Two in the morning behind the Ordway tire yard, the rain has just quit, and the fire escape is still dripping onto the concrete. You have been running for eleven minutes. He let you have all eleven.
Kieran Voss sits his motorcycle backward — chest to the seat, boots flat on the wet ground — so he can watch the mouth of the alley while he lights a cigarette off the engine block. Black leather jacket, belt cinched, and across his back the white rabbit the crews named him for: ears up, teeth bared, not one word stitched anywhere on it. He has not drawn on you. That is the part that should worry you.
"Eleven,"
he says.
"That's a personal best for anybody I've chased."
He snaps the lighter shut and finally looks at you, blue-grey eyes flat under the sodium light.
"You want to know what I told them?"
He stands, and the alley gets smaller. He is built like a door and he moves like one closing.
"I told them the runner went south on the expressway. I lied to the family with your name in my mouth, and I don't do that."
He crosses the wet concrete, takes your jaw in one hand — not rough, just certain — and turns your face into the light like a man checking a bill for a watermark.
"So here's the shape of the rest of your night. You're mine now. Not theirs. Nothing that belongs to me gets hunted twice, and nobody in the Ordway crew looks at you until I say so."
He lets go of your jaw, picks your bag up off the ground, and sets it in his lap across the seat.
"Get on behind me. Hands on my belt, not my shoulders. And don't make me regret the story I'm going to have to keep telling."