10. Chapter 10
Crowe
It took a few hours and one frightened clerk to turn a carrier number into a name and a home address.
The name is Aldo Reyes. I’m sitting at his kitchen table when he comes home, and now he’s sitting across from me, trying to pour himself a drink with hands that won’t hold still.
“Take your time,” I tell him, even though I want him to hurry.
His heart is going hard enough that I could count it from the next room. Under the whiskey there’s the sharp smell of fear.
He’s in his fifties. Thick through the gut, gray in his beard, hands that have done real work. There’s a work jacket on a hook by the door with a carrier patch on the sleeve.
He didn’t scream when he came in and found me sitting here. He put his keys down slowly, looked at the door, worked out he’d never reach it, and sat down across from me. A sensible man.
Kent is leaning against the counter behind him, arms folded. Meyer is outside with the truck.
“I know why you’re here,” Reyes says.
“Tell me, then.”
“The runs.” He gets the bottle open on the third try and pours. He doesn’t offer me one. He’s worked out what I am, and that saves us both some time. “The mountain runs. That’s the only thing I’ve ever done worth sending someone like you.”
“Go on.”
“They stopped.” He drinks. “A few weeks back. No call, no letter, nothing. I ring the number I’ve always rung, and it’s dead. I drive out to the compound, and the gate’s chained. Over a year, twice a week, never missed one, never late. And then nothing, like I never existed.”
“And that scared you.”
“Mister, I’ve been sitting in this kitchen every night since, waiting for somebody to come through that door.
” He looks at me over the glass. “People like the ones who paid me don’t leave loose men lying around.
I know that. I knew it when I took the money.
So go ahead and ask your questions. Whatever you are, at least you’re asking. The next ones they send won’t bother.”
He’s right about that, and I don’t tell him so, because a scared man talks and a terrified man babbles.
“Tell me about the runs.”
“I picked up a case at the quarry compound. I never opened one. It was in the contract that I’d never open one, and for the money they paid, I’d have carried it with my eyes shut.
” He turns the glass on the table. “Twice a week I drove it up the mountain, handed it over, and drove back down. That was the whole job. Always the compound. I never collected from anywhere else. They put a second man on when they opened the new place. Never met him. I just knew my runs got shorter.”
“Which mountain?”
He tells me. He tells me the highway, the turnoff, and the private road after the turnoff.
He tells me how long the climb takes in summer and how long it takes in winter.
He’s driven it more than a hundred times, and he gives it to me in miles and grades and bad corners.
I write all of it down. By the time he stops for breath, I could drive that road tonight in the dark without a map.
I know where she is.
Over a year of her blood went up one road. She went up that same road days ago. The road ends at a valley with a house in it, and Reyes has seen the house with his own eyes.
“Describe the handover.”
“There’s a gate.” He holds his hands apart to show me.
“Stone posts, steel between them, and a gatehouse with a man in it. The man has a folder. Every single time, a hundred times, the same man knowing my face, he opens that folder, finds my truck, and checks the plate against the list. Then the gate opens, and I drive through.”
“And if your plate wasn’t on the list?”
“Then the gate doesn’t open.” He says it fast. “And don’t think you can rush it, either. I saw a truck try to follow me through once. Delivery firm, lost, nothing to do with anything. It got maybe ten feet past the posts.”
“And?”
He looks into his glass.
“The engine died. All of it just stopped—lights, radio, the man’s phone in his hand.
The truck rolled back out on its own weight, and the gate man came out, not even in a hurry, and told him to reverse down to the junction.
The driver was crying. Grown man. He didn’t know why, and neither did I, and I never asked.
For that kind of money, I kept my mouth shut a lot. ”
There it is.
Wards. Runes. Magic of some kind. It’s walled in a way that will keep out everything that’s not on that access list.
“How far past the gate did you go?”
“To the yard in front of the big house. Never inside. I hand the case to whoever comes out, they sign my sheet, I turn the truck around.” He rubs his mouth. “You don’t linger up there. Nobody has to tell you. Your own body tells you.”
Then it hits.
Heat.
Her mouth at my throat. Her teeth against the skin. The weight of her, and heat coming off her bare skin onto mine—
Her face comes with it. Clear now.
The kitchen comes back.
Reyes has stopped talking. He’s staring at me, and his glass is halfway to his mouth and not moving, and Kent has come off the counter behind him without a sound.
I lost time. A second. Maybe two.
Years of sitting across tables from men like this, and I have never once gone somewhere else in the middle of it. The subject watches your eyes the whole time. It’s the one thing they all do. And this one just watched my eyes leave the room.
“You all right?” Reyes asks. He asks it very carefully. He’s stopped moving, and his heart has picked up speed again.
“Keep talking.”
“You went—”
“Keep talking.”
He does, because he’s sensible. But he pulls his chair back an inch first, and Kent stays off the counter, and I put my hands flat on the table and keep them there.
“The vials,” I say. “Who took them from you at the house?”
“Staff. Different ones. A woman mostly, older, capable-looking. Once or twice a man in a good coat.” He shrugs. “They signed, I left.”
“Ever see anyone else?”
“Groundsmen. A cook once, having a smoke by the kitchen door.” He turns the glass again, and then he says it, easy, with no idea what it’s worth to me. “And the woman at the window, but that was months back. Last spring, maybe.”
“What woman?”
“Up on the second floor of the house. I was turning the truck, and I caught her in the mirror, watching me. Young. Dark hair.” He shrugs again.
“I figured family, or a guest. But I never saw her before that, and I never saw her after, and I remember thinking she watched me the whole way down the drive. The whole way. Until the trees cut her off.”
“When last spring?”
“Mud season. I remember because I nearly lost the truck on the second switchback, and when I got up there late, nobody said a word about it. That’s the day I saw her.”
Last spring.
Kalli was in a cell in the quarry compound last spring. I was reading her blood draws off a sheet from that same compound yesterday. So this was somebody else. A young woman, behind that gate, at a window, long before they ever brought Kalli up that road.
I don’t know what that means. I write it down anyway, because I write everything down, and things that mean nothing now sometimes mean something later.
“Did you ever carry anything up?” I ask. “Besides yourself and the empty truck.”
“Sometimes. Boxes from a medical supplier, sealed, same rules. Food came separate, different firm.” He rubs his beard. “And once, a crate from a dressmaker’s. I remember it because it was the only thing in fourteen months that had a woman’s shop name on it.”
“When?”
“Around the same time. Spring.”
“You’re sure of the timing?”
“It’s the only crate I ever carried with flowers printed on the label. I’m sure.”
Kent’s eyes come to me across the room. I don’t give him anything back.
“What happens to me?” Reyes asks.
It’s the question he’s been sitting on since I arrived, and he asks it steadily, which I respect.
“You have family?”
“A sister in the south.”
“Go and see her. Tonight.” I stand up. “The people who paid you don’t know I exist. If that changes, the only thing you ever told me was the route, and you told it to me because I broke your door. Understood?”
“You didn’t break my door.”
“Break it after we leave,” Kent says. “Make it look honest.”
Reyes looks at him, and then at me, and then he laughs, one short surprised sound, and pours himself another drink with a steadier hand.
“One more thing, for free,” he says, as we’re moving.
“The gate man’s list…it’s short. In over a year, I saw my truck go through, the medical truck, the food truck, and twice a black car with plates I didn’t know.
That’s it. That’s everything that road carries.
Four vehicles have business in that valley, mister, and you’re not any of them. ”
“I know.”
“Then I hope you’ve got wings,” he says.
He’s making a joke. He has no idea what he’s just said. I keep my face still, tell him to lock up behind us, and walk out of his kitchen.
Outside, the cold is clean after the small warm kitchen. Meyer has the truck running. Kent gets in the back without being told and waits until the doors are shut.
“We know where she is,” he says.
“Yes.”
“But there’s more, right?”
“There’s one road in. You need to be on a list to access it, and the list is four vehicles long. Everything else that touches that ground dies at the gate. Engines. Phones. Us, probably. Or worse—it announces us.”
“So we can’t drive in.”
“No.”
“Can’t walk in.”
“A delivery truck got ten feet through that gate, and everything in it died on the spot. We wouldn’t get five steps. And if that wall does to us what it did to the engine, it tells them somebody tried.”
Kent flexes the fingers of his bad arm, slow, testing the bone that’s been closing all day.
“So how do we get in?”
“I don’t know.”
He goes quiet. I’ve never said those three words on a job, and he’s been around me long enough to know it.
Meyer puts the truck in gear. “North?”
My palms pull. They’ve been pulling since the mountain, and I’ve said nothing to anyone about it, and the direction has never once changed.
“North. Drive.”