Chapter 14 #2
“The truck has to be cleared before Jess rides in it.”
Her face made me wish I had said nothing at all.
“You should have put Jess in another vehicle.”
The source had specified mine, and I couldn’t say so without adding a witness to the scheme. “It’s the vehicle on the approved route.”
“You write the routes.” She looked past me at Eden’s house. “Five years of her things in that truck, and you found them the morning somebody else needed her seat.”
“Nobody’s taking her seat.”
“Listen to yourself more often,” June said, and shut the office door.
I wiped no surface. I adjusted no mirror. I left the passenger seat exactly where Eden had it, four notches back, which would put Jess’s knees against the dash and make her ask me to move it. There was no reason for that except possession, and I did it anyway.
The jacket had hung on the hook beside my bunk since Jess refused it.
When I lifted it, one of Eden’s hairs was caught under the collar, long and dark red against the black.
It could have been there since the Saturday of the fundraiser, when I took the jacket out of our bedroom, or from any night she rode home in it.
I wound it around my finger and stopped, and unwound it, and dropped it in the laundry bin, and carried the jacket out to the yard.
Jess met me by the vehicles at nine in dark jeans and a gray sweater despite the heat. The jacket was folded on the passenger seat where I had put it before church. She stopped short of the open door.
“I told you I wouldn’t wear that.”
“You don’t have to.” The watcher needed it visible, not on her body. “It stays in the truck.”
“That wasn’t the deal.” Her lawyer came around the follow car and Jess held up a hand and kept the refusal her own. “You said no jacket.”
I remembered the exact conversation, and I hated how fast I had rewritten it. She had said she wouldn’t wear it. I had agreed to no contact and treated every inch beyond that as mine. “It goes in the back.”
“It goes nowhere near me.”
Without leather in the frame the proof weakened, and I had two hours to fix it. “Jax puts it in the lead SUV where the gate camera catches it. You don’t touch it.”
Her lawyer wrote the change onto her copy. I carried the jacket to Jax, who looked at it, then at Eden’s house, and put his hands on the roof of the SUV instead of taking it.
“Why does this have to ride separately?”
“The source watching the road expects it.” I heard the sentence after it reached him.
Jax straightened up. “What source.”
“The contact who warned us Dez was tracking Jess.” A real man, a false purpose. “I want him to see we’re moving her under full protection.”
Jax took the jacket, laid it over the SUV’s passenger seat, and then walked twenty feet into the yard, turned his back to the vehicles, and called Bear on the handheld.
He kept the convoy standing for ten minutes with three engines running.
I stood at my own door and counted them.
Nobody in that yard had ever made me wait for permission to move vehicles I had routed myself.
He came back with the radio still in his hand.
“Bear says roll. I ride the follow car, I log every stop, and you sit at that table tonight and give him a name for your source.” He held my eyes longer than he needed to.
“For the record, I told him to cancel. He wants the appointment stood up in person by nine forty, and that outranks what I want.”
Eden came out of the common hall with Leah and June before Jess got in.
Mia walked beside them with the household folder.
They stopped at the porch rail where the whole line of vehicles was visible — the guarded SUV, my truck, my jacket laid out behind glass.
Nobody had to tell her what she was looking at.
I wanted to cross the yard and say the appointment wasn’t real.
I wanted to put the photograph in her hands before Jess climbed into the seat where my wife had slept with one hand on my thigh for five years of long drives.
The engines were running. The watcher was six miles out at the closed feed store.
Silas was one report short of committing everything to Denver.
I stood beside the open door of my truck and let my wife believe I was taking another woman to see our child.
Jess got in without taking my hand. Her lawyer took the rear seat, which put a second witness in the frame. It made no difference. Eden looked at the vehicles, then at me, and her right hand closed over her left.
For five years I had watched her turn that ring when she was working something out.
She turned it in waiting rooms, and at table arguments she wasn’t allowed into.
I had spent three months comparing settings before I bought it and chosen low stones because flour and dough packed under anything taller.
She laughed when I admitted I had tested the sample in a bag of sugar.
She had worn it every day since the wedding.
She pulled it over her knuckle.
I moved before I knew where I was going. Jax caught my shoulder by the lead vehicle. I could have broken the hold and he knew it. Eden watched him hold me and handed the ring to Leah without hurrying.
“Keep it with the burner,” she said, and her voice carried the width of the yard. “I don’t want either lie in my house tonight.”
Leah closed her hand around it and looked at me over Eden’s shoulder with nothing in her face but blame. June opened the household folder and put a small envelope in it. Mia wrote the date on the front. They handled it with the care I had given a forged appointment card.
“We move now,” Jax said at my right ear. “You cross to Eden, Bear cancels the route.”