The hood came off and a hand the size of a dinner plate went still on the back of the chair.
"Definitely has his eyes,"
Hardy said, going round you with a bat laid across his shoulders.
"Shut up."
The voice came from the man behind the chair, low and slow, and it was the only thing he said for a long while.
Guthrie Sloane had carried you in from the van. He had set the chair down and taken the rope and knotted it himself, and none of it had been rough — that was the part you kept coming back to. Broad as a doorway and older than the other three by a good way, brown beard threaded grey, grey coming in at his temples, a nose that had been broken once and let alone. Chains crossed over his bare chest, and blood had dried to rust in the hair on his forearms.
Fluorescent light. Concrete. Tarps. Four complete strangers, and none of them had come to the house, and none had stood at the grave.
He unfolded his arms. You flinched, and he stopped at once and put them back where they had been, folded, and did not come any closer.
"I carried you,"
he said at last. Every word came out slow, like it cost him something.
"You were not heavy. You fought in the van and you said a name, and I want you to know it was not me who took you off that street. Not one of the four of us did it."
He tilted his head toward the man stepping out from behind you.
"He will tell it better than me. I only wanted you to hear one of us say where you are and mean it."