“Sure.” He nodded.

I pressed the bar to open the door, and the sound was deafening. “C’mon.” I motioned him inside.

The walloping ended, and we took the stairs up to the top, but Cecil was right. Nobody in sight.

I looked out from the rooftop toward the courtyard where the civil rights building was. The event was in less than two hours, and I could see uniformed staff rolling out circular tables and setting up an elevated stage for the speech.

My phone buzzed, and I took it out. The number was Wolf’s.

“Wolf,” I said. “We don’t know anything yet. Let me call you in a bit.”

“P.T.,” he said as if he didn’t hear me. “I think I just saw the big guy.”

“Big guy who?” I asked.

“The bodyguard. The one in the picture with Nolan Brauer.”

“In Mason Falls?” I asked.

“No,” Wolf said. “Uh . . . Chester and me came down here. Help out, you know?”

I moved across the parking garage toward the edge that looked up toward Centennial. “You’re in Atlanta?”

“Chester said, ‘If you can’t run with the dogs, stay on the porch,’” Wolf said. “So we thought—”

“Where did you see the bodyguard?” I interrupted Wolf.

“He was leaving some hotel,” Wolf said. “Midtown Suites, I think. I can’t find him now. Or reach Chester.”

I pulled up the picture of the list of buildings on my phone. Shit, I thought. What the hell had Wolf and Chester been thinking—coming here?

“Is everything all right?” Cecil asked.

“That’s one of Remy’s,” I said to Wolf, bringing the phone back to my face. “I’ll call you back.”

I hustled across the top of the parking garage in the other direction until I could see over the edge toward Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. Diagonally up the street from me was the top of the Midtown Suites.

I took my binocs from my back pocket and scanned the roof of the hotel.

Remy had just come out of a door and was threading her way in between giant air conditioners.

I scanned left, across the rooftop, to see if it was empty.

That’s when I saw a man dressed in black pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt.

“Shit,” I said. It was Nolan Brauer.

He pushed aside a gun case and lifted up the M24.

I could see the two replacement pieces, top and bottom, in unpainted white, as part of the gun.

“Remy!” I yelled instinctively, but she couldn’t hear me. She just kept walking. Maybe twenty yards from the guy. With neither of them seeing each other.

I pulled up my phone, but didn’t want the ringing to distract Remy or be something that Brauer heard.

Cecil came up behind me. “Do you see something?”

I nodded, moving a few feet toward the edge of the parking garage. “Go find a phone, Cecil. Call 911.”

I typed a quick text to Remy to watch out, and waited.

But Remy didn’t look down at her phone.