of replicating the most difficult part, the hologram. The Gray Man was impressed.
He left the licenses lying outside the door and broke into Monmouth Manufacturing. He was careful about it. One could easily break a lock. One could not easily unbreak it. As he picked the lock, he dialed his phone and propped it on his shoulder. It only took a moment for someone to pick up.
“Oh, it’s you,” Maura Sargent said. “King of swords.”
“And it’s you. The sword in my spine. I seem to have lost my wallet somewhere.” The Gray Man let the compromised door fall open. A smell of musty paper and mint rolled around him. Dust motes played over a thousand books; this wasn’t quite what he’d expected. “When you were vacuuming under Calla, did you happen to see anything?”
“Vacuuming!” Maura said. “I’ll look. Oh. Look at that. There is a wallet in the couch. I’ll imagine you’ll want to pick it up. How’s work?”
“I’d love to chat about it.” The Gray Man turned the lock behind himself. If the boys came back for something, he’d have a few seconds to make a plan of action. “Face-to-face.”
“You’re quite creepy.”
“I imagine you like creepy men.”
“Probably true,” Maura admitted. “Mysterious, possibly. Creepy is a very strong word.”
The Gray Man moved among the cluttered parts of Gansey’s quest. He pulled down a map rolled on the wall. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for yet.
“You could give me a reading.” He smiled faintly as he said it, paging through a book on medieval weaponry that he also owned.
Maura heard the smile in his voice. “I most certainly cannot. Neither of us want that, I can promise.”
“Are you sure? I could read you more poetry when you’re done. I know a lot of poetry.”
Maura clucked. “That’s Calla’s thing.”
“And what is your thing?” The Gray Man poked at a stack of books on the Welsh language. He was so very charmed by all of these things of Richard Gansey’s. He wasn’t sure, though, that Gansey understood just how well Glendower would be hidden. History was always buried deep, even when you know where to look. And it was hard to excavate it without damaging it. Brushes and cotton swabs, not chisels and pickaxes. Slow work. You had to like doing it.
“My thing,” Maura said, “is that I never tell my thing.”
But she was pleased; he could hear it in her voice. He liked her voice, too. She had just enough Henrietta accent so you knew where she came from.
“Do I get three tries to guess it?”
She didn’t immediately answer, and he didn’t press her. Heart wounds, he knew, made one think more slowly.
While he waited, the Gray Man stooped to study Gansey’s miniature model of Henrietta. Such affection in these tiny recreated streets! He straightened, careful not to harm any of the fond buildings, and headed for one of the two small bedrooms.
Ronan Lynch’s room looked as if a bar fight had taken place within its walls. Every surface was covered with expensive bits of expensive speakers and pointy bits of pointy cages and stylishly distressed bits of stylishly distressed jeans.
“Tell me this, then, Mr. Gray: Are you dangerous?”
“To some people.”
“I have a daughter.”
“Oh. I’m not dangerous to her.” The Gray Man picked up a box cutter from the desk and studied it. It had been used to wound something before being hastily cleaned.
Maura said, “I’m just not sure this is a good idea.”
“Don’t you?”
He inverted a cowboy boot that seemed out of place. He gave it a shake, but nothing fell out. He couldn’t say whether the Greywaren was anywhere in the building. Looking for something without a single description . . . he had to imagine what a loaf of bread looked like based upon the trail of crumbs it left behind.
“I just . . . tell me something true about you.”
“I own a pair of bell-bottoms,” he confessed. “And an orange disco shirt.”
“I don’t believe you. You must wear it, then, next time I see you.”
“I couldn’t,” the Gray Man said, amused. “I’d have to change my name to Mr. Orange.”
“Personally,” Maura replied, “I don’t think your sense of self should be flexible. Specially not if you’re going to go around as the king of swords.”
From the main room, the doorknob clicked audibly as the lock was tested. Someone was here. Someone without a key. He told Maura, “Hold that thought. I have to go.”
“To kill someone?”
“Preferably not,” the Gray Man said, in a much lower voice. He ducked behind Ronan’s half-open door. “There are nearly always easier ways.”
“Mr. Gray —”
Someone kicked open the door. The Gray Man’s careful lock-work was rendered irrelevant.
“I will,” the Gray Man interrupted softly, “call you back.”
Standing in the shadows of Ronan Lynch’s room, he watched two men stalk into the room. One man wore an oversized polo shirt and the other wore a T-shirt printed with a missile. The two men took in the scope of the space with obvious annoyance, and then they spread out. The oversized polo shirt clung to the area near the windows to keep watch out in the parking lot, and the other crashed through the boys’ belongings. They kicked over stacks of books and pulled out desk drawers and upended the bare mattress.
At one point, Missile turned to Polo Shirt. Missile Shirt held a pair of sunglasses up for inspection. “Gucci. Rich bastards.”
He dropped the sunglasses before stepping on them. One of the fractured earpieces skittered across the wide floorboards. It made it all the way to the Gray Man’s feet, but only the Gray Man was watching it. He leaned and picked the shard up, pensively thumbing the sharp, broken end.
So these were the people Greenmantle had warned him about. Fellow seekers of the Greywaren, whatever it might be. The Gray Man picked his teeth with the broken edge of the sunglasses and then used his phone to take photos of the men for Greenmantle.
Something about them was making him lose patience. Perhaps it was that they still hadn’t noticed that he was watching them. Or perhaps it was the inefficiency of their process. Whatever it was, it solidified precisely as they began to trundle through the miniature model of Henrietta. He didn’t know what the Greywaren looked like, but he was certain that he could find it without kicking in the front of a miniature cardboard courthouse.
He swiftly moved out of Ronan’s room.
“Whoa!” said Missile from the middle of the destroyed Henrietta. “Don’t move.”
By way of reply, the Gray Man stuck the sharp end of the earpiece into Polo Shirt’s neck. They fought briefly. The Gray Man used a combination of physics and the edge of the window air conditioner to gently lay the other man down on the floor.
It happened so quickly that Missile had only just reached them when the Gray Man wiped his hands on his slacks and stepped over the body.
“Jesus F. Christ,” said Missile. He pointed a knife at the Gray Man.
This fight lasted slightly longer than the first. It was not that Missile was bad; it was that the Gray Man was better. And once the Gray Man had relieved the other man of his knife, it was over immediately. Missile crouched in the wreckage of Henrietta, fingers braced on the floorboards, gasping for breath.
“Why are you here?” the Gray Man asked him. He rested the tip of the knife as far into the man’s ear as it would go without making a mess.
The man was already trembling, and unlike Declan Lynch, he folded at once. “Looking for an antique for an employer.”
“Who is?” the Gray Man prompted.
“We didn’t get his name. He’s French.”
The Gray Man licked his lips. He wondered if Maura Sargent’s thing was environmental issues. She hadn’t been wearing shoes, and that, to him, possibly was the sort of thing that someone interested in the environment might do. “French living in France or French living over here?”
“I don’t know, man, what does it matter? He’s got an accent!”
It would’ve mattered to the Gray Man. It occurred to him that he was going to have to change clothing before he went to 300 Fox Way for his wallet. He had intestinal matter on his slacks.
“Do you have a contact number? Of course you do not. What was this antique?”
“A, uh, box. He said it was probably a box. Called the Greywaren. That we’d know it when we saw it.”
The Gray Man doubted that highly. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven; the day was racing by and he had so many plans. He said, “Do I kill you or let you go?”
“Please —”
The Gray Man shook his head. “It was a rhetorical question.”
24
Would you like to explain, now, why we’re in the middle of this puddle?” Adam asked.
“Godforsaken puddle,” Ronan corrected from beside Gansey. As a pale-skinned, dark-haired Celtic sort, he didn’t care for the heat.
The five of them — plus Chainsaw, minus Noah (he had been present, but feebly, when they’d left) — floated in the boat in the middle of the belligerently ugly man-made lake they had found before. It was relentlessly sunny. The smell of the field — warm dirt — reminded Gansey of all the mornings he’d picked up Adam from his parents’ double-wide.
From shore, crows hollered apocalyptically at them. Chainsaw hollered back.
It really was some of the worst Henrietta had on offer.