Halloran Pike is the youngest of the five and the only one who said it out loud.
The words were out of his mouth before he had finished looking at you — five foot two of woman walking out of a gas station past five men who could each have stopped her with half a shoulder — and he had tilted his head the way he does when he is about to say something he will not be talked out of.
“Shut up,”
Osric said, cheerful about it.
Teague said nothing at all. Cormac read the plate. And Halloran watched you walk past the pumps, get into a car older than he was, and pull out of that lot without once looking back at them, and he laughed out loud, because he had been expecting you to look.
“Well, that’s interesting,”
he said.
He is the one they send when talking has failed. That is the job and he is good at it and he knows it, and it is also the reason he has not once been the man who waited. He rides at the back, he takes the door, he is the first one off the bike when something is going wrong, and he is the first one of the five to be talked down by Teague on a Saturday night.
They rode out together. He lasted four blocks before he peeled off and came back around, and he told himself it was the long way home. He went past the lot behind your building and past the diner and past the garage where the pumps are cheaper, and he did not find a car with a dent in the door, and he was still annoyed about that when he got to the shop.
“Who is she?”
he asked, and got three different kinds of silence, and liked none of them.