Page 25 of Forbidden Protector

I put that away where I put things.

"Fine," I say and hang up. I stand there with the phone in my hand and both hands going inside the gloves now that there is nothing left to do with them.

I would like to call it the cold. I am dressed for the cold. I have been dressed for the cold for twenty minutes and my hands did not start until I put the phone down. I put them in my pockets.

Holt has come up on my right. He does it without sound on ice.

"You heard it on a scanner," I say.

"Yes."

"You got here fast." I watch his face while I say it. "Sideways into a full stop, before Young was even off the highway. Young told me dispatch went out at ten fifty-one."

He doesn't answer that.

"And Young didn't blink at no name. A deputy who's worked this county three years should have blinked at that."

Either it happens here all the time and I've misjudged the place, or he had the same thought I did, and drove like it.

I have a file on this man that says Army, says honorable, says nothing else worth the paper. Whatever trained him to read a phone call the way I read a balance sheet did not show up in five months of Bureau digging, and I am done pretending that's an oversight.

He looks at the tire tracks.

"You did that math in your driveway," I say.

"I did it before I had my coat on."

So he knew that fast. He had it before his boots were laced, and he has known it the whole time he has been standing in this lot saying nothing to a deputy.

"My father wants me to tell you something."

"Of course he does."

"He's offering security cooperation. Local. Someone on you until this closes."

I turn and look up at him.

"Someone," I say.

"Yes."

"Say the name of the someone."

He does not move. "Me."

Out loud in a parking lot well past midnight, and I have to hand it to Gideon Blackwater, who has never once in his life carried his own knife anywhere.

He put this in his son's mouth. He made the man stand in the cold on the night of the funeral and say it himself, to a woman who already has his name written down as a suspect in Jacob's murder.

And Holt said it. Flat, no argument in it anywhere, the way a man reports a number.

"Somebody came into my room tonight," I say. "Somebody who knew which room. There are three parties in this county who knew that number. The motel. The Bureau. And the family that put me in a truck at the airport."

"I know."

"Your father is offering to protect me from a list he's on."

"I know that too."