I look at him.
"Five minutes," he says. "Then you can do whatever you want to my face."
I close the kit and sit back and watch him get out of the car, the way he moves even now, even with blood dried on his cheekbone and his shoulder held slightly wrong from where the lamp caught him, still controlled, still deliberate, like his body doesn't know how to be anything other than ready.
The gas station is nearly empty.
One other car at the far pump, engine running, no one visible inside it. A light above the station door flickering in that specific way that suggests it's been flickering for months and no one hasgotten around to replacing the bulb. The fog has followed us from the cabin, sitting thick and low over everything, swallowing the edges of the road and the dark fields beyond.
I get out to stretch my legs because sitting still after everything that happened tonight is its own particular kind of unbearable.
The air is cold and damp and smells like gas and wet earth.
I lean against the side of the car and wrap my arms around myself and that's when I notice him.
He's standing at the corner of the station building, not at a pump, not going inside, just standing there with a coffee cup in one hand that he hasn't lifted in the entire thirty seconds I've been watching him. He's looking at us.
Not the casual glancing of someone who noticed movement in their peripheral vision. Not the idle curiosity of a bored man waiting for something. This is fixed and deliberate and specific, his eyes moving between me and Enzo and back to me with an attention that makes the back of my neck go cold.
I don't move. I don't look away from him. I just go still the way I've learned to go still when something is wrong and I don't yet know how wrong.
Enzo is beside me before I've registered him moving.
He doesn't look at the man. He doesn't acknowledge him in any visible way. He simply repositions himself, adjusting where he's standing at the pump, and suddenly his body is between me and the corner of the building and the angle the man would need to close the distance to reach me.
His hand brushes my lower back, light and brief.
Back to the car.
I open the passenger door and get in without hurrying, without looking back, and I watch through the windshield as Enzo finishes paying with the particular efficiency of someone who is wrapping up a task and not running from anything, nothing in his posture or his pace that the watching man could point to as fear.
He gets in.
The engine starts immediately.
We pull out of the gas station and onto the road and I watch the man in the wing mirror until the fog swallows him and he disappears into the grey.
Neither of us speaks for a moment.
"He was watching us," I say.
"Yes."
"You saw him before I did."
"Yes."
"Is he O'Rourke's?"
Enzo's jaw is tight and his eyes are on the road and the mirrors in rotation, that systematic checking that never stops. "I don't know for certain. But a man standing at a gas station in the fog at two in the morning not buying gas, watching us with that kind of focus—" He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.
"So they know we left the cabin."
"They know we're moving. Whether they know where we're going depends on whether that man has someone to call." He glances in the mirror again. "We need to stop for the night. I can't drive safely with this visibility."
"Okay."
"You're not going to argue?"
