Chapter 6 #2
She flips it open and I lean over her shoulder to read. Handwriting, cramped and fast, filling the pages. Columns of numbers. Initials beside each column. Dates running back two years.
She turns pages steadily. The initials rotate, four sets of them, irregular intervals, amounts ranging from a few thousand to well into six figures. She pauses on a page near the middle. A column that's longer than the others. She traces the initials at the top with one finger.
R.V., she mouths. Robbie Vásquez.
I look at the page.
Near the bottom, a row of numbers unlike the rest. Not a payment amount. An account number. And beside it, two letters.
B.W.
Blackwater.
The account number is one I set up at twenty-three years old, at my father's instruction, at a bank in Calgary I've been to exactly once. I have not thought about it in four years.
I don't move. Don't tighten. Don't let a single thing reach my face.
"Do you recognize any of these initials?" Maren asks.
"No."
The lie comes out clean. It always does. That's the part I've never been able to feel good about. Not the act, the ease of it.
She keeps turning pages. I watch for the account number to reappear. It doesn't. Twelve more pages of columns, dates, and at the very back, inside the rear cover, a folded scrap of paper tucked into the binding. She pulls it out and unfolds it.
One word. Written in a different hand than the columns. Heavier pen, deliberate lettering.
McKenna.
I go still.
One second. Maybe less. But Maren Sullivan has spent years reading rooms and people, and she catches it the way she catches everything. Sideways, without looking directly at the thing she's clocking.
"You know that name?" she asks.
"No."
"Knox."
"I said no."
She looks up at me. Sunlight coming through the pines catches her face and her eyes do what they always do in direct light. They go complicated, green and brown and something gold underneath that only shows when she's deciding something. Right now she's deciding something.
"You went still," she says.
"I'm always still."
"Not like that."
I take the notebook from her hands. She doesn't fight me for it, and the way she doesn't fight me tells me she's made a decision, not a concession. Maren knows exactly what she's letting me walk away with and she's choosing to let me walk away with it for reasons I don't fully understand yet.
I tuck it into the back waistband of my jeans, against my spine.
"That's evidence," she says.
"Yes."
"You're taking it."
"I'm taking it."
"And the McKenna note?"
I hold her gaze and give her the note back.
She folds it once, puts it in her back pocket, and looks at me.
Between us in the ravine heat with blood on the truck seat, an empty compartment, and a name neither of us is ready to say out loud again.
Something cinches down like a rope pulled to the last inch before it holds or breaks.
She starts back toward the ridge.
I stand there one more second with the notebook pressing into my spine and the wire still taut in my chest.
Then I follow her.
The hike back is brutal in a way the descent wasn't, the July sun overhead now instead of filtered, the grade punishing going up. Maren sets a pace I'd expect from someone who grew up racing horses on rangeland, not scrambling ridges, and she doesn't slow down for me.
Halfway up she stops, hands on her knees, breathing hard. I stop beside her. We're both soaked through. A strand of auburn hair has pulled loose from her ponytail and is stuck to the side of her neck. I look away up the ridge.
"McKenna," she says, still catching her breath. Not asking me. Turning it over.
"Don't."
"I'm going to."
"Not on this hill."
She straightens and looks at me, sweaty and flushed and unmoved by any of it. "You went still, Knox. Like you already knew it was out there somewhere and now it's landed."
"I went still because it's an unknown variable in an active threat situation."
"You went still for one second longer than that." She holds my gaze. "I'm not going to forget it."
"I know."
We look at each other on the side of a ridge and something passes between us that is not chemistry, is not an argument, and has no name I'm willing to give it.
She turns and climbs.
I follow.
Back at her truck, she gets in the passenger side without comment and I take the wheel.
I start the engine, she hits the window button, drops the glass and tips her head back against the headrest. Her hair is dark with sweat at the temples, the ponytail fully coming loose now, and there's a pine needle caught near her ear.
I reach across without thinking and pull it out.
She goes completely still.
My hand comes back to the wheel.
The highway south opens up ahead, the rangeland shimmering flat to the east in the building heat.
I find a station and Chris Stapleton comes through low, Tennessee Whiskey, and I leave it because the quiet underneath it would be worse.
Maren looks out the open window at the mountain front along the western skyline, snow on the highest ridges even in July.
I keep both hands on the wheel. It's that or put them on her, and we are fifteen miles from Rimrock and both families are waiting. I grip the wheel, watch the road, and remind myself of all of this in sequence like a man reciting instructions he doesn't trust himself to follow.
"You want to tell me what B.W. stands for?"
She's looking at her phone when she says it. Not at me.
My jaw tightens. Half a second, no more.
"Plenty of things," I say.
"Sure." She doesn't look up. "Lots of things in that notebook."
"Plenty."
"Mm." She swipes something on her screen. "Good thing you held onto it. For safekeeping."
I don't answer.
She puts her phone face-down on her knee and looks out at the highway unspooling ahead. She is streaked with dust. There's a scratch along her left forearm from the brush on the ridge and she hasn't mentioned it once.
She found the compartment before I did. She let me take the notebook for reasons I don't understand yet. And she told me on a hillside that she's not going to forget what she saw on my face.
She turns and looks at me.
I watch the road.
"Knox."
"Yeah?"
"Drive faster."
I step on the gas.
The outskirts of Rimrock appear. She puts her phone in her bag, sits up straight, hits the window button, and reaches for the AC.
I keep both hands on the wheel and think about the fact that I have already had her, in a Sullivan Transport conference room, and neither family knows, and neither family can.
The Blackwaters and the Sullivans have maintained an uneasy peace for a hundred and fifty years.
What the heir of Blackwater Ranch did this morning is not part of that arrangement.
The notebook presses into my spine the whole way.
Outside the Sullivan Transport building I put the truck in park.
Maren collects her things, opens the door and the July heat rushes in.
She climbs out, stands in the open door, looks at me across the cab and I look back at her in the full morning light, the dust, the scratch, the gold hoops, the loose pieces of hair at her temples.
I think about how she tasted. About the sound she made when I put my mouth on her.
About the fact that I have been thinking about both of those things every mile of this drive and I intend to think about them for considerably longer.
I want her again with a focus that has nothing civilized in it and I am sitting in her truck outside her family's building and I do not move.
She closes the door.
I watch her walk inside without looking back.
Then I get out, round the hood, and leave her truck where I found it. Mine is two spaces over, where I left it this morning before any of this started.
I sit in it in the empty lot.
I pull the notebook from my waistband, open it to the page with the account number and look at it for a long time.
Two letters. One number. The thing that could end us before we've started.
I sit with that for a while.
I close the notebook.
Put it in the glove box.
Drive home.