More scar than bleeding wound.
In the hallway, Jimmy still leaned against the wall.
The moment he saw Sky’s face, he knew.
He uncrossed his arms.
“Done?”
“Petition denied.”
Jimmy nodded slowly.
Then he looked at the men lined along the hallway.
Devlin.
Rico.
Strand.
Carver.
Eleven others in clean jackets.
“All right.”
Jimmy pushed away from the wall.
“Let’s go home.”
That was it.
No speech.
No ceremony.
A road captain used the word home in a sentence that included her.
Twelve men moved.
Sky walked out of the courthouse wearing Luther’s jacket.
Folder beneath one arm.
Gregory on one side.
Jimmy on the other.
Behind her came the sound of twelve pairs of boots crossing the courthouse floor.
Sky thought:
Luther, you should see this.
You really should see this.
Renata Voss left the courthouse fourteen minutes later.
Briggs waited beside the black car.
She climbed inside without speaking.
After a moment, she said one thing.
“The estate claim.”
“It’s still filed,” Briggs said.
“Then we proceed.”
Briggs glanced toward the now-empty section of parking lot where the motorcycles had been.
“She has a lawyer now.”
Renata stared ahead.
“And those people behind her.”
He chose his next words carefully.
“It’s going to be harder.”
“I didn’t hire you to tell me about hard.”
Renata looked at him.
“Drive.”
Briggs drove.
But three blocks later, sitting in traffic, even he found himself thinking about the girl in the oversized denim jacket.
She had walked into that hearing room and walked out as though the building had somehow become smaller around her.
Briggs had done investigative work for eleven years.
He had an instinct he never discussed with clients.
And the instinct told him Renata Voss had made a strategic miscalculation.
One that was going to cost considerably more than she expected.
He kept that thought to himself.
Back at Garland’s, the day resumed.
Engines.
Wrenches.
The radio.
The ordinary machinery of the place.
Sky was beginning to understand that none of it was ordinary.
It was the sound of people who had chosen each other.
People who appeared every day.
People who did the work.
She went directly to the second bench.
She did not remove Luther’s jacket.
She opened her brush case.
Devlin walked by.
“You don’t want ten minutes?”
“I want to paint.”
“Fair enough.”
Sky had been thinking about the back wall for three days.
From the first morning she walked into Garland’s, she had looked at that wall and thought:
That wall is wrong.
Not ugly.
Not damaged.
Empty in the way a sentence feels wrong when it stops before the period.
Twenty feet wide.
Twelve feet high.
She had been designing the mural mentally every night.
At Patrice’s.
At the storage unit.
Between everything else.
No paper.
No brush.