Coulton was patting his pockets. “Did you bring your gun?” he hissed.
But Alice had not. She’d left it behind on purpose, knowing that if it were fired, the sound would give them away, would draw too much attention. She didn’t need anything but her fists, anyway.
But all at once Ovid was in front of them, a swift movement, he was fumbling in Coulton’s pocket and Coulton, astonished, just let him do it, staring as the boy withdrew the sharpest of Coulton’s lockpicks. He crouched on the edge of his bench and rolled up his sleeves and then he gripped the pick in his right fist like a fork and suddenly, in the darkness, without making a sound, he stabbed his left forearm, working the pick deep into the flesh, carving a ragged cut downward to his wrist.
“Jesus—！” Alice hissed.
The blood dripped blackly in the darkness and she could see the boy grimacing, his teeth clenched, the bubbles of snot as he breathed sharply through his nose. And then he dropped the pick to the floor with a clatter and dug his fingers deep into his own flesh and pulled out of the slick a thin six-inch piece of metal.
A blade.
And then, a minute later, to Alice’s amazement, the cut in the boy’s arm began to stitch itself together, flesh by flesh, until there was only the blood in a long smear and the mess of his shirt and the floor, slippery underfoot.
It felt like a dream. Ovid got to his feet. He said nothing. He stood trembling and fierce in front of the door with the blade gripped low in his right hand, and he waited.
Then an orange light spilled out from under the door and the heavy locks were unlocking, one by one, and the deputy was calling out in a cheerful voice, “Hiya, boy, looks like you ain’t leaving us so soon after all,” and then the door was swinging wide, and for a moment it blocked Alice’s view so that she couldn’t see Ovid, couldn’t see the deputy as he shuffled in, could only see the fall of the lantern light and hear the man grunt in surprise and then there was a clatter of something falling and the lantern smashing to the floor and then darkness.
Alice was around the door at once, fists doubled, but the deputy was already dead. The blade was deep in his neck. Ovid stared down at him.
“Goddamnit,” she swore. “What was that?”
But Coulton was unfazed. “Let me see that, son.” He grabbed Ovid by the wrist and turned his arm this way and that until the boy pulled away.
The boy kneeled over the dead man and pulled the blade free from the body with a sucking noise and he wiped it on his own trousers and then he slid it inside his shirt for the keeping. “Why’d you come back for me?” he whispered. His gestures were calm but his voice sounded shaken.
Alice, still stunned, didn’t know what to say. “Because it’s our job,” she said at last. “And because no one else was going to.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Coulton interrupted. “Riverboat leaves in fifteen minutes. We got to go.”
Alice held the boy’s eye for a long quiet moment. “Maybe someday you will,” she said. “Maybe someday there’ll be somebody to go back for.”
Coulton was already taking off his greatcoat, handing across his bowler. Ovid looked ridiculous in the clothing, far too tall for it, Alice thought, but there was nothing to be done about it. Alice pulled off the deputy’s boots and Ovid put them on. They needed to keep to the shadows and pray for quiet streets. Alice figured they would have maybe ten minutes at most before the deputy’s absence was noticed and someone came looking. She tugged at the sleeves of the greatcoat for the boy and she buttoned it fast over his bloodied shirt and she turned up the collar and she grunted.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Coulton waved them forward. They hurried through the warehouse and back outside into the moonlit street, then slid along the silvering wall and down toward the river. The air felt clean, impossibly good to Alice, after the close reek of the warehouse cell. She was trying not to think of what she had just seen, of the boy and his forearm, the blade buried in it. Trying and failing.
At the river wharf Alice could see the big paddle steamer lit up over the water, the water reflecting the shine, the men quietly moving around below with the freight and the ropes. Coulton led them up a long ramp and into a little ticketing house, and there he spoke in low tones to a man behind the counter, and after a few minutes they hurried back out and up the gangway to the steamer. Ovid had his hat pulled low and his collar high and his hands thrust into the greatcoat pockets but he was still, to Alice’s eye, clearly a black kid, absurd in his big empty boots and too-short clothes. But whatever arrangements Coulton had made worked; no one stopped them; and within a few minutes they were on board the paddleboat and following a porter down a corridor to their staterooms and then they heard the shouting of the workers below, and the ropes were cast off, and the paddle steamer pulled slowly, powerfully, out into the currents of the dark Mississippi.