Chapter 6
SIX
KNOX
My chest is against her back. Her face is turned just enough that I can see the line of her jaw, the tension in it, and my mouth is at her ear and I can feel every breath she takes move through her body and into mine.
The engine idles outside. I'm listening for doors, for footsteps, for the sound of someone deciding whether to come in.
What I'm doing is watching the small gold hoops in her ears, thin as wire, catching the light through the cracked window.
Watching the fine curled hairs at the base of her neck that her ponytail missed, dark auburn against pale skin, close enough that if I moved an inch they'd brush my mouth.
I don't move an inch.
I can't stop tracking the way her head fell back when I put my lips to her ear and said don’t move. The fact that, when I said it, her hips shifted back into me, slight, maybe unconscious, maybe not, like her body answered before she could stop it.
She knows I'm hard. There's no version of this where she doesn't know. She hasn't moved away from it. Hasn't moved at all.
Neither have I. Professional reason: any sound telegraphs our position.
Real reason: my hand is on her hip and her back is against my chest and I already know what she feels like with nothing between us.
That knowledge is making it considerably worse, and I am not capable of stepping away from this right now.
I have never in my life not been capable of something.
The engine revs. Tires bite gravel. The sound retreats north and keeps going until it's gone.
I step back.
Maren doesn't turn around immediately. Puts one hand flat against the wall and breathes. I watch those curled hairs at the back of her neck, her shoulders rise and fall twice, and then I stop watching because I can't afford what happens next if I don't.
I cross to the window. A dark pickup, no plates visible, taking the bend at the end of Robbie Vásquez's road faster than the road wants. I clock the truck body, the brake lights flaring and gone, the way it fishtails on the gravel without the driver lifting off the gas.
Confident. Familiar with these roads.
Local.
"Gone?" Maren asks.
"Moving."
I'm already at the door.
She's two steps behind me when I go through it. She doesn't ask permission and doesn't wait to be invited. That's the thing about Maren Sullivan nobody warned me to account for. I expected to have to manage her in a crisis and what she actually does is keep up.
She pulls her keys from her pocket and tosses them across the hood without breaking stride.
I catch them. She rounds to the passenger side and gets in.
I take the wheel and pull out before her door is fully shut.
She braces one hand on the dash, and we hit the road in time to see the truck crest the rise north of us and drop out of sight.
No complaint. No commentary. She watches the road the same way I do, checking mirrors without being asked.
Four miles north, we've lost it.
I slow at the intersection. Two directions. Both empty. The Rocky Mountain Front rises hard to the west, the upper ridges already lit under the July sun.
"Left goes up into the hills," Maren says. "Right loops back to the highway."
"Left," I say.
"Because?"
"Because right is the rational choice. And whoever just cleared that house isn't thinking rationally."
She considers this for one beat. "You're saying panic drives uphill."
"I'm saying guilty men don't take the highway."
"You say that like you know a lot of guilty men."
"I know a lot of men."
She looks at me. I watch the road. After a second she makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh and faces forward and I hold onto it next to every other sound she's made in the last two hours that I have no business holding onto. I'm starting to think I'd do this all day if she'd let me.
I turn left.
The road narrows within half a mile, asphalt crumbling to gravel, and then we lose it entirely.
The tracks fade into a rutted path that switchbacks up through pine and scrub.
I push the truck as hard as the terrain allows.
The air coming through the vents is already warm, the hills baking even this early.
Maren has her phone out, checking signal.
She gets one bar and loses it. Checks again.
"Nothing," she says.
"Put it away."
"I'm mapping the route."
"I know the route. Eyes up."
She puts it away. Then: "You've driven this."
"Parts of it."
"Which parts?"
"The useful ones."
She turns and looks at me with an expression I feel in my back teeth. "Knox. What exactly does Blackwater Ranch produce that needs a back route to Canada?"
"Cattle."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
She holds my gaze for three full seconds, which, in my experience, is how long Maren Sullivan gives a man to tell the truth before she decides to find it herself. Then she faces forward.
I stop at the top of the grade where the rough dirt road gives out entirely.
Kill the engine. Roll down my window. July heat floods in, dry and smelling of pine resin and dust and baked earth, and somewhere beyond the ridge, faint and fading, the sound of a diesel coasting downhill on the other side.
"He went over," I say.
"There's a service road on the other side of this ridge. Connects back to the highway twelve miles north." Maren says it quietly, working through something. "Robbie drove freight through this corridor for eleven years. He knows every back road between here and the border."
"So do you, apparently."
"I manage public relations for a trucking company." A beat. "Some of us learn the routes to know our business. Some of us learn them for other reasons."
She gets out of the truck without waiting for my answer. I watch her start up the last slope through the windshield and think that Maren just called me a criminal to my face and somehow made it sound like foreplay.
I get out and follow her.
We go over the ridge on foot, single file, Maren picking the line through the pines without asking me to lead.
The undergrowth grabs at my shirt and tears at the knee of my jeans.
She moves through it like she's done it before, arms up, chin down, finding gaps I would have gone through by force.
By the time we reach the bottom we're both sweating, the July air thick and still in the trees, and I am acutely aware of every place her shirt is sticking to her skin and the fact that I need to stop being acutely aware of that.
At the bottom of the slope the service road runs east-west through a shallow ravine.
Morning light cuts through the pines in long flat angles, catching the dust still settling on the road.
We find the truck a few yards west. Driver's side door hanging open, front end nosed into the ditch, not from losing control, but from someone who pulled off the road in a hurry, got out, and left it.
Maren moves toward it. I catch her arm.
"Wait."
She waits. I go first, gun out, and clear the vehicle quickly. Empty. I open the driver's door fully and look inside.
Blood on the seat. Not a pool, a smear. The same story as the floor of Robbie's living room.
Someone bleeding but mobile, someone who got out of this truck and kept moving.
A flannel shirt balled up on the passenger seat, one sleeve soaked through at the cuff.
On the floor, a to-go cup from Nell's Diner in Rimrock on its side, coffee soaked into the mat around it.
I crouch and press two fingers into the soaked mat.
“Still warm.”
Maren appears at my shoulder. She's close enough that I can feel the heat off her arm and smell the pine coming off her hair.
I want to push her against the side of this truck and put my mouth on her.
I stay crouched an extra second because standing up means being closer and I've had enough close for one morning.
"That's Nell's," she says. "They open at six." She checks her watch. "Two hours ago, maybe more."
"He didn't come here to search the house." I straighten. "He came to check on it. Pulled up, saw your truck in the driveway, and didn't even kill the engine."
Maren goes quiet, processing. "Someone sent him to watch."
"Or he's been watching on his own."
"Either way, we flushed him." She steps back and looks at the road, at the tracks in the dirt, the way the door swung wide and stayed. "He stopped deliberately. That ditch is theater."
I look at her.
"What?" she says.
"Nothing."
"You're doing the thing where you recalculate me."
"I don't do a thing."
She's already moving to the truck bed, running her hands along the sidewall. I watch her work and feel something shift behind my sternum that I don't have a name for and don't want one.
She finds the seam before I do.
Her fingers stop on the magnetic catch and she looks up at me over the bed rail with an expression that is equal parts satisfaction and fury. She pulls it.
The compartment opens. Two feet wide, six inches deep, running the length of the bed behind the wheel wells.
Empty.
"Well," she says.
"Yeah."
She stares into it for a long moment. The July heat presses down through the pine canopy and a bead of sweat traces her temple.
She reaches up and wipes it away with the back of her wrist. I watch her do it and think about her heat through my shirt and the forty-five seconds I stood there not moving.
"Knox." Her voice has changed.
She's crouched at the passenger side of the truck, looking at something in the dirt. I come around.
In the dirt beneath the passenger window, half-buried where the truck's front end rode down into the ditch: a notebook.
Small. Brown faux leather, water-stained, the kind you buy at a gas station for three dollars.
It must have slid off the seat when the nose went down, came out through the gap where the window was cracked.
Scuff mark where the cover hit the ground.
Maren picks it up.
I keep my face neutral. My pulse does not stay neutral.