Chapter Four
I WOKE REACHING ACROSS the bed.
My hand slid across the mattress and found cool sheet instead of warm skin.
For two breaths, there was only the cheap motel cotton, wrinkled where she’d been, and the space beside me gone empty.
I opened my eyes.
Green light from the Pine Shadow sign cut around the curtains. The window unit rattled like loose coins. Stale air, old smoke, sex, and motel bleach sat heavy in the room. I lay naked under the sheet, one arm stretched into the place where Crystal should’ve been, and listened.
No water ran.
No movement came from the bathroom.
No soft curse, no bare foot on carpet, no rustle of clothes.
I shoved upright. The cuffs sat on the nightstand beside my phone, dark screen up and untouched.
Her boots were gone from the foot of the bed.
Her overshirt was gone from the chair. My T-shirt lay half under the bed, and my jeans were on the floor where they’d landed when I’d stopped thinking with anything above my belt.
The front door was the only place left.
I dragged on my boxer briefs and jeans, yanked on my T-shirt, and crossed the room.
The safety chain hung slack against the wood. The room key was still on the table.
I opened the door.
Cool July air slid over my face, carrying pine resin, damp blacktop, and the tired buzz of the motel sign. The parking spot in front of room twelve sat empty.
My pickup was gone.
My hand tightened on the doorframe, and the last of sleep cleared.
I shut the door and shoved my hand into the right front pocket of my jeans.
The truck keys were gone.
Only then did I check the bathroom. The door stood half-open, the little window above the narrow drop behind the motel was shut, latch down, and the motel soap still sat dry around the edges. She hadn’t gone in there.
I stood in the middle of that cheap room with one hand buried in an empty pocket and the taste of her still in my mouth.
Then I moved.
I pulled my hand out of my pocket, grabbed my belt from the floor, and threaded it through my jeans. My boots went on fast. The leather dragged over skin still warm from the bed. I checked the small coin pocket in my jeans. The cuff key sat there alone, too small to matter for the problem outside.
She’d left the restraints.
She’d left my phone.
She’d left the room key.
She’d taken the only key that moved.
I almost laughed, but nothing about it had humor in it.
I shoved the cuffs onto my belt, took my phone off the nightstand, and picked up my jacket from the chair. The cheap phone I’d taken from her car still rode in the pocket. If she’d had help—and she had to—she’d kept another way to call for it.
Crystal Kemp had played me in my own room, in my own bed, with my own keys.
My jaw locked so hard it sent pain into my ear.
The bed sat behind me, ugly and ruined, one side kicked open, the other still holding the shape of my body. The sheet had slipped low, and the green motel light washed over every wrinkle I had no business touching.
Her hair had been spread there two hours ago.
Her mouth had been on mine.
Her tiny black ink drop had been under my thumb.
I shut that down before it found a place to live.
The room needed clearing. The job needed fixing. The woman needed catching.
Anger made a man sloppy. I didn’t give it the order of the room.
I checked under the bed, behind the curtains, and around the bathroom. Nothing. No purse, no boots, no hidden anything. She’d swept herself clean out of the room and left me every reminder of why I should’ve known better.
By the time I stepped back outside, the eastern edge of the mountains had gone from black to iron gray.
Pine Shadow looked worse before sunrise.
The cracked blacktop had a damp shine. The green and orange sign buzzed above the office.
Two rooms down, a curtain twitched, then went still.
Somewhere behind the building, the trash-bin lid knocked softly in the wind.
Room twelve’s parking spot stayed empty.
I walked the lot anyway.
No woman crouched behind the vending machines.
No pale hair cut between cars. No fresh sound came from the highway except a semi downshifting somewhere beyond the trees.
A set of tire marks cut out of the lot and toward the county road, and I knew the track before I crouched beside it.
My truck had a heavy rear tire and a front right with a worn outer edge I’d been meaning to replace for two weeks.
She’d pulled out clean.
She hadn’t even hit the curb.
That made me angrier than it should’ve.
The office bell gave a tired jangle when I pushed through the door. The same clerk from check-in sat behind the counter with a hoodie pulled over his uniform shirt and a paper cup in his hand. His eyes went from my face to the empty space through the window where my truck should’ve been.
“You need another key?” he asked.
“I need to know when my truck left the lot.”
His fingers tightened around the cup. “Your truck?”
“Black pickup. Parked in front of twelve. Cracked passenger-side headlight.”
“Oh.” He swallowed. “I thought you were leaving.”
“I wasn’t.”
He put the cup down carefully. “It rolled out early. Maybe forty minutes ago? I didn’t see much. I was restocking towels behind the desk, and I heard the engine. I looked up when it pulled past the office.”
“Driver?”
He looked toward the window again, like the answer might return in the parking lot. “A woman. Blonde hair. She’d pulled the seat close. I figured you were in the room packing or something.”
“Was anyone with her?”
“I didn’t see anyone else.”
“Did she stop anywhere? Talk to anyone? Walk toward the road first?”
“She came from the room side. She got in and left.” His voice went thin around the edges. “I didn’t know there was a problem.”
I stared at him until he looked away.
That wasn’t useful, and it wasn’t his fault.
That didn’t make it easier to hear.
“Did she turn left or right out of the lot?”
“Right,” he said fast. “Toward the pass. I’m pretty sure.”
Pretty sure was better than nothing.
I took one breath, then another. “If anyone asks, you don’t know anything else.”
“I really don’t.”
“I believe you.”
He didn’t seem comforted.
I left the office and called North Fork from the lot.
The after-hours line rang twice before it clicked through. I expected the night-desk voice from last night. Instead, Annette Haynes came on with the dry bite of a woman who had answered too many disaster calls before coffee.
“North Fork Bail Bonds. This better be worth waking me up twenty minutes early.”
“It’s Tolliver.”
The line went quiet.
Then all the sleep left her voice. “What happened?”
“Kemp escaped from Pine Shadow before dawn. She stole my pickup.”
Annette didn’t swear. That was how I knew it was bad. She made one small sound through her nose, the kind she used when a recovery agent had handed her a mess and expected her to make it polite for paperwork.
“Are you injured?” she asked.
“No.”
“Is she injured?”
“No blood, no crash, no sign of force. She left the room under her own power.”
“Restraints?”
“Left in the room.”
“Your phone?”
“In my hand.”
“Your keys?”
“Gone from the right front pocket of my jeans.”
A pause.
I stared at the empty parking spot and let her have the silence. Annette had been keeping agents alive long enough to know which questions mattered and which ones could wait until a man wasn’t standing in the middle of his own consequences.
Her voice sharpened. “I’m not asking why your keys were in jeans you weren’t wearing, because I don’t want to hear you lie this early. We recover your mobility first. Then we recover Kemp.”
The words hit exactly where they needed to.
My grip tightened around the phone. “Her sedan is still disabled near Old Quarry Road unless someone moved it overnight. My truck went right out of Pine Shadow toward Bearclaw.”
“You need a ride.”
“I need eyes on likely dump points.”
“You need a ride first, Dex. You can’t chase a stolen truck on foot unless you’ve become more impressive since yesterday.”
The old part of me that hated help opened its mouth. I closed it.
“Who can you send?” I asked.
“Rudy Bonner is already awake because his dog hates sleep and his wife hates him pacing. I’ll send him your way. He can get you from Pine Shadow and help run the trailhead pullouts.”
“I don’t need a search party.”
“You don’t have a truck.”
“I know that.”
“Then enjoy the miracle of other people having vehicles.” Paper rustled on her end. “I’m also putting a note on the disabled sedan so we don’t lose that location. Do you want county notified about the stolen truck?”
“Not yet.”
“Dex.”
“She’s a skip who stole a recovery vehicle after escape. I know what it is. I also know she’ll dump it fast. If county lights up the pass, she buries herself deeper or bolts into worse terrain.”
Annette stayed quiet long enough for the office hum to come through the line.
“You’re angry,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“You sound worse than angry.”
“Send Rudy.”
“I’m sending Rudy. And Dex?”
“What?”
“When you get your truck back, get your head back with it.”
The line clicked dead.
I lowered the phone and looked toward the road.
Getting my head back would be easier if I hadn’t left part of it in that room with her mouth around my name.
I opened the recovery packet on my phone while I waited. North Fork had sent the digital copy when the job came through, and the paper packet was in my truck, wherever she’d left it. The screen glowed pale in the gray morning.
Crystal Kemp.
Pale blonde. Blue eyes. Late twenties. Bookkeeper. Five foot six. Left ankle/lower-leg floral tattoo. Right shoulder anchor-and-compass tattoo.
The mugshot loaded below the identifiers.
I’d looked at that face for days. I’d compared it to the woman in my truck, the woman on the motel bed, the woman who’d laughed in the dark like she knew exactly which nerve to touch.
The photo still matched.
Mostly.
It was the same pale hair. Same eyes. Same shape of mouth. Same face in all the places paperwork cared about.