by Tina Whittle
I took another sip of wine. “Uh oh. I’m getting looks.”
“Of course you are. You’re in the news. Again.”
“Yes, but not one reporter has used the word ‘reckless.’”
“Yet.”
He managed to draw the word into two syllables, with a pronounced emphasis on the final consonant. I heard the buzzing of my phone, but I didn’t look down.
Trey raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to get that?”
“It’s just Kenny again.”
“I thought he finished your computer last week.”
“Yes, but he keeps thinking of new-fangled awesomeness to install, and since I told him money was no object…”
Trey didn’t complain. His AmEx Titanium was doing penance for him. I was doing my own penance, most of which involved swearing off the Darknet and always looking him in the face when I spoke.
“Thanks, by the way, for getting your professor friend to put in a good word. Kenny’s going to keep his scholarship.”
“You’re welcome. I was glad to help.”
Trey had pulled an old contact out of the woodwork, a Georgia Tech computer science professor he’d once worked with on asymmetrical sniper prediction models. Good words were powerful currency, but they carried their own price. Markers and favors, tokens and boons. They all returned home eventually, empty-handed and needy as prodigals.
I put the wineglass to my lips, dismayed to see that it was empty. Across the room, I saw Geoffrey Walker step closer to Evie, put a hand on her shoulder. Her face softened, and she sent a genuine smile his way. She would be fine, Dr. Evie Amberdecker. She was tough enough for the truth, even a landslide of it.
“I think I’m ready to go,” I said.
Trey didn’t argue. He’d been ready to go for a while. He’d come because I’d asked him, but he was keen to get us back to his apartment. I knew why. My new outfit covered equally new La Perla undergarments in a matching flame red, and we still had unexplored sections on the flowchart.
“I’ll get the car,” he said, already headed for the exit.
***
I waited for him out front, pulling my coat around me, winter nipping at my knees. Milder now, with wet spring on its breath. I couldn’t see the Ferrari, but I heard it growling from around the corner.
“Excuse me, miss?”
I turned. “Yes?”
A woman stood there—black fitted coat, black bobbed hair, porcelain skin, red-lipped smile. She handed me a notecard, heavy ivory stock, with my first name written on the envelope in a swirling cursive.
“You dropped this,” she said.
“No, I didn’t.”
She smiled wider. “I’m sure you did.”
And then she walked away, heels clicking on the sidewalk. She walked so quickly she was out of sight before I could open the envelope. I pulled out the card just as the Ferrari swung to a stop in front of me.
There was only one line inside the card, written in the same flowing script as my name on the front—And I will give you all the kingdoms of the world and their glory—but there was a photograph, taken at the summit of Kennesaw Mountain, black bare branches reaching into a winter-blue sky. In the image, a woman stood next to an iron cannon, gazing out over the landscape, Atlanta a distant shimmer of steel on the horizon. She had her back to the camera, but I recognized her riotous hair. I put my hand to the same hair, tidied now, no longer tossing in the high mountain wind.
Trey came around to open the car door for me, stopping short when he saw my expression. “Tai? What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
I looked up at him. “I don’t know, boyfriend. But something has. And I suspect I’m going to find out what it is, real soon.”
Author’s Note
Tai and Trey’s Atlanta is a place of bustle and leisure, nature and steel, tradition and edge, just like the real Atlanta. These two Atlantas co-exist easily in my imagination, like kissing cousins, but any native to the area will recognize some differences between my fictional version and the actual one (the most obvious being that in Trey and Tai’s Atlanta, nobody spends nearly enough time waiting in traffic).
Tai’s gun shop resides in my imagination; the city of Kennesaw is real, however. You’ll find it slightly northwest of Atlanta, and it really does have a city ordinance requiring every head of household to maintain a firearm and ammunition. It also has a store specializing in Confederate memorabilia—Wildman’s Civil War Surplus (although any resemblance between Tai’s shop and this one is purely coincidental).
Trey’s Buckhead neighborhood also exists, even if there isn’t a bar called Hog Wild there. Most of the other places I describe—Stone Mountain (both the hunk of granite and the city beside it), the FBI field office, the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta History Center, and the Atlanta Fulton Public Library—are also real, as is Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield National Park. And while you won’t find any Amberdecker plantations along the park’s borders, the rest of what Tai says about the Civil War history and the complicated geography of the area is true.
If you’re interested in learning more about the research that went into this book, you can check out my ever-changing Pinterest boards: The Civil War— devoted to the War Between the States, especially Georgia’s part in it; Criminal Behavior, which explores villains and scams and nefarious wrongdoings, including the ones that show up in Deeper Than the Grave; Trey and Tai’s Accessories, a collection of my protagonists’ clothing, automobiles, and weaponry; and Trey and Tai’s Atlanta, which includes an interactive map of the metro Atlanta landmarks that have cameo appearances in the series. This fourth book also has its own board: Deeper Than the Grave Research. You can find these and my other writerly and readerly boards at www.pinterest.com/tinawh.
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