She’s my daughter, Craig said. The word came out slightly too deliberate, the way words do when someone has decided in advance which ones to use. She ran off. She gets scared sometimes. Does things that don’t make sense. He said this last part with a particular kind of patience that was designed to sound like long-suffering love and landed about 6 in short of it.
Sorry to hear that, Pete said. Hope you find her. Craig was already scanning the booths. His eyes moved to the woman in the denim jacket, passed over her, moved to the two men at the bar, passed over them, moved toward the back of the room, and stopped. Duke Callahan had not turned around. >> He sat exactly as he had been sitting for the past 3 minutes, leaned back, arms crossed, facing the door, his expression as readable as concrete.
He had watched Craig Bowman walk in and had spent those seconds making a quiet, complete assessment that reached its conclusion before Craig had taken four steps inside. Craig’s eyes moved to the table to the two glasses on it. One bourbon, one water, both on the surface, nothing underneath visible from where he stood. Who are you? Craig said.
Duke looked at him for a moment before answering. The way a man looks at a math problem he already knows the answer to. Nobody important, Duke said. Something moved in Craig’s expression. Not quite uncertainty, more like the faint recalibration of a man who was used to being the most dangerous thing in the room and had just encountered data that complicated that assumption.
I’m just looking for my kid, Craig said. Juke said. Craig took another step toward the back of the room. Duke’s arm came off the table and rested on his knee, and something about that movement, the absolute unhurried quality of it, the way it changed nothing and yet changed everything, stopped Craig in his tracks.
