6. Justice #2
But Lorraine isn't the problem. Cedar Bend has eight hundred and twelve people and not all of them would refuse a brick of hundred-dollar bills from a polite stranger in a clean suit.
All it takes is one. One person who saw the headlights of a beat-up sedan on the mountain pass.
One person who noticed my tow truck heading up the road with a car on the hook.
One person who remembers that Justice Spanks never tows vehicles to his property because Justice Spanks doesn't bring anything to his property. Ever.
I slide the coffee cup on the table. Leave two dollars on the saucer.
Walk out into the cold.
The drive back up the mountain takes eleven minutes. I do it in eight. The diesel engine roars on the switchbacks and the rear tires bite into frozen gravel and loose shale and I don't ease off the accelerator until I hit the first gate.
Steel. Eight feet. Reinforced with angle iron I welded myself.
The lock is a Medeco deadbolt housed in a hardened steel shroud that would eat a bolt cutter for breakfast. I unlock it, pull through, lock it behind me.
Drive two hundred yards uphill to the second gate. Same process. Lock. Drive. Lock.
The third gate sits where the road curves out of sight from the valley below. This one has no lock. It has a chain with a spring-loaded pin that can only be released from the inside. I get out. Release the pin. Pull the truck through. Reset the chain. Walk back to the cab.
Three gates. Three locks. One road in, same road out.
A quarter mile of dense spruce forest on either side with ground cover thick enough to slow a man on foot to a crawl.
Motion sensors at fifty-yard intervals along the tree line, pressure plates buried under the gravel at each gate, and two trail cameras with cellular uplink that send photos directly to the tablet on my kitchen counter.
None of it is enough.
I pull up to the A-frame and kill the engine. Sit in the silence for ten seconds. Fifteen. The ticking of the cooling engine is the only sound.
Professional operators with corporate-blind plates and banded cash and shoulder holsters.
This isn't a concerned father sending a private investigator with a business card and a polite inquiry.
This is extraction. Locate, isolate, retrieve.
They'll canvass the town today. Tomorrow they'll start working the roads. By Thursday, somebody will talk.
I need to tell her.
The deadbolt turns from inside before I reach the porch. She heard the truck. She's been listening. The door opens six inches and her face appears in the gap, brown eyes scanning me from boots to hairline, cataloguing. Making sure I'm whole. Making sure I'm alone.
"Just me."
She opens the door the rest of the way. Steps aside. She's still wearing my flannel and the sweatpants and she's found my wool socks somewhere, thick gray ones bunched around her ankles. Her hair is pulled back with a rubber band she must have found in a kitchen drawer.
She made soup. I can see the pot on the stove, lid slightly ajar, a thin ribbon of steam curling toward the ceiling. She cooked in my kitchen while I was gone. Used my food. My stove. My pans.
I want to come home to this every day for the rest of my life.
The thought arrives uninvited and fully formed and I crush it between my back teeth.
"Sit down."
Her face changes. She reads the tone the way prey reads a change in wind direction. Instant. Total.
"What happened?"
"Sit."
She doesn't sit. She stands in the middle of my living room with her arms wrapped around herself and those doe eyes locked on mine and she waits. Patient. Terrified. Already bracing.
I put the hardware store bag down. Pull off my jacket. Hang it on the hook. Every motion is a delay and I know it and she knows it and the silence between us is growing teeth.
"There are two men in town. Black Suburban. Suits. They have your photo and they're showing it around with a stack of cash attached."
All the color leaves her face. Not gradually. All at once. Like someone pulled a plug.
"They're offering a reward for your location. The diner waitress turned them down. Won't be the last person they ask."
Her mouth opens. Closes. Her hands tighten on her own arms until the knuckles go bone-white.
"How much?"
"Enough."
She nods. Small, mechanical motion. Her eyes have gone somewhere far away, somewhere I can't follow. I've seen that look before. On soldiers. On men who've just been told the perimeter is breached and the evac isn't coming.
"Nobody in Cedar Bend knows you're here. I towed your car after dark and the road isn't visible from the main highway. But that window closes. Two, three days. Maybe less."
"Okay."
"I'm locking down. Full blackout. No lights visible from the exterior after sundown. No smoke from the chimney during daylight hours. Propane heat only. You stay away from windows. If the alarms trip, you go to the storage room, same as before. You don't come out until I open that door."
"Okay."
"Emilia."
She blinks. Focuses. Comes back from wherever she went.
"They won't find you here."
Something breaks in her expression. Not into tears. Into resolve. A quiet, terrible kind of clarity that settles over her features like frost forming on glass.
"Thank you for telling me."
She turns and walks down the hallway toward the guest room. Measured steps. Steady. I hear the door click shut.
I stand in the kitchen and gaze at the pot of soup she made me on my stove and I listen to the muffled sounds filtering through the thin hallway walls. Drawers opening. Fabric rustling.
I'm moving before I make a conscious decision.
The guest room door is closed. I don't knock. I open it.
She's standing by the narrow bed with the plastic grocery bag I gave her that first night.
The one she keeps her ruined silk blouse in.
Her shredded loafers. She's folding the flannel.
Taking it off. Pulling it over her head with careful, deliberate movements, and underneath she's wearing nothing but a thin white undershirt that clings to every line and curve and I can see the shadows of bruises along her ribs through the fabric.
She folds the flannel into a neat square. Places it on the bed.
"I'll leave the sweatpants on the bathroom hook."
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Packing." She examines the loafers. The soles are split and the leather is water-stained beyond repair. She puts them in the bag anyway. "I can walk to the highway. Hitch a ride going south. They'll be watching the northern routes out of town."
"Put the shirt back on."
"You've done more than anyone has ever done for me." She won't look at me. Her hands are steady now. Surgical. Folding, sorting, placing. "I won't repay that by getting you killed."
"Nobody's getting killed."
"You didn't see what they did to the last person who helped me. A woman at a rest stop outside Denver. She let me use her phone. They found her car on the highway the next day. Windshield smashed. She was in the hospital for a week."
She zips the bag. Hefts it. It weighs nothing because she owns nothing.
Then she turns to face me.
Her eyes are wet but the tears haven't fallen.
She's holding them through sheer force of will, chin up, jaw set, and underneath the terror and the guilt and the exhaustion there is that spine of steel I keep catching glimpses of.
The one that got her out of a gilded cage and into a cash car and over a frozen mountain pass alone in the dark.
"Move."
She says it to me. Five foot three and a hundred and ten pounds, standing in my guest room in my wool socks, telling a man twice her size to get out of the doorway.