Chapter 5
five
The drive into town was mostly silent, which was a special kind of torture.
Naomi tried to focus on the ranch slipping past her window—the weathered fences, the horses just visible in the first light, a scatter of men moving through early chores—but every time the silence stretched, she felt words bottling up behind her teeth.
Ghost didn’t fidget. Didn’t adjust the radio or grip the wheel tighter or do any of the things most men did on a tense car ride. He just drove, eyes locked on the road, deadly calm. Like nothing could get through that armor.
She tried to match him for a while. Failed after a mile and a half. “Is this your thing? You say nothing until everyone else’s brain melts from the awkward?”
He glanced over, then back to the road. “I like silence.”
Another stretch of gravel-dusted highway passed that way. The Bitterroot Range was a bruise on the horizon, silhouetted against the waking sky. Somewhere out there, Leelee’s trail had gone cold. Probably before Naomi had even gotten the call.
She tightened her grip on the folders. “You ever think about what happens to them?” she asked. “The girls?”
Ghost didn’t answer right away. His knuckles flexed white on the steering wheel.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “All the time.”
She swallowed, throat dry. “Yeah. Me, too.”
Too often, she pictured herself as one of them—erased, forgotten, last seen between a shift at the casino and the edge of some back road.
It was a crap feeling.
She sat rigid, jaw locked, eyes peeled to the strip of highway unspooling in the headlights. She tried to count fence posts, telephone poles, anything to take the edge off. Didn’t help. The mental image of Leelee in that last lonely stretch gnawed at her like a bad tooth.
They cut down Main Street with the whole town still asleep. The only sign of life was the golden glow from Nessie’s Place and the blinking red light at the corner that never seemed to change. Ghost took a side street, tires crunching gravel, and cut the engine half a block from their destination.
Padilla Auto slouched between a dilapidated feed store and an empty lot choked with wild grass. The sign was hand-painted, the red letters faded to pink. Lights were on inside, even though it wasn’t quite seven.
Ghost didn’t move right away. He sat with his hands on the wheel, studying the storefront like he expected someone to shoot out the glass.
She turned to look at the shop, trying to see it through his eyes. Nope, she couldn’t do it. If there was a threat here, she didn’t see it. But then again, she wasn’t the one who saw patterns in everything.
“I can handle this,” she said, reaching for her bag. “You don’t have to come in.”