I drop two of his crumpled twenties on the table. "For Barb," I tell him when he glares. "She's the only one who's been nice to me all week."
He doesn't take the bait. He just holds the door, and the bell jingles once more, and we step out into the storm.
We don't go back the way we came.
We don't go anywhere that makes sense, as far as I can tell.
Afon leads us out past the Sunoco, around the dark hump of the church with its sign about picking up after your dog, and then off the road entirely, into the trees, where the snow is deeper and the wind is meaner and there is no diner, no Barb, no Drake, no electricity, no heat, no glory of civilization.
Just the white and the dark and the cold closing back over us like water over a stone.
"Afon." I'm following in his bootprints again, the way I have for fourteen miles, except now I'm doing it on a full stomach and a freshly broken mood. "Afon. The town wasright there.There werebedsin that town, probably. There werehumans."
"That's the problem."
"That humans exist? Yes, I've heard you take issue with the concept."
He just keeps walking, breaking trail, his shoulders a dark wall against the snow. I only trudge after him because the alternative is freezing to death out of spite.
We go maybe half a mile—uphill, of course, because Afon has never met a flat surface he didn't want to turn his back on—before he stops in a stand of dense spruce. In here, the canopy is thick enough to break the worst of the wind.
He shrugs off the duffel and starts clearing snow, scraping down to the frozen needles underneath. It takes me a moment to realize that he's…
… making a camp.
Out here.
In the storm.
A hundred yards from civilization.
"You havegotto be kidding me," I say.
"I'm not. Take a seat."
"Which snowdrift looks like a 'seat' to you?!" I demand. I cross my arms over my chest. "I want to know why we're camping in a snowbank when there is a perfectly good town nearby with, presumably, a hotel or a neighbor with a spare couch. Are you aware that we abandoned central heating for—let me check my notes here—frozen fucking dirt?"I'm wheezing now, throat achy from the cold. "What was that all about, anyway? Did you know that guy, Drake? Is he someone from your past? Was that secretly Viktor Reznik in a wool cap?"
"I don't know who Drake is."
"Then how do you know he's dangerous?"
"I don't." He's stringing the tarp now, fast and economical, lashing one corner to a low branch. "That's the point. I don't know who any of them are. The trapper at the counter. The woman in the parka. Barb." He pulls the cord taut. "So I have to assume all of them represent a potential threat."
"Barb wouldn't hurt a fly."
"You don't know what Barb would or wouldn't do." He ties off the last corner. "You knew her for forty minutes. You think you can read people. Maybe you can, in a courtroom, in Manhattan, where the worst thing across the table is a man who beats his wife. Up here, you can't read anybody.Ican barely read anybody, and I've been doing this since before you could drive."
"So that's it? Everyone is the enemy until proven otherwise?"
"Until you're home, yes."
I stand there in the snow, fists clenched at my sides, the warmth from Barb's coffee already a distant memory. I feel the wet heat come back behind my eyes. This time, I'm not sure if it's the cold or the anger or the thing underneath both of those that I'm trying very hard not to look at directly.
"Then explain why you freaked out when you saw Drake," I say. "Because that didn't look like your usual overprotective bodyguard tactics, Afon. You looked at that guy like you wanted to put him through the window."
His shoulders go rigid. He's crouched over the duffel, pulling out this and that, but refuses to look in my direction.
"He was sitting too close to you," he says at last.
