Chapter 1
Astrid
By the third day in the town below Bone Hollow, I have learned everything about the Sinners that the people here are willing to say out loud, which is a great deal and almost nothing at the same time.
My accent helps. I have noticed this everywhere I have worked, but it is especially true here.
To these people I am exotic in a way that disarms rather than alarms — a Swedish woman writing a magazine story about mountain towns nobody writes about, charmed by their church and their diner and their hard beautiful country.
They want to be seen. Everyone wants to be seen.
And so they talk, and I listen with my whole face, and I let the recorder in my coat lining gather the parts that matter.
What I have gathered is this. The Bone Hollow Sinners are the mountain.
There is no version of this town that exists separately from them.
They own the towing company and the auto shop and the lumber yard and a construction outfit that does half the road work in three counties.
They employ, by my rough count, something close to forty percent of the working-age men in the valley and a fair number of the women.
When the bridge on the county road washed out two springs ago, it was the Sinners who rebuilt it, not the state.
When old Mr. Coomer's house caught fire last winter, it was the Sinners who put it out, and then the Sinners who paid to rebuild it, and Mr. Coomer himself told me this with tears standing in his eyes, in a diner booth, over eggs.
They are loved here. That is the thing I did not expect and have to keep accounting for.
I came expecting fear, and there is fear, but it lives underneath the love like rock under topsoil.
These people will tell you a hundred warm stories about the men on the mountain.
They will not tell you one specific fact.
The moment a question turns from a story into a detail — a name, a date, a shipment, a road — a curtain comes down behind their eyes, and the warmth stays in their voice while the substance drains out of it, and you are talking to a polite, friendly, completely impenetrable wall.
I have hit that wall maybe forty times in three days.
I am very good at finding the seam in a wall.
These people do not have a seam. They have been trained, the way you train a dog not to take food from strangers, except gentler, except over generations, until it isn't training anymore, it's just who they are.
You do not give up the mountain. You do not give up the men who are the mountain.
You smile, and you offer more coffee, and you change the subject to the weather, which up here is a subject with no bottom.
On the fourth day, I make a mistake. I know it is a mistake while I am making it, which is the worst kind, the kind you walk into with your eyes open because you have run out of patience with the slow way.
It is late afternoon, and I am in the bar at the end of Main Street — not the diner, the bar, a different population, looser tongues, more bourbon.
I have spent an hour establishing myself with the bartender, a heavyset man in his fifties named Doyle who has told me about his time in the merchant marine and his ex-wife and his theory that the government seeds the clouds.
He likes me. I have made him like me. And because I am tired, and because four years is a long time, and because Ingrid is laughing in my wallet against my chest, I let the slow way go and I ask the fast question.
"I heard," I say, light, conversational, leaning in like it's gossip, "that there's some kind of freight that comes through here. Trucks, late. People say it's the Sinners moving — I don't know. Something. You ever see it?"
Doyle's face does the thing. The curtain.
But it is not the soft polite curtain the schoolteacher had, the gentle change of subject.
It is faster and colder. He sets down the glass he was drying.
He looks at me — really looks, the friendliness gone so completely it's like watching a light switch — and he says, "I don't know what you heard, but you heard wrong, and I'd be careful who you say it to. "
Then he walks to the other end of the bar and does not come back.
I finish my drink because leaving it would be its own kind of confession. I pay. I tip well. I walk out into the long blue mountain dusk, and within a block I know.
There is a truck. A dark pickup, parked across the street from where I parked mine, that was not there when I went into the bar.
As I pull out, it pulls out. It does not follow closely.
It does not need to — there is one road, and I am on it, and it stays four or five car lengths back the whole way to the motel, headlights filling my mirror, patient, unhurried, a thing that wants me to know it is there.
I have been followed before. I know how to lose a tail, and I know when not to bother, and this is a when-not-to-bother.
They are not trying to catch me doing something.
They are telling me they see me. So I drive to the motel at the speed limit, and I park, and I get out, and I walk to my room without hurrying and without looking back, and behind me I hear the truck idle in the lot for a moment and then move on.
There is a man in the parking lot. He is leaning against the ice machine near the office, smoking, a big man in a denim vest, and he watches me cross to my door with an attention that is not bothering to disguise itself.
I nod to him, pleasant, a guest acknowledging a guest, and he does not nod back.
I go inside. I lock the door. I sit on the bed for a moment with my heart doing something steady and elevated, the body's honest report on a dishonest situation.
Flagged. After three productive days, I have flagged myself in one impatient hour.
I think about Ingrid laughing. I think about the way she would have done this — walked into that bar and had Doyle telling her his cloud-seeding theories and his shipment schedules in the same breath, because people give Ingrid things they guard from me.
The careful sister overplayed her hand. I make a note of it, mentally, in the cold ledger I keep, and I begin the work of damage assessment.
I am still doing it three hours later, sitting cross-legged on the bed with my laptop and my notes spread around me, the lamp doing its flicker every time a truck passes, when there is a knock at the door.
It is not a loud knock. That is the first thing I notice. A frightened person knocks loud, or a drunk person, or an angry one. This is two soft raps, evenly spaced, the knock of someone who has all the time in the world and wants you to understand that.
I do not have a weapon. I have made that choice deliberately, every time, for a decade — a weapon turns a conversation into a confrontation, and I survive on conversation.
But I have a phone, and I have a voice, and I have the thing I always have, which is the ability to be a problem that is more trouble to solve than to leave alone.
I go to the door. I do not open it on the chain, because the chain is a fiction in a door like this, and pretending otherwise only tells the person on the other side that you think the chain is real. I open it the way I would open it for the front desk.
The man on the other side is leaning against the frame.
I take him in the way I have trained myself to take in a room, fast and complete and without letting it show on my face.
He is lean, not big — the man at the ice machine was big, this man is something else.
He is built the way a knife is built, all length and edge and economy, nothing wasted.
Sharp features, a sharpness that is almost Slavic, cheekbones and a jaw you could cut paper on.
Pale eyes — even in the bad light I can see they are a blue so light it's nearly colorless, the blue of ice over deep water.
He is wearing a dark henley and the Sinners' cut over it, and his hands are loose at his sides, and his hands are the thing that stops me.
I have seen a great many hands. It is, in a strange way, my specialty — you learn more about a man from his hands than his face, because a man controls his face.
These hands are scarred across the knuckles, deeply, repeatedly, the kind of scarring that does not come from one fight or ten, the kind where the bone underneath has been broken and reset and broken again until the architecture of the hand has been rewritten.
But they are not a brawler's hands. A brawler's hands are clumsy with damage.
These are precise. The fingers are long and the nails are clean and there is a callus pattern across the palm and the side of the index finger that I recognize, because I have spent four years looking at men who handle weapons, and this is what it looks like.
He is, I understand in the half-second the door has been open, the most dangerous man I have stood in front of since the warehouse in Odessa.
And he is leaning against my door frame with the relaxed, total stillness of a man who could be inside the room and have his hand at my throat before I finished the thought of closing it.
"You're asking dangerous questions, Miss Lind," he says.
His English is good, clean, but accented — Russian, or something near it, the vowels rounded and the rhythm slightly off the American beat. And he has said Lind. Not the name on my motel registration, which is the name on my fabricated press credentials, which is not Lind.
He used my real name.
I keep my face still. This is the entire game now, the only game, the one I have played in worse rooms than this. Do not let him see the floor drop out from under you. "I'm a journalist," I say. "Asking questions is the job."
"You're not a journalist." He says it without heat, without even much interest, the way you'd correct a child on a point of fact.
"You're an arms investigator with the International Small Arms Coalition, out of the Brussels office, on a leave of absence that isn't really a leave of absence.
You've been tracking a weapons pipeline for four years.
Odessa, Rotterdam, Savannah." He pauses, and the pale eyes move over me, reading, the way I read, and I have the deeply unfamiliar sensation of being on the other end of my own technique.
"And you just walked into the end of the trail. "
I say nothing. There is nothing to say that would be a move rather than a tell.
He pushes off the door frame, unhurried, and takes a step closer, into the threshold but not over it, a courtesy that is also a demonstration that the threshold means nothing. "My name is Nikolai," he says. "People here call me Dagger. I handle the weapons you're looking for."
My heart is going faster. I am aware of it the way I was aware of it in Odessa, except that it is not the same, and the difference is so strange and so immediate that for a moment I lose the thread of my own composure.
In Odessa my heart raced because a man was deciding whether to kill me.
This man may also be deciding whether to kill me.
But that is not what my body is responding to.
My body is responding to him — the stillness of him, the precision, the way he has assembled a complete and accurate picture of who I am and laid it at my feet like a card player turning over a hand, not to win but to show me the game is already over and he is choosing not to take the pot.
I have spent four years among dangerous men. I am not supposed to find them interesting. I find this one interesting in a way that is going to be a problem.
"Are you here to threaten me?" I ask.
He tilts his head a fraction. Considers it like it's a genuinely good question. "I'm here," he says, "to tell you that if you continue, I can't protect you from what happens next." A beat. "And despite my better judgment, I'd prefer not to find you in a ditch."
I look at him. I let myself, finally, look at him directly, and I say, "That sounds like a threat wrapped in a warning wrapped in something almost concerned."
For just a moment, something moves at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of where a smile would go on a face that does not make them. "It's all three," he says.
And then he steps back, and turns, and walks across the parking lot, past the big man at the ice machine who straightens when he passes, and gets into the dark pickup, and drives away up the mountain into the dark.
I close the door. I lock it, the real lock, not the fiction of the chain.
I stand with my back against it and I look down at my hands and they are shaking — not badly, not the way they shook after Odessa, but unmistakably, a fine tremor across the fingers that handle cameras and recorders and four years of patient red string.
It is not fear. I know what fear feels like in these hands, and this is not it.
It is recognition. The clean, electric, entirely unwelcome recognition that the man who just told me to stop is the single most interesting obstacle I have encountered in a decade of obstacles, and that some part of me, the part that does not answer to the cold ledger, is already certain that I am not going to stop, and that the not-stopping has just stopped being entirely about Ingrid.
I sit back down among my notes. I do not sleep. At dawn I do not pack my car to leave.
At dawn I start planning how to get up the mountain.