The 6:20 Man(18)

He turned and walked toward her. She backed away, looking fearful.

He wiped the blood and snot off his face and onto his sleeve. “Thanks for the warning. And call an ambulance for those guys.” He paused and added, “And I’ll see you at the office, sweet cheeks.”

He walked down the street, put on his helmet, cranked his bike, and blew past as she stood outside an alley where three large and disappointed young men lay with the city’s trash.





CHAPTER





13


DEVINE SLEPT FOR A COUPLE hours, with an ice pack around his arm and another on his shoulder and a third bag on his face. He’d applied ointment to the cuts and brick rash. He rose, put on his workout clothes, jogged over to the high school football field that was right behind his neighborhood, and started his daily workout.

A tractor tire lay on the football field. The football players used it to build up the thrust strength of their arms and legs. Devine flipped it down to one end, turned around and flipped it back to the other, until he was drenched in sweat. With every flip he had a new thought about Sara Ewes and her death, and Cowl and Comely. Then there were regular car tires that he threw like discuses to build up his obliques. As he did so, Devine thought about his new gig with Emerson Campbell.

Next, Devine ran the bleacher steps until he was soaked in even more sweat. He did pull-ups and chin-ups on a pull-up bar. One hundred of each. Twenty at a time followed by twenty seconds of rest. Two hundred push-ups, fifty at a time. With each rep he imagined Sara swinging on the end of that cord.

Ab crunches followed, both flat on his back and then hanging from the pull-up bar. Squats, lunges, army crawls, high-kickers, then plyometric jumps on and off wooden boxes of varying heights the school kept here for the athletic teams. Followed by burpees. Every one he performed was now accompanied by images of the battle in the alley. His wounds howled in protest of the workout, which made him push himself even harder. When the going got tough, you just kicked your own ass even harder. That was the Army way.

Sprints down the field, and, on the return, he did the run backward. He went faster each time, working off his frustration at the hard left turn off a cliff his life had taken.

Lieutenant Roy Blankenship and Captain Kenneth Hawkins. Names he had heard every day for years, and then no more. Both men dead. Both struck down violently. One with an assist by him.

How many times had he seen those faces in his sleep? It was always the same. They were staring at him, waiting for him to say something. To Blankenship, maybe something about avenging him. To Hawkins, maybe angry words, venting. But Devine never said a damn thing back. Not one damn thing while two dead men stared at him.

He finished off with a series of isometric routines, holding the poses until his body shook violently with the effort of simply standing still.

He jogged back to his place, cooling down and stretching along the way. He showered, shaved, dressed, and left his room. Valentine was on the couch dead asleep, having failed to make it up to his room the previous night. Apparently tapping keys on a laptop could be exhausting. He had heard Tapshaw softly snoring and probably dreaming of new deals and happy couples from the Hummingbird empire she’d created.

He had seen the light on in Helen Speers’s room. She was no doubt studying. She had the belly fire, that was for sure. Being Black and a woman were two strikes against you already, Devine knew. It sure as hell had been that way in the Army.

Quite a few of his comrades in uniform resented women being in the ranks. Sure, the guys said all the right things in public so their records and promotion trajectories wouldn’t get ripped, but the private mutterings among the men were a whole different story. This pattern of misogyny came from some of the enlisted grunts all the way up to a number of the bars and stars. And the petty shit these men would do to screw with the women was legendary in its cruelty. Nothing wounded a female soldier more than knowing the guy in uniform next to her didn’t have her back, and, more insulting, didn’t even want her there. Didn’t think she would ever be good enough. When all the ladies wanted was to simply be allowed to do their jobs and serve their country. And maybe Devine would have looked down on the ladies in uniform too, except a newbie enlisted had saved his life near Kandahar, losing a hand in the process.

The soldier’s name was Alice.

He got to the station and boarded the train. One more working day until his only day off.

The train was empty except for Devine until a woman in a warm-up suit and carrying a large canvas bag got on four stations later. She eyed his mangled face and immediately sat far away from him.

By the time they got to Brad Cowl’s palace the train was barely a quarter full. All the others, except the warm-up suit lady, were dressed as he was. But it was Saturday and the numbers were going to be lower. Not every business in New York worked the Wall Street way. Some people did get two days off out of seven.

Devine stretched out his arm and shoulder, touched his injured face, and tensed a bit as the train slowed. There it was. The pool, the backyard with the string of lights still up and still on; some servant must have forgotten to pull the plug. Cowl would probably ding their paycheck.

He had looked up the property online. The place was twenty-seven thousand square feet, a dozen bedrooms, seventeen baths, two kitchens, servant quarters in an adjacent cottage, a large guesthouse in case the twelve bedrooms weren’t enough, along with the resort-sized pool and eight exquisitely landscaped and private acres. There were no pictures of the interior online, which told Devine the place had been built by Cowl and had never been on the market for resale. It was tax-assessed at a figure that was less than half of what it would cost to buy or build.