Chapter 6
six
Hazel
We leave before the sun clears the ridge.
I come downstairs to find him at the kitchen table with the drybag already sealed and a coffee waiting for me that I don't have the stomach for but drink anyway because he made it and it might be the last one we share for a while, and I am going to drink every drop.
He goes through the plan while I drink it.
Not reading from notes, just talking, low and even, his eyes moving between me and the window the way they've moved between me and every window for five days.
There's a forestry office forty minutes down the mountain.
That's the waypoint. Beauchamp will be there with two plainclothes officers and a paramedic.
We pull in slow, he gets out first, I stay in the truck until I see the signal from Beauchamp and then I come out on Rafe's side.
"Why your side?"
"Because I'll be between you and the road."
I drink my coffee.
He tells me that inside, I ask for Michel Beauchamp first and I hand over the laptop and the written statement and I answer everything they ask for as long as I want to answer it.
"I want to do all of it today," I tell him.
"I know." No argument, no qualification. Just: I know.
"The Belize shell, the Liechtenstein intermediary, the placement dates, It's all in the statement but I can walk them through it myself."
"Then walk them through it."
I look at my coffee. "And after that. Where do I go?"
"Safe house first, RCMP-managed. Beauchamp will have more detail than I can give you. Could be a week, could be a bit longer, depends how fast the Crown moves on the arrest." He pauses. "It won't be long. Once Voclain is in custody the threat is gone. You won't need to hide."
"You actually believe that?"
"I believe what's on that laptop ends him. Yeah."
I nod. The logic is sound and the logic does nothing for the thing that's been sitting behind my sternum since I woke at four and found him already dressed, already at the window, the rifle leaned against the wall beside him. The truck already facing the gate.
Today the world that had been waiting outside the gate was going to come through it one way or another.
He reaches across the table and covers my hand with his, thumb pressing against the gauze on mine the same way he did five days ago at my grandmother's table. Just for a moment. Then he stands and picks up the drybag.
"Tell me the signal," he says.
"Palm up, then dropped."
"And if something feels wrong before we get there?"
"I drop. You deal with it."
He nods, but his smile is grim. "Let's go."
We don't talk much on the drive down. The road is gravel and shadow and thin mist, spruces pressing in on both sides, and Rafe drives with one hand easy on the wheel and his eyes moving in that rotation I've memorized and I watch him do it and try to hold onto the feeling from yesterday afternoon.
I want to stay inside that feeling for as long as I can before the day takes over.
I press my bandaged thumb into the strap of the canvas pack and watch the road and breathe.
A kilometer from the gate Rafe slows the truck without saying anything, his eyes going to the left shoulder of the road, a turnout in the alders, staying there a half-second too long. Then back to the road, face giving nothing, and my stomach drops through the floor.
He's seen something. Or the absence of something. Either way it's wrong.
A hundred meters later he eases off the gas and coasts and pulls right through a gap in the alders, the truck nosing into the bush, and stops.
Engine off.
"Down."
I'm already moving. Footwell, pack against my chest, head below the dash. The truck goes cold immediately and the windshield starts fogging from my breath and my heart is so loud I can feel it in my throat.
"There was a vehicle in that turnout," he says, quiet and even.
"Not Beauchamp's. Someone's come in behind us on the road, which means Voclain found the spur faster than I expected.
" He doesn't say I'm sorry. He doesn't say I should have seen this coming.
He just says: "I'm going to deal with it. Twenty minutes. Don't come up."
"Rafe."
"If I'm not back, reverse out to the gate and go up to the cabin. Beauchamp has my coordinates. He'll come to you." His hand rests on the top of my head for just a second, warm and steady through the flannel. "Don't come up until I say."
The door opens and closes and he's gone and the silence that follows is enormous.
I press my face into the pack and close my eyes and count.
One. Two. Three.
He went left, uphill, into the trees. His footsteps disappeared inside the first few seconds and I know that's deliberate and it doesn't help.
The cold comes up through the floor. The windshield fogs.
The mountain is completely silent in the way that mountains are silent when something is moving through them.
Thirty. Forty. Fifty.
I press my thumb into the bandage until the pain is sharp and specific and focus on that.
I think about the kindling splitting along the grain yesterday, clean and sudden.
I think about his hand brushing cedar dust off my cheek.
I think about last night, his forehead against mine, his voice certain and low in the dark.
I said yes and I meant it down to my bones and if he doesn't come back out of those trees I will have spent five days with a man I loved completely and said it once, in a moving truck, which is the most I will have managed.
One hundred twenty. One hundred eighty.
The job is twelve hundred seconds. If I get to twelve hundred he hasn't come back and I drive, and I do not think about what that means, I just drive, because it's what he asked for and he has never asked me for anything that wasn't the right thing.
Two hundred. Two hundred forty.
I think about all the things I should have said and didn't. All the moments over the last five days when I held the words back because I told myself I was being careful, and what I was actually being was a coward.
I can reconstruct three years of financial crime from a rounding error in an offshore account but I could not look at a man standing in a doorway and say four words without waiting until he was bleeding.
Two hundred eighty. Three hundred.
Two sounds, close together. Flat, hard, specific.
My hands go over my ears before I've decided to move them. I press my face into the pack and bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste blood and I do not move because he told me not to move.
Three hundred sixty. Four hundred. Four hundred twenty.
Silence.
Four hundred forty.
The silence is worse than the shots were because the silence has room for every terrible probability and I am running all of them, I cannot stop, my accountant brain building the columns I do not want —
Boots on gravel. One set. Heavy. Slightly uneven.
The driver's door opens.
"Up."
His voice. The same voice, low and even and alive, and my whole body goes boneless with relief.
I come up.
He's in the driver's seat, hand pressed against his right side, jacket dark and wet beneath it and getting worse.
My hands fly to him and pull back because I know better than to touch a wound I don't understand but every part of me is screaming.
"It's meat," he says, steady in a way that costs him. "Through and through. Missed the kidney. I can drive but I'd rather not."
"I'll drive."
"Yeah."
We swap. I come around the front of the truck, he slides across the bench, and I get in and adjust the mirror with shaking hands and put both of mine on the wheel.
"Volcai’s men found us. There were two of them," he says, before I can ask.
"One on the road, one in the treeline. The one in the treeline got lucky before I found him.
The other one won't be a problem." States it like a cold fact.
"Beauchamp will have people on the mountain within the hour. It's done."
"Okay," I say, because it's the only word I have.
"Creek at the culvert. Take it slow."
He talks me through every turn. The landmarks, the junction name, the sign for the forestry office, how far past it to pull in. I take it all in and hold it while the rest of me monitors his breathing and his color and the way his hand stays pressed against his side without trembling.
"If I go under, you keep driving."
"Don't."
"Hazel." His hand finds my arm, briefly, warm and certain. "You keep driving."
"Okay. I will. I promise."
I keep both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and I talk to him because his eyes sharpen on my voice when I talk and I need them to stay sharp. And then, because I have run completely out of patience with careful timing, I say it.
"I love you." My eyes stay on the road and my voice stays level and it still costs me everything.
"I've been trying to find the right moment for two days and there isn't one, there's just this one, so.
I love you. I've loved you since you decided I was worth more than your contract. I need you to stay awake."
He's quiet long enough that I check — a quick look, his chest moving, his eyes open.
"I know," he says. Quiet. Rough at the edges in a way that has nothing to do with the wound. "Because I love you too." A pause, shorter than the first. "Drive, Hazel."
I drive.
The color drains from his face and his breathing gets careful and his eyes lose focus and find it again with effort, and I talk to him through all of it, and he talks me through the last two turns, and the trees open up at the forestry junction exactly where he said they would.
The gravel lot has two unmarked cars and a paramedic already moving at a run, and Beauchamp. He’s older than I expected, a kind face, exactly the face Rafe would trust. We make eye contact and he raises his hand.
Palm up. Then dropped.
Rafe sees it. I feel him settle. The tension drops from his shoulder.
"Good girl," he says.
Then his eyes close.
I put the truck in park. I get out on the signal.
I walk between Beauchamp and the paramedic and I hand over the laptop and the statement and I tell them everything — the Belize shell, the Liechtenstein intermediary, the placement dates, all of it — in a voice that doesn't sound like mine but doesn't stop, while behind me they load him into the ambulance and the doors close and it pulls away.
I watch until I can't see it anymore.
Then I sit down on the gravel because my legs have made their own decision, and Beauchamp crouches beside me and says something I don't immediately hear, and after a moment I say it out loud, to the mountains and the morning and no one in particular:
"He's going to be fine."
I don't know yet if it's true. But I have spent two weeks running from things and I am done with that now, so I'm going to say it like it is until it becomes true.
“He's going to be fine.”