Episodul 129 · In the Parking Lot

The lawyer came through that door at a quarter past ten.

He was as Soles knew him from their stories and the meetings he himself had had with him: an orderly man in a good overcoat, a leather briefcase under one arm, with the face of a man who never hurries because he is never late. He went down the three steps of the side entrance without looking at anyone. A black car waited with the engine running. The driver opened the rear door.

Halfway between the steps and the car, the lawyer passed two men standing beside a light pole. One broad, in a leather jacket, with a fresh scar on his lip. The other thinner, in a gray jacket, his right shoulder slightly higher than the left, now supported in a sling.

The two pushed away from the pole when they saw him. The broad one stepped toward him and said something. Soles could not hear what.

The lawyer did not stop. He did not look at them. He passed them the way you pass a post, climbed into the black car, and the door closed softly the way only expensive doors do. The car moved slowly through the lot between the others and disappeared around the corner of the building.

The two men stayed where they were. The broad one stared after the car, his mouth still open around the word he had not finished. Then he turned, and his eyes fell on the main steps, on Soles coming down.

Soles saw him understand. Saw the idea settle into him, simple: the master had left, they had remained, and the man at the top of the stairs was the reason.

Tesa pushed away from the hood.

— Soles, she said. Not loudly.

The broad man was already coming through the cars, fists clenched, walking like someone who had decided something and did not want to think anymore. The man in the gray jacket came after him more slowly, his good hand in his pocket.

Soles came down the last step and stopped in the parking lot. Exactly there. He realized it only afterward: the place a gray car with a half-dirty plate had once driven away from on the morning Kerr died.

The broad man said nothing. He hit.

Soles half-dodged. Half was no longer enough. The fist drove beneath his arm into the cracked rib, and the world turned white and narrow as a keyhole. He folded.

He tried to back toward the steps. His heel caught the bottom one, and he had to put his foot down again, closer to the man. Tesa was coming between the cars. He could see her, but she was still too far away.

Stay up. Get clear of the steps.

The broad man hit him again. Soles raised his right forearm by reflex. The fist drove it into his cheek. His teeth struck together, and his hand dropped before he could make it stay up.

He had stopped the fist reaching his face cleanly. He could barely hold the arm afterward. The man had felt that too. He came closer instead of letting Soles retreat, one shoulder turned to hide the movement of his leg.

Soles tried to straighten. His rib would not let him.

The broad man’s boot scraped the asphalt as he drew his leg back for another strike.

And Phenom came close.

In the garden he did not move from his plant; he had never needed to. His attention settled into Soles’s body the way a hand settles into a familiar glove, and Soles’s body became water. He sank beneath the kick instead of taking it, and the boot went past his shoulder. For that instant the broad man stood on one leg, all his weight on the knee beneath him, locked straight. Soles’s right hand found that knee on its own, from the side, just below the kneecap, and drove it inward, short and hard, the way you knock a chock out from under a wheel. The leg folded where legs do not fold. The broad man dropped to one knee on the asphalt with a sound Soles had never heard from a person.

The man in the jacket pulled his hand from his pocket. In it was a small cord-cutting knife, its blade bent from use.

Soles saw him coming and knew everything. He knew where the blade would be after half a step. He knew where the man’s throat was when he raised his good arm, open on the side with the sling, where he could no longer defend himself. He knew, with cold and quiet clarity, the way you know two plus two, where his thumb would go if he let it go there. One motion. Shorter than a breath. He had done it a hundred times in another life.

His hand moved.

And on the way, in that half-second when the hand was already moving and the man’s throat was still there, Soles searched for what he had searched for all his life in that moment. He searched for the reason. The sentence that had kept him standing on the yard floor, in the hospital, on these steps, in the archive basement, in the round room, beneath the building. The one that said why not yet. The one that said until when.

Not until I find out who did this.

He searched for it and there was nothing after it anymore.

He had found out. He knew who. He knew how. He even knew what time had shown on the kitchen clock. The sentence remained inside him whole, every word in its place, and led nowhere now, like a staircase ending in air. And where its end had been, in the place that had kept him alive since the yard floor, there was nothing anymore. No anger. No fear. A clean, white absence.

And Phenom, who had never needed an until, closed Soles’s fingers into a fist around a hilt that was not there, thumb extended. Gently. Encouragingly. The hand kept moving through that emptiness because nothing told it to stop.

Into the emptiness, because nothing else was there, entered what was around him. The asphalt of the parking lot. Morning sun on the hoods of cars. Pain in his rib. The man in front of him with the knife raised and eyes wide like a child’s, who still knew nothing.

Here, Soles thought.

It answered nothing. It was not a reason. It was only a place. Not not until. Only here.

And his hand stopped.

It stopped with his thumb a hand’s breadth from the man’s throat, and the small knife passed beside him, sliced his jacket at the shoulder, and stayed in the air because the man holding it was staring at Soles’s hand stopped beside his throat and had understood too, all at once, how close it had been.

Soles lowered his hand.

Tesa had come down the gap from the second row of cars while his hand was still in the air. She went past him like a train. She hit the man in the jacket from the side with her shoulder, with all her weight, and took him off his feet; the knife clanged onto the asphalt and spun beneath a car. Then she hit the broad man, who was trying to rise from his ruined knee. Not with the cast. With her good hand, once, under the jaw, short and rising from below, the way a boxer dead long ago had taught her to strike. The broad man sat down on the asphalt and did not get up again.