The arithmetic was this: get to town. Get to Hector Briggs.
Hector would let me sleep on his couch. Not because he owed me — I had been careful never to let anyone owe me, because the debt ran both ways and I‘d spent enough of my life on the wrong side of it — but because I had done his books for eleven months without ever being late and without ever making an error, and Hector was the kind of man who paid debts he didn’t know he‘d incurred. I would knock on his door and I would say the windowlatch at The Timberline broke and I can’t go back there tonight, and he would nod and fetch a blanket and not ask.
One night on the couch. Two, maybe. Long enough to get to the credit union in Pueblo. The credit union had nine hundred and forty-two dollars in it. Nine hundred and forty-two dollars bought a bus ticket and three weeks of eating and a deposit on a room somewhere nobody had ever heard of me. Albuquerque. Cheyenne. I had done it before. I had done it so many times the pattern was muscle memory.
The Diablos. Fine. The Diablos were a problem I could calculate. They wanted a bookkeeper. They didn’t want me specifically — Pitt did, Pitt had made it personal the moment I said no twice, but Pitt was one man in one operation in one town, and one town was an easy thing to leave. Dante had said Creed operated the whole corridor. Fine. I would go outside the corridor. I would go east, or south, or both, and I would keep going until the map stopped being theirs, and I had dealt with worse men than Pitt in worse rooms than The Timberline and I had walked out of every single one of them and I would walk out of this one too.
My boots kept time.
The pines closed in on both sides of the track, dark even in the afternoon, and the afternoon light was already failing because the afternoon at altitude failed early. The trees were wet from last night’s rain. Pine resin. Mineral cold. I could taste my own adrenaline, bright and metallic at the back of my throat, the particular taste of a body that had committed to a decision and was flooding itself with chemicals to enforce it.
I adjusted the box under my arm. Clover wasn‘t making a sound — she was a stuffed rabbit, she didn‘t make sounds — but I could feel her through the cardboard, the small shifting weight of her as my stride jostled the box, and I set my jaw harder and kept walking.
I was not going to think about the face-down paper.
I was not going to think about the contract folded in my front pocket.
I was not going to think about the mug on the nightstand this morning with the handle turned toward my hand.
The track met the service road. Gravel gave way to older gravel, wider, rutted in places from logging trucks. I turned left because left was downhill and downhill was town. The pines closed in again. The road bent.
I went faster.
The bag was starting to dig into my shoulder where the strap rode over the collarbone. I shifted it. The box slid and I caught it with my elbow. My breath was making small clouds in the cold even though it wasn‘t that cold, which meant I was breathing too shallow and too fast.
The road bent again. I was close now. One more curve and the road would straighten and drop toward the main road, and the main road would carry me into town, and town was a solved problem.
I came around the bend.
The dark green pickup sat across both lanes.
It was stopped. Not parked — stopped, angled across the road like a wall, the front bumper toward the ditch on the far side, the rear against the opposite shoulder. A vehicle placed where a vehicle had to be placed if the point was that nobody got past it. The engine was off. Steam, or maybe just the cold air hitting the hood, rose in a thin line from somewhere near the grille.
I stopped.
My boots skidded slightly on the loose gravel and then caught. I stood in the middle of the road with the bag on my shoulder and the box under my arm and I stared at the truck.
The driver’s door opened.
Dante got out.
He didn’t hurry. He swung the door shut behind him with the flat of his palm — quiet, not a slam, the kind of motion that said he had all the time in the world — and he walked to the front of the truck and stopped with one hip against the fender. His hands went into the pockets of his jacket. His weight settled on his left leg, compensating for the right, the favoring I’d noticed and he’d never acknowledged.
He looked at me.
He didn’t speak.
I stood in the road. My hand tightened on the strap of the bag.
How?
That was the first word in my head. Not a sentence, just the word, a single syllable turning over and over. How did you know? How did you know where I was? How did you know I’d gone? How did you get ahead of me when I had left while you were on the north ridge and the north ridge was two hours out and I had been walking for less than forty minutes? How?
The fury came up fast. Hot behind my ribs, useful, familiar. I let it come.
Underneath it, something else moved.
Smaller. Quieter. A thing that wasn‘t fury at all.
