Chapter Four #2
Two blocks down, Patsy’s was already open for business.
Patsy herself wasn’t in today, but the girl running the counter was exactly the type who remembered faces and never forgot a tip, which was a problem, since I was running on borrowed cash and the toast-and-coffee special was already stretching the budget.
I slid into the booth at the back, the only one where you could see both exits and the street through the slanted blinds. The seat was patched in three places with blue electrical tape, but the foam still had a little give left.
The menu hadn’t changed since 1975. I ordered black coffee and dry toast and got a look of pity from the counter girl that she didn’t bother to hide.
I watched her in the reflection of the napkin holder: every time she bent down to refill a coffee cup, her ponytail swung in a precise arc, like a metronome keeping time for the slow march of the regulars filtering in.
They all sat at the counter. The men with hands like old tools, their voices as slow as their chewing.
At the far end, a feed delivery guy in coveralls with a name patch that read simply “Bud.” He was eating hashbrowns with the focused intensity of a man who’d done the same thing for thirty years.
Next to him, a younger man in a green John Deere cap, talking with too much energy for the hour.
It was in their conversation, the way news traveled in towns like this—not in a headline but in a relay, baton passed with every second sentence.
“—yeah, she came through around closing,” Bud said, not bothering to lower his voice. “Black Escalade, out-of-state plates. Montana plates, but rich-people ones, you know?”
“Like those white ones with the tiny numbers?” John Deere Cap asked.
Bud nodded, mouth full. “She asked about a blond guy, early twenties, said he was her cousin, but I didn’t buy it. She was too serious. Wrote it all down, too. Who does that?”
“Cops,” said the kid. “Or lawyers.”
“Or wives,” Bud countered. “Or the kind of people who get paid to track you down.”
I sipped my coffee, letting it scald the roof of my mouth just to anchor myself in the moment. I kept my posture loose, like I was half-asleep, but my eyes tracked the rhythm of the room, each face, each glance toward the door.
When the waitress brought my toast, she leaned in close. “You staying at the motel up on Route 16?” she asked, voice pitched just for me.
I shook my head. “I’m up at the feed store for a couple days. Helping out.”
She nodded, making a show of not caring.
“Had a woman come in last night. Dressed like she was headed to church. Left her card at the register and at the gas station, too.” The words were slow, precise.
“Said she was looking for her cousin, worried he was in trouble. Just thought you’d want to know. ”
I kept my expression neutral. “Haven’t seen anyone like that,” I lied, and she accepted it.
“Sure,” she said. “But if you do, you ought to tell him to lay low. She was the type that doesn’t leave without what she came for.”
She walked away. I crumbled a corner of the toast, the brittle sound as satisfying as breaking glass. The food didn’t taste like anything, but it filled the right space.
At the counter, Bud had switched topics to the possibility of a storm coming in from the west, and the kid in the cap was talking about chains on the front tires. But every few sentences the conversation looped back: the Escalade, the woman, her weird way of talking.
I took a slow scan of the room, memorizing the faces, then ran a second check through the warped glass of the window for any sign of a car that matched the description.
Nothing. Just the usual: a sedan too old for the badge to be readable, and a pickup that might have been green once but had faded into a color best described as “disappointment.”
I finished my breakfast, dropped the last of my change on the counter, and left with no tip. I could feel the waitress watch me go, but she didn’t say anything.
I took the long way back to the feed store, using alleys where I could and side streets where I couldn’t, checking each intersection twice before I crossed.
The wind was up by then, sharp enough to make my eyes water, and the clouds had started to bunch at the ridgeline, fat and gray and heavy with the promise of snow.
When I made it back to the feed store, the back door was still propped with the splinter of two-by-four I’d wedged in on the way out.
I climbed the stairs three at a time, heart not quite at panic but at least in the neighborhood.
The radiator was waiting, full of itself and clanging harder than before.
I didn’t take off my boots. I sat on the edge of the mattress, running the math again, tracing out the moves that would have to follow this one.
The Escalade meant Eleanor wasn’t in Casper anymore.
She’d closed the net, moved the search here, and if the waitress and Bud and the John Deere kid already knew about it, there were maybe twenty-four hours before someone put together my blond hair and the woman’s questions and decided to make the introduction in person.
I could go, but not far. The Subaru was still hidden a mile outside of town, parked in a copse of dead pine with a tarp thrown over it and the battery disconnected. I could run, but only with what I could carry, and even that wasn’t much.
I checked the phone. Still forty minutes, but the battery was at thirty percent and falling.
I took the photograph out again, this time holding it for longer than I should have. I traced Emilio’s face with the pad of my thumb, the cheap photo paper smudging under the touch.
I thought about Hooper, about the way he would have responded to a stranger asking questions at the diner.
He’d have made a joke, probably, or run the stranger off with a smile that looked harmless unless you knew him.
He’d have found a way to turn the attention sideways, deflect it until it lost interest and wandered away.
But I wasn’t Hooper. I was just a man in a jacket too thin for the weather, sitting on a mattress in a room that reeked of mouse poison and mold, clutching a photo like it was a lottery ticket I hadn’t scratched yet.
The radiator clanged again, louder. I closed my eyes and counted the beats, making a mental list: call the number from the card—maybe, if it was safe—gas up the car, double-check the highway, and above all, keep the phone charged enough for the final call when it was time to move.
I opened my eyes, stared at the blank wall across from me, and waited for the next knock.
* * * *
The prepaid phone was useless for anything except the one function I needed: maps.
Even then, it lagged, freezing every few seconds, sometimes zooming me out until I was looking at the entire northern hemisphere, as if the phone itself wanted to remind me that every move I made was still visible from somewhere.
I sat cross-legged on the mattress, a cup of stale water balanced between my ankles, and watched the blue dot that was me pulse in place while I tried to figure the best route north.
Four hours, give or take. The roads would be clear until the pass, then it would be slow going, two-lane blacktop and the possibility of ice.
I traced the route with my finger, then did the math on gas: at thirty-four miles per gallon and one tank left, I could make it all the way if I didn’t eat tomorrow. Maybe not even then.
I closed my eyes, pressing the phone flat to my chest, feeling the heat and the tremor in my hands. The hunger wasn’t just literal; it had taken up residence in the back of my throat, in the meat behind my eyes.
I had not expected to miss the kid, or the man, or the idea of the place. I had expected fear, relief, maybe a sense of accomplishment for having made it this far. Instead it was just hunger, sharper with every hour I waited.
I reopened the map, let the screen burn into my retinas. Black Butte Ranch was a pin, but the landscape around it was pure fantasy: the satellite images years out of date, green where there should be snow, a river that probably didn’t even flow in winter.
I zoomed in, looking for anything familiar, some proof that the ranch existed in the world and not just in Hooper’s stories. There was nothing. Just roads curling around nothing, and the long dead end that led to the old homestead.
I knew the real reason for going wasn’t to check on Emilio.
It wasn’t even about the risk of Eleanor.
It was about the possibility of being seen—not as a fugitive, or a mistake, or a pawn in someone else’s game, but as something that could survive all the way north, through the cold and the fear and the math of running.
To see if I could outlast the version of myself that Eleanor had created and that I had, for too long, believed was the only one I’d ever be.
I let the phone fall into my lap, face-down. The battery was now at sixty percent, the number a bright, blue accusation in the upper right corner. I closed my hand over it, then opened the jacket and slipped the photograph from its hiding place.
I looked at it for a long time, letting the memory of that night in Billings run through every frame. Hooper had laughed at my jokes, not because they were clever, but because he wanted to know where my mind would go next.
He had asked questions and then waited, not pretending to listen but actually listening, as if he had nothing else to do with the entire night. I’d never had that before, never even considered that kind of attention could be real.
I remembered the way the room had smelled—like plastic and old cigarettes and the ghost of cleaning products.
I remembered waking before dawn, the way my body ached, the panic already starting to crackle in my chest. I had packed my things so quietly, as if the act of staying for one more hour would make it impossible to leave.
Five weeks later, kneeling on the floor of the gas station, pregnancy test balanced on the toilet tank, I had remembered Hooper’s laugh before I remembered my own name.
I had not known what to do with that.
Now I looked at the photograph, at Emilio’s fist curled around my finger, at the set of his jaw that was too big for his face, and tried to imagine the future that didn’t end with me running. I couldn’t see it. But I wanted to, so badly it made my teeth hurt.
The radiator gave a final, desperate knock. I stood, slipping the photo back into my jacket, tucking the phone into my waistband.
I took one last look at the room. The water-stained wallpaper, the single chair, the pair of jeans still not quite dry, the smell of alfalfa and ammonia and old, spent hope. The photograph was the only thing I was taking that didn’t fit in a pocket or a glove box.
I closed the door behind me, careful not to let the knob click. The hallway was silent, the stairs cold underfoot, the alley as empty as a grave. I pulled the collar of the jacket up to my ears, hunched my shoulders, and walked the three blocks to the edge of town.
Every step was the edge of a decision, but I never once looked back.
At the tree line, where the Subaru waited like an old friend, I paused. The engine would be slow to turn over, and the heater might not work, but the car was mine, and so was the road.
I pulled up the map, let the blue dot find itself one last time, then set the phone in the cup holder and started the ignition.
North was the only direction left.
I drove with the photograph on the dash, the face of my son catching the first pale light of morning as the town disappeared behind me.