Chapter 5
GRAYSON
The engine's wrong.
That's what wakes me. Not the sound of a vehicle.
The sound of a vehicle that doesn't belong to anyone who drives this road.
The locals all have diesels or beaters that rattle at specific RPMs I've memorized in the three months I've been up here helping the owner patch the roof.
This is a gas engine. Smooth. Tuned. Running slow because someone's coasting to keep noise down.
I'm already dressed. Never really went to bed. Just sat in the leather chair downstairs with the shotgun across my knees and let my body do the twenty-minute thing it does when my brain won't shut off.
I get up the stairs in six silent strides and push her door open.
She's already sitting up. Eyes wide. Hair a mess of braids and sleep.
"Up."
She moves. Good girl, my brain says, and I shove that sentence into a box and weld the lid shut.
"Boots. Hoodie. Grab whatever's essential. Sixty seconds."
She's out of the bed before I finish the sentence.
I cross the hall to my room, grab the go bag I packed the first hour I got here because old habits don't die, they just wait for a reason. Sat phone. Spare mag. Med kit. A second sidearm I tuck into the back waistband of my jeans.
When I come back she's at the top of the stairs with a hoodie over her tee and her boots in her hand. Phone. Wallet. A small leather notebook I'd bet my truck is her source list.
"Downstairs. Back of the cabin. Wait on me at the mudroom door."
She goes.
I do a last pass of the upstairs. Kill the lamp in the office. Close the laptop. Pull the hard drive on the way out because if anyone gets inside this cabin I'd rather they find a paperweight.
Down the stairs.
She's at the mudroom door pulling her boots on, one hand braced on the wall. No shaking. No questions.
"Car's still on the road," she says quiet.
"Yeah."
"Moving?"
"Sitting. About three hundred yards down. Killed the engine a minute ago."
"So he's on foot."
"Probably."
Her breath comes out slow.
"What's the plan."
"We go out the back. Down the slope. There's a hunting shack about half a mile northeast through the trees. Not on any map. Owner uses it for elk season."
"Half a mile in what."
"Terrain."
She looks down at her boots. Back up at me.
"I can do half a mile."
"I know you can. But if I say move, you move. If I say down, you're already down. If I say run and I don't follow, you don't stop for me."
"Gray."
"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 know this 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 like keep 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."
"He won't. Not unless he's tracking us with dogs, and he's not."
"You sound sure."
"I'm sure because if he had dogs we'd have heard them."
She breathes out.
I crouch down in front of her because she's sitting and I want her eyes on me.
"Hey."
She looks at me.
"You did good."
A small thing happens in her face. A tiny crack I've been watching for since yesterday afternoon. Her mouth wobbles for a half second. She pulls it back in.
"Don't do that," she says.
"Do what."
"Be nice to me right now. I'll fall apart."
"Fall apart. I've got you."
She shakes her head. Looks at the ceiling. Blinks hard. Doesn't let a single tear go.
"I'm not going to cry in a hunting shack, Mercer."
"Nobody's scoring you."
"I'm scoring me."
I don't move. Don't touch her. Because if I put my hand on her knee right now it doesn't stop at her knee, and neither one of us has the bandwidth for what that would start.
She pulls herself together in about eight seconds flat. Wipes the corner of her eye with the pad of her thumb. Straightens her shoulders.
"Okay. What do we do for thirty minutes."
"You sit. I watch the window."
"That's boring."
"It's supposed to be boring."
"Tell me about yourself."
"No."
"Tell me one thing about yourself."
I take my position at the window. Ease the plastic flap back a half inch. Scan.
"One thing."
"One thing."
"I grew up in Minnesota."
"Wow, that was painful for you."
"You said one thing."
"Give me another."
"Simone."
"Gray."
I look over my shoulder at her.
She's hugging her knees on that cot in an oversized hoodie with braids hanging over one shoulder, and her chin is up even though the wobble is still right there under the surface.
I hold her eyes a second longer than I need to.
"You talk when you're scared."
"Yeah."
"Then talk."
She does. Quiet and low. About a cat she had in college.
About her grandmother's sweet potato pie.
About a story she wrote in her second year at the paper that won her an award she doesn't talk about because it's pretentious.
Her voice fills the shack and it fills the space in my chest too, and I keep one eye on the window and one ear on her and I tell myself this is still professional.
It isn't.
But the sun comes up over the ridge and nobody comes up the path.
Thirty-eight minutes in, my sat phone buzzes.
Marcus: team on site. cabin clear. tremblay in custody on the road. stand down.
I stare at the screen a second.
"Gray?"
"It's over."
She blinks at me.
"Already?"
"Already."
She laughs. It's shaky and a little wild.
"That's anticlimactic."
"Most of the time it is."
She stands up. Crosses the shack to me. Looks up.
"Thank you."
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't thank me."
"Why."
Because I want things I shouldn't want. Because you looked at me last night and said yes sir in a voice that undid twenty years of discipline. Because I've been a man who couldn't save someone, and if I tell you thank you now, we both have to pretend that's all this was.
I don't say any of that.
I say, "Let's get you home."
She keeps looking up at me.
"This isn't home, Mercer."
"I know."
"And it's not over."
"I know that too."