Greg Rucka: Critical Space

Blood was coming off my forehead as I straightened, blinding my left eye. I felt thick and sluggish, and it took a while to get my hand up and my glasses off to clear my vision. Each time I swiped, more blood came to replace it. I put my glasses back on and tried to focus on my principal.

Skye Van Brandt stood behind the couch, her hands at her sides. There was no repentance or apology in her expression.

"Now," she said sweetly, "pick up my bags, motherfucker."

"I quit," I said.

The doorman hailed me a cab to the airport, and I spent the entire ride with my handkerchief to my forehead. Facial cuts, as any guy can tell you, bleed a lot. I caught a glance of myself in the rearview mirror during the drive and, over the reflection of the hack's curious gaze, saw the gash above my left eyebrow. It wasn't deep, but the skin had split and I was probably going to need stitches.

When I hit the terminal I gave the cabbie an extra twenty for a tip – expense money – and then made straight for the monitors inside, trying to find the next departure to any of the New York-area airports. There was a flight to Newark that was boarding, another to Kennedy that was leaving in thirty minutes. I got into line and weathered a storm of stares. I couldn't tell if the stares were because of the wound or because I'd been recognized, and frankly didn't care.

"You ought to do something about that cut," the customer rep said in a gentle Texas drawl. He looked sincerely concerned.

"I am doing something about it," I said. "I'm going home."

I checked my bag with my weapon inside, and as he was swiping my credit card, my cell phone started ringing. I shut it off, took my boarding pass, and then stopped at the first gift shop I could find on the concourse, where I paid too much for a package of Band-Aids. Then I found a men's room and examined myself in the mirror. The appraisal didn't help my mood. Blood had speckled my cheek and the collar of my shirt, though the wound was now content only to ooze. I looked tired and sallow and generally unpleasant, though maybe that was the lighting.

I ran some warm water, cleaned myself off carefully, then used my pocket knife to slice the bandages into makeshift butterfly sutures. It hurt when I applied them, but the wound appeared closed and I guessed I'd earned myself a companion scar to the one on my cheek from when I'd been pistol-whipped a couple years back. I tried to remember a time when I hadn't had any scars on my face, realized I really was thirty years old, and then ran some more water and cleaned my glasses. I pushed a couple fingers through my hair, straightened the two hoops in my left ear, and made it to the gate as they were closing the door.

My seatmate was white and in his mid-thirties, wearing a blue suit with a green-and-gray-striped tie. A leather laptop case lay by his penny loafers, stowed under the seat in front of him. He had all the marks of a business traveler, and I prayed that meant he'd leave me alone. With some squeezing I made it past him and then folded myself into the window seat, and with additional contorting, managed to assume a position that was merely uncomfortably cramped rather than genuinely painful. We were another forty-three minutes on the tarmac before actually lifting into the air, during which time the headache from the tete-a-ashtray invited a few friends over to throw a really big party.

Then we were rising and I stared out the window, watching as Texas faded away beneath me and wondering how I'd become someone who was expected to carry the bags of the likes of Skye Van Brandt.

The call had come in February, five months earlier. It had been a bleak winter, filled with rain and slushy snow, and a wind with teeth that never seemed to let up, day or night. I'd been cold and often irrationally lonely. My "don't call me girlfriend" Bridgett Logan had entered rehab just a few weeks prior, and Erika Wyatt, my almost-baby-sister, had started NYU, and moved out of the apartment we'd shared and into student housing. My home, which had never seemed spacious to me before, felt cavernous.

I was stretched out on the sofa in Dale Matsui's living room, squabbling with Natalie Trent about whether or not we were so desperate we needed to take out ads in some of the less-reputable trade journals. I was on Dale's couch because we'd been using Dale's house in Queens as our offices, and I was arguing with Natalie because our company was in serious danger of going belly-up.

"Can you think of another way to get clients?" Natalie asked. "Because without clients, we don't have a business."

"Security firms that advertise in the publications you're considering do not, in my opinion, engender confidence," I said. "And if we're protecting someone's life, I think confidence is kind of important."

"Don't be snide. We build confidence by protecting clients. To get clients, I'm suggesting we advertise."

"No," I said.

"Sentinel advertises."

"Well, by all means, then," I said.

She scowled at me, and I kept my tongue still, knowing that I'd cut too close to the bone. Natalie and I have a confused history that includes things like her dating my best friend, that friend dying, her blaming me for his death, and, eventually, the two of us making up to such an extent we ended up sleeping with one another off and on for almost a year. That the friendship has survived such things is a testament to its quality and our stubbornness.

Even knowing that, though, the crack about Sentinel was probably a cheap shot. Sentinel Guards was the biggest security firm in Manhattan, run by Natalie's father, Elliot Trent. Our firm – KTMH Security – was founded, in part, due to a falling-out between Natalie and Dear Old Dad, and she and I liked to think of ourselves as an alternative to the old-school protection firms that Sentinel personified. That was still, in my opinion, a worthy goal, and one that I knew Natalie shared.

The problem was that personal protection is an intimate community. Most work comes from referrals, either via former, satisfied, clients or from other agencies. Since we were a new firm we didn't have any former clients, and the rumor was that Elliot Trent had pretty much blacklisted us from the start, so no firms, from Sentinel on down, were giving us referrals.

I used my elbow to prop myself up and looked at Natalie, who had now turned her scowl to the window that looked out onto Dale's backyard. Outside, a light sprinkling of snow was twirling down onto the lawn. Dale, in the other chair, was looking at me like a disapproving parent. I've actually known Dale longer than I've known Natalie – he and I were in the Army together on a couple of the same details. He is, without a doubt, the nicest person I know, genuinely kind.

As a result, his disapproving look is pretty darn devastating.

"You know what I mean," I said to Natalie.

"I don't appreciate being compared to my father."

"That's not what I was doing, Nat."

She looked back at me, and her green eyes lost their focus briefly in their contemplation. Natalie is just shy of my age, tall and fine-boned, with red hair that she'd recently had cut into a bob. The new haircut showed off her facial features, the line of her neck and jaw. While the four of us in KTMH – Natalie Trent, Dale Matsui, Corry Herrera, and I – are equals, there is a hierarchy when we're at work, and Natalie is my strong second-in-command. She's as good as I am at the job, if not better.

"We're living on credit right now, you are aware of that, aren't you?" she asked.

"Painfully aware," I said.

"And you understand that our credit is almost gone?"

"Yes," I said.

"So you tell me, Atticus, what are our options? Keep waiting, hoping that the phone is going to ring? Or do we do something proactive, do we take out some ads and see where that gets us?"