Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
MAREN
Knox opens the hood before I've finished putting my bag in the truck. Which means he already knew.
I come around to the front. He's crouched over the engine. He has already found what he was looking for and is deciding what to do about it. I lean against the grille and look down at what he's looking at.
"Brake line," he says. He doesn't look up.
I look at it. A clean cut, most of the way through. Not a wear fracture. Not road damage.
"When?" I ask.
"While we were inside."
"Someone was watching the motel."
He's already moving, pulling a tool kit from behind the back seat.
The kind that lives in a ranch truck because ranch trucks break down on roads that don't appear on maps.
He works fast and without commentary, his hands capable and strong.
I watch him and I don't offer to help because there's nothing to help with and we both know it.
"How long?" I ask.
“Not too long.”
I check my phone. No messages. I walk a slow perimeter of the lot, not because I expect to find anything, but because standing still feels like a choice I'm not willing to make.
The Conrad motel backs against a grain elevator and a two-lane that runs straight north.
Plenty of sight lines. Whoever was here had options.
When I come back, Knox is closing the hood.
"It'll hold," he says.
"For the switchbacks?"
"Yes."
"You're sure?"
He looks at me. "I'm sure."
We get in the truck, pull out of the Conrad motel lot, and drive north. I watch his hands on the wheel and think about the fact that someone in Rimrock flagged our departure this morning. Someone local. Someone who knew which vehicle, which motel, which window of time.
We've been doing this for a week. I know what it looks like when Knox is thinking through a list of names.
I'm thinking through one too.
The line cabin sits at seven thousand feet, the last five miles on a dirt two-track gone dry and washboarded in the early August heat.
Knox takes the switchbacks without slowing, the truck finding the ruts by muscle memory.
His family has been running cattle into this elevation for three generations.
He knows these roads the way I know Pondera County's precincts: not by thinking, just by being inside them long enough that they become part of you.
The mountain fills my window the whole way up. Broken Sky, riding the western horizon, its glacier catching what's left of the afternoon sun. I have lived in this county my entire life. I have driven past the turnoff to this mountain a hundred times without once wondering what's on it.
I look at it now and I don't know why it nags at me. The light, maybe. The way the glacier burns white against the rock like it's trying to be seen.
Knox pulls into a clearing, cuts the engine, and I look away from the mountain.
The cabin is timber and stone, small, tucked under a stand of Engelmann spruce with the understanding that if you have to find it, you weren't supposed to. Knox unlocks it with a key from his glove box. He holds the door and I go in.
One room. A woodstove with a cord of split pine stacked against the wall. Two narrow windows, east-facing. A kitchen counter with a propane two-burner stove and a hand pump at the sink. A shelf of canned goods.
One bed.
My stomach clenches.
The sensation is not fear. I identify it correctly and let it sit there warm between my legs, doing what it's doing. My mind drifts to his mouth on me.
"Canned goods are probably three years old," Knox says from behind me.
"Perfect. I'll die of botulism instead of getting shot."
"Better odds than the alternative," he says.
He says it so flatly I almost laugh. Almost.
"There's a root cellar."
He moves past me and starts opening cabinets with the same efficiency he brought to Vásquez's house.
Looking for something specific. I watch his shoulders under his shirt, the way he angles his body to check each corner, and I think: he searches rooms the same way he reads a person.
Fast, thorough, remembering what doesn't fit.
I put my bag on the kitchen counter and start checking the canned goods.
Knox finds Jacob's envelope inside a rusted coffee can in the root cellar, which is exactly where he says his family would hide something. He brings it inside and we sit at the narrow kitchen table in the late afternoon light. He reads while I look over his shoulder.
Partial financial records. Six months of payments from a numbered account I don't recognize into a shell company I do, and it takes me thirty seconds to place the name from a corporate filing I reviewed three weeks ago in a different context entirely.
Sullivan Transport leased warehouse space from that company in 2018.
I don't say this out loud. I take a photo of the page with my phone and say nothing.
Jacob's handwriting is cramped and fast, a man writing like someone might take the page before he finished.
Another McKenna reference. Coordinates that might be an airstrip or might be a drop point.
A name with three letters circled twice and then scratched out so hard the pen went through the paper.
Knox's forearm is warm against mine where we're both leaning over the table. I don't move away from it.
"He was scared," I say.
"He was careful." The distinction matters to him. I can hear it. Jacob was his, and Knox is adjusting something inside his chest to account for this.
We don't say anything else about it. Jacob isn't answering his phone and his handwriting is on a page hidden in a rusted can at the end of a two-track, and those two facts sit between us on the table like a third person.
The storm arrives without announcement.
One minute the spruce canopy is still and the next the wind hits the cabin walls and the temperature outside drops fifteen degrees in the time it takes me to walk to the window. Then the rain, hard and horizontal, the kind that comes off the mountain in a dark cold front.
Knox is already at the woodstove.
He builds the fire fast, effortlessly, with the same hands that slipped under the water at the South Fork and cleared a basement in Conrad a few hours ago. The same hands. I watch them work and I don't look away.
My phone shows no signal. I hold it toward the window. Still nothing.
"Creek crossing will be gone in an hour," Knox says. He doesn't look up from the woodstove.
"How long until we can drive down?"
"Until morning, minimum. Might be two days if it keeps up."
I look out the east window at the rain coming down in sheets. Then I look at the bed.
"I'll take the floor," Knox says.
I turn back around.
"Don't be ridiculous. You’re injured.”
He doesn't reach for the out. He just looks at me with those bottomless grey eyes. He must be more exhausted than I realize. It has been a hell of a twenty-four hours.
We eat canned soup heated on the propane burner and he finds a bottle of decent whiskey in the back of the root cellar. Neither of us says what we're not saying, which is that this is the first time in seven days we've been anywhere without a clear exit and neither of us is afraid of that.
Knox is the only other person here. The storm has locked us in until morning. I have no cell service and no way out and I am not afraid.
What I am has no clean name. I leave it where it is.
He lifts his shirt so I can check the bullet wound.
Doesn't ask, doesn't announce it, just pulls the hem up and turns his left side toward the lamplight.
The stitches are holding. Four inches of shallow damage across the ribs, already closing.
I run two fingers along the edge of the work and his stomach contracts under my touch, a hard involuntary pull, and he goes absolutely still the way he goes still when he's deciding whether to close a distance.
He doesn't close it. He lets me check.
"It's fine," I say.
"I know."
I leave my hand where it is for two more seconds, then I take it back.
He lowers his shirt, takes a drink of whiskey, and looks at the woodstove.
"You're going to do something with that," he asks. "The thing you found in Jacob's records?"
"What thing?"
"The thing you photographed while I was reading." He doesn't look at me. "The shell company."
I don't answer right away. Let the fire do some talking for me.
"We leased space from them," I say. "2018. It probably means nothing."
"Probably."
"But I'm going to look into it."
"I know."
"And I'm not going to tell you what I find until I know what I have."
He looks at me then. "I know that too."
Two people from two families trained to work information before they share it. We have spent a week pretending that's a problem when it is just who we are.
"I want to tell you something," he says.
I wait.
"I'm going to get this wrong. Not the investigation." He turns the whiskey glass in his hand. "The rest of it. I've already gotten parts of it wrong and I'll get more wrong before this is done."
"I know," I say.
"I'm not asking you to forgive that preemptively."
"Good, because I wouldn't."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile exactly. Something more honest than a smile.
"But I'm not going anywhere," he says. "That part I can tell you without getting it wrong."
I look at him across the narrow table, in the firelight, with the storm hitting the cabin walls and Jacob's handwriting still spread between us.
"Come to bed," I say.
It's not a move. It's not a relapse, it's not adrenaline, and it's not the fog of danger burning off into want.
It's an invitation. Simple, deliberate, mine.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he puts down the whiskey glass.
He comes.
The bed is narrow and the sheets smell like cedar and the woodstove throws enough heat that the room is warm by the time he crosses it.