Part Three
The Last Days
Chapter 22
Felix slept hard and woke up late.
He lay there a moment, staring at the ugly ceiling tiles that fit in just right with this ugly motel. Then he rolled his bare feet out onto the floor and sat up and thought: What if she won't come with me?
After all, the girl had no family - save for that wandering Uncle Harley, was it? - and the Team had clearly become everything to her. She and Annabelle were tight, very tight. She loved Jack and she loved big Carl Joplin and Cat and...
Shit.
He went through his morning ritual and then he took a shower and then he sat naked and dripping on the edge of the bed and had a cigarette and thought: What have I got to offer her?
"Staying alive, for one thing!" he muttered out loud.
But it didn't sound as fine as he would have liked.
So he stopped thinking about it. He stubbed out the cigarette and put on some clean clothes and gathered all his other stuff together and sat it on the little card table provided him.
Where his shoulder holster and gun were.
He looked at it a second, then abruptly reached down and dragged the Browning out of its holster and it slid - as had every decent goddamned gun he'd ever known - so easily, so smoothly, into his palm.
He knew, or at least had come to believe, that this feeling was very rare. That most people never felt this natural with a firearm. Some people hated them and some who didn't couldn't see them and most always felt just a little awkward and...
But not him. Not ever. The Browning felt just like...
Just like the end of his hand.
My Lord! he thought wearily, with at least some trace of wry humor, what if it's all just as simple as that?
They were all being terribly cheerful when he got to the suite, but that was okay. Now that he had made the decision to go, nothing much bothered him anymore. He even liked it. Even liked them, sitting around that faded coffee table scarfing down take-out fried chicken, reeking of Team spirit and smartass remarks and just generally acting like the kind of people who got into this mess in the first place.
But... what the hell. They deserved a couple of grins. And Annabelle was there looking radiant as always. And she was there, dimpling and feeling safe. And, well, the chicken smelled good.
And then Father Adam's mass, after the meal - that felt okay, too. Felix had never even seen a mass before these people and now... now it felt perfectly natural. Logical, maybe.
Felix's good mood remained for another twenty minutes, until they started War Planning and Davette's sketch of the basement in her Aunt Victoria's house started to look too damn much like the Cleburne Jailhouse.
Seems vampire Ross had done quite a few renovations to keep sunlight and prying eyes away - looked like a bloody fort down there - and Davette hadn't even seen it all.
"You're going to have to blow it," said Felix, standing over them as she drew. "Just like the jail."
"Can't," replied Jack Crow calmly.
Felix stared at him. "What do you mean: 'can't'?"
Crow puffed on a cigarette and stared at him through the smoke.
"Blow up a mansion worth maybe four or five million dollars in the center of residential north Dallas? Shit, I'd have every Dallas police car, fire truck, and SWAT team and half the Texas Rangers on my ass in two minutes."
Felix blinked. "Well, do what you always do - call 'em all up ahead of time. Have them there. Get authorization. I thought you knew people."
"Not that many and not that well. They'd hang up on me if I told them I wanted to blow up a mansion in the middle of their city."
"What did you do when you had one in a city before?"
"Never had one."
"Huh?"
Crow grimaced, leaned back in his chair. "It's true. We've never had one inside a city, a major city, before."
Felix looked at the others.