Chapter 5: Even Odds

The doorway was three feet wide and the only dark left on the block.

Wes stood at the edge of the doorway and looked both ways down the street, then came back. “No cabs.”

“I can see.”

“Even if one came, it couldn’t get in here.” Wes had his phone out and put it away again without looking at it. “Fifty minutes, if we stand here and try.”

The cars were stopped three deep back from the light with their engines running, and nobody was honking. Most of the people on the sidewalk faced one way, up toward the middle of the block, where the noise hadn’t come down at all.

Wes took his jacket off and held it out.

“Put it on.”

“I’m wet.”

“That’s the part I’m worried about.” Wes didn’t take it back. “You’re soaked through and this street is full of people with phones.”

Halliday took it. It was tight across the shoulders and short in the sleeve and didn’t fit him at all.

“Thanks.”

“It’s laundry.”

Halliday took the cap off. It was a good red, the kind a camera found in a crowd from a block away, and there were enough cameras on this block to find it. There was nowhere on him to put it, so it stayed in his hand.

“He seems all right,” Halliday said, still looking up the block. “Better in person than in the pictures.”

Wes looked at him. “Compared to you?”

Halliday gave it a second. “Even.”

Wes said nothing at all.

“A thousand times better,” Mina said. Her phone was in both hands and her thumbs weren’t moving on it. “I have said this for two years. The lens can’t do it. It flattens him. I’m not going to be argued with about it tonight.”

“It’s not the same category anyway,” she said. “You’re pretty. He’s handsome.”

“You only think that because he got that guy off you,” Wes said. “That’s the part I can’t get past. Him stepping in. For you.”

He looked Halliday over in the dark of the doorway — borrowed jacket, wet collar, a red cap in one hand.

“So how’s it feel? Being rescued.”

“Not bad,” Halliday said.

He looked at Mina. “When the album comes out, I’m buying a stack of them. For you.”

Her phone came down. “Really?”

“Why,” Wes said.

“Numbers.” Halliday turned toward the street — the light, the noise, the middle of the block — at the volume of a person doing a bit for two friends and nobody else. “Supporting the album. Thanks for the save, Calloway.”

Mina opened her mouth and closed it again.

They walked. There was no way off the block except along it, past the closed storefronts, and the headlights were still stopped behind them.

At the corner the noise from the middle of the block thinned to a thread.

Halliday folded the cap in half, put it in the pocket of Wes’s jacket, and left his hand in there. The wind had come up along the cross street.

Wes walked off the curb without looking at the light. Halliday went after him, one hand in his pocket, closed around the cap.