"Say you heard me."
"I heard you."
I look at her a second. One second. Because the morning is going to get bad and if it gets worse than bad I want to remember her face exactly like this. Brown eyes. Braids. Her chin up.
Then I open the back door.
The cold meets us in the teeth.
Mountain morning. Mist still low in the trees. The kind of quiet that isn't quiet at all if you're listening for the wrong things.
I lead her down the deck stairs, keep her behind me, keep my body between her and the road. Forty yards of open ground to the tree line. I walk it fast with my eyes on every sight line and my hand on the grip of the sidearm and I don't breathe until we're in the trees.
She's right behind me. Good footing for a woman in those boots. Better than I expected.
I set a hand on her shoulder when we hit the first stand of pine, pull her low.
"Listen."
We listen.
Somewhere off to the southwest, the faint crunch of boot on gravel. Then nothing. Then the sound of a door closing. Not slammed. Pushed.
Front door of the cabin. He just let himself in.
Simone's eyes widen.
"Keep moving," I mouth.
She nods.
We move.
I knowthis terrain because I spent my second week up here walking it with a topo map and a compass, which is what you do when you're ex-military and you can't sleep and you're trying to convince yourself you're not waiting for something.
Northeast through a stand of spruce. Down a slope where the needles are thick enough to cover our tracks. Across a dry creek bed that runs at a diagonal and throws off any heat signature if he's got a drone, which I doubt but plan for.
She doesn't complain. Doesn't ask how much farther. Every so often her breath does a catch I can hear, and every time I glance back she lifts her chin likekeep going.
Thirty minutes in we hit the shack.
It's nothing. A ten by twelve lean-to with a tar paper roof and a cot and a wood stove that hasn't been lit since November. A small window with a plastic flap. A padlock on the door that I open with a key the owner gave me when I shook his hand three months ago.
I get her inside. Close the door. Slide the old iron bar across it.
Then I finally let myself breathe.
She sits down on the cot. Hands on her knees. Head down a second. When she lifts it her eyes are clear.
"Okay," she says. "Now what."
"Now we wait."
"For what."
"For my people. Marcus has a team moving. I called it in the second I heard the engine. Thirty minutes, maybe forty, to the ridge. They'll sweep the cabin and the road."
"And if Tremblay finds the shack."
