Thirteen Stitches

Chapter One: The Coat He Never Took Off

The phone rang at 11:47 p.m., and Ezra Lockwood knew something was wrong before he answered, because his grandfather never called after nine.

"Ezra." Abel's voice was thin and fast. "Come to the shop. Wear the gray coat. Don't call the police."

"Granddad, what's going on? Are you hurt?"

Something heavy hit wood on the other end of the line, and then there was nothing at all.

Ezra called back twice on his way down the stairs and got silence both times. He pulled the gray coat from its hook by the door, the way he had every winter morning for eleven years, and ran out into the rain.

Harrowgate was six streets of crooked brick and dead streetlights, the last old quarter in Calder Bay that hadn't been bought and rebuilt in glass. The towers stood all around it now, lit gold against the clouds, and every year they crept a little closer. Every year another shop on Mercy Street went dark and stayed that way.

Lockwood & Son was the last one left. For sixty years Abel had cut suits there for the thirteen families who owned this city, the bankers and judges and shipping heirs who drove past Harrowgate with their windows up and still came back to the old man's fitting room, because no one else could make a jacket sit the way his did.

The front door stood open. The bell above it hung bent and silent.

Ezra stopped on the threshold, rain running down his neck, and for a moment his mind refused to understand what it saw. Bolts of wool lay slashed across the floor. Mannequins sprawled on their sides with their chests torn open. Every coat on the racks had been turned inside out, and every lining had been cut away and thrown aside, pale silk scattered over the boards in ruined heaps.

This wasn't a robbery. Thieves took the cash register. Whoever did this had been hunting for something sewn inside a garment.

"Granddad?"

He found Abel on the cutting floor beside the long oak table, curled on his side. The old man's face was swollen and split, and each breath dragged out of him in a wet rattle that Ezra felt in his own chest. He dropped to his knees and reached for him, and that was when a floorboard creaked behind the fitting room curtain.

Three men stepped out in black masks and black gloves. The one in front held Abel's long tailoring shears.

"Wrong night to visit," he said.

Ezra came off the floor without thinking. He wasn't a fighter, but he had spent years hauling forty-pound bolts of cloth up narrow stairs, and his first punch snapped the leader's head sideways. The shears clattered under the table. The second man caught him around the waist and drove him into a rack, and the third slammed a fist into his ribs until the air left him in a hoarse grunt.

Even in the chaos, Ezra's eyes did what Abel had trained them to do since he was a boy. They measured.

The man pinning him wore hand-welted calfskin shoes, the stitching tight and even along the sole, the kind a craftsman spent weeks making. When Ezra grabbed the third man's wrist, the jacket cuff came open under his fingers, and he saw that the sleeve buttons passed through real buttonholes. Nobody bought that off a rack. These weren't street thugs from the docks. They were rich men's men.

The leader recovered and hit him across the jaw with something hard, and Ezra went down beside his grandfather. The room tilted. Above him the men tore into the last row of overcoats, swearing under their breath.

A hand closed on his collar. Abel's eyes were open, bloodshot and fierce, and he pulled Ezra close with more strength than a dying man should have had.

"They want the coat," he whispered. "You've worn it eleven years. Never take it off." His fingers tightened in the gray wool. "Thirteen... don't cut the last one."

"I don't understand. What coat? Who are they?"

Abel's lips kept moving, but no sound came out. Footsteps scraped behind Ezra, and he started to turn. Something cracked against the back of his skull, and the shop went black.

Light came first, white beams slicing across his face, then voices shouting words he couldn't piece together. His head throbbed with every heartbeat. He tried to lift a hand to shield his eyes and couldn't, because his wrists were cuffed behind his back.

Something cold and sticky was pressed into his right palm, his fingers folded around it by someone else's hand. An officer pried it loose and held it up in a gloved fist, and Ezra saw Abel's shears, the blades dark and wet to the hinge.

"No," he said, but his voice came out cracked and useless.

Across the room, two paramedics were working over his grandfather with a mask on his face and a line in his arm. They lifted him onto a stretcher with the fast, grim care of people who didn't expect him to survive the drive. Ezra tried to rise, and a knee in his back pinned him to the floor.

"Let me go with him. Please, he's my grandfather."

A broad, gray-stubbled man crouched in front of him, a badge clipped to his cheap raincoat. His eyes were flat and patient.

"Detective Cole Brannigan," he said. "Ezra Lockwood, you're under arrest for the attempted murder of Abel Lockwood. You have the right to remain silent. I'd use it, son."

"I didn't do this. There were three men here, in masks. They were searching for something, they..."

"Funny," Brannigan said. "Our witness tells it different."

He stood and stepped aside, and Ezra saw who had been behind him all along.

Danny Pruitt was soaked through, his dark hair plastered to his forehead. Abel had brought him home at twelve, a silent orphan with a black eye and nowhere to sleep, and raised him at the same kitchen table as Ezra. They had shared a bedroom and learned to cut cloth side by side. No one alive knew Ezra better.

Danny looked straight at him. His face was pale, but his voice didn't shake.

"He threatened Granddad last week," he said. "Over the land money. I heard him."

Ezra stared at him. He knew every one of those words, and none of them fit together into anything true.

"Danny. Look at me."

Danny turned away. Brannigan hauled Ezra to his feet and marched him out past the bent bell and into the rain. An officer patted down his trouser pockets and took his phone and keys, then shoved him into the back of the van and slammed the door. Through the wire mesh, Ezra watched the ambulance pull away with its lights spinning, carrying the man who had raised him.

He sat in the dark with blood in his mouth and his grandfather's whisper in his head, and slowly the thought surfaced.

They had turned every coat in that shop inside out. They had cut every lining to pieces.

And not one of them had thought to search the coat on his back.