CHAPTER FOUR #2
The cab smelled the way I’d come to expect: motor oil, old leather, the stale mustiness of a vehicle that had carried too many things for too many years without anyone bothering to clean it.
The dashboard was cracked in three places.
The radio didn’t work, or if it did, Mustang hadn’t turned it on, and I wasn’t about to reach across and try.
The seats were vinyl, cracked along the seams, and the springs underneath had given up somewhere around the turn of the century.
I settled into the depression my body had already made over the past few days of sitting here, watching trees go by, and braced one hand against the door as Mustang put the truck in reverse and pulled us onto the gravel track that led away from the cabin.
The road down the mountain was what roads are in places nobody builds roads for: narrow, winding, more suggestion than pavement.
Gravel popped under the tires in a constant percussion that became background noise after the first mile.
Pine crowded in on both sides, dense and dark, branches scraping the truck’s flanks when the curves tightened.
No guardrails. No street signs. Just the mountain falling away to our right in a steep grade carpeted with deadfall and shale, and to our left the rock face rising sheer and moss-streaked, close enough that I could have reached out and touched wet stone if I’d been stupid enough to try.
Mustang drove the way he did everything: unhurried, precise, both hands on the wheel at ten and two.
His eyes moved between the road ahead and the rearview, checking the mirrors with a regularity that came from habit, not traffic.
Nobody was behind us. Nobody had been behind us for miles. He checked anyway.
The trees thinned. The road widened, gravel giving way to patchy asphalt that had more potholes than surface.
A hand-painted sign appeared on the right, weathered to near-illegibility: PINE CREEK, POP.
87. The number had been crossed out and rewritten so many times that the wood beneath was scored deep, a record of a town that kept getting smaller.
Pine Creek was not a town so much as a pause between stretches of nowhere.
A single main street lined with buildings that had been grand once, sixty years ago, when grand meant a different standard than it does now.
Faded storefronts. Porches with rocking chairs that nobody rocked.
A hardware store with a hand-painted sign so old the letters had blistered and peeled.
Next to it, a grocery that might have been a general store in a previous life, and across the street, a feed-and-supply with a corrugated metal roof that caught the midday sun and threw it back in blinding sheets.
Mustang parked in front of the hardware store. Killed the engine. “Twenty minutes.”
I followed him in. The bell above the door jangled, tinny and thin, and the man behind the counter looked up from his newspaper with the practiced disinterest of someone who hadn’t been surprised by a customer in a decade.
Mustang nodded at him. The man nodded back.
No words exchanged. Business conducted in the language of men who understood that silence was its own form of courtesy.
Mustang moved through the store like he’d memorized the floor plan in a previous life.
Canned goods from the shelves along the back wall—beans, tomatoes, shelf-stable staples.
A bag of flour that he lifted without looking at me, without asking if I wanted it, just added it to the growing stack in his arms with the same efficiency he applied to everything.
Propane canisters from behind the counter, handed over by the clerk without a receipt being written.
Fresh produce from a battered cooler near the door—onions, garlic, a handful of potatoes already sprouting eyes but clean enough to use.
I lingered near a rack of work boots while he settled the tab.
They were practical things, brown leather, scuffed display models that had been sitting on that rack long enough to develop a patina of dust. I wasn’t looking to buy.
My feet were cold, yes, and the socks I’d been wearing for three days straight had developed a personality of their own, but boots cost money, and I didn’t have any because I’d been taken from my kitchen at midnight in a sleep shirt and nothing else.
Mustang finished at the counter. Cash changed hands—bills, folded, passed across the wood without being counted by either party.
Then he was beside me, reaching past my shoulder for the boots.
Not the flashy ones. Not the expensive ones.
The plain brown pair, sturdy, unremarkable, built solely to keep feet dry and supported while the wearer did work that mattered. Size seven. My size. He hadn’t asked.
He set them on the counter next to the propane canisters. Added them to the total. Paid. The clerk bagged everything except the boots, which went into a box that Mustang handed to me without ceremony as we walked out.
“I didn’t ask for these,” I said.
“Your shoes are shot.”
I looked down. The shoes I’d been wearing,borrowed from his duffel, a pair of canvas slip-ons two sizes too big, held on with determination and nothing else,were indeed shot.
The sole on the right one had split along the seam.
The left was stained with something I didn’t want to identify. They were, objectively, garbage.
“That’s not the point,” I said.
He was already at the truck, loading supplies into the bed with the unfussy competence of a man who’d done this a thousand times. “What is the point?”
“The point is you can’t just—” I stopped.
The sentence died somewhere between my brain and my mouth because what was I objecting to, exactly?
That he’d noticed my feet were cold? That he’d fixed a problem without being asked?
That he’d spent money on me without making me beg for it first?
None of those things were offenses. All of them were, in their own way, considerate.
Which was the problem—consideration from a man like Mustang came wrapped in so many contradictions that my brain short-circuited trying to sort them.
He closed the tailgate. Got in the driver’s seat.
I stood beside the passenger door with the boot box in my hands and the mountain at my back and the town of Pine Creek doing whatever towns like Pine Creek do when strangers come through and leave again, which is nothing.
Nothing changed. Nothing moved. The storefronts stared with empty windows.
I got in the truck.
The drive back up the mountain was quieter than the drive down.
The gravel popped. The engine groaned on the steeper grades.
The cab smelled like new leather now, the boots releasing that clean scent of untouched leather, gear that hadn’t been broken in yet.
I held the box on my lap. Didn’t open it.
Just rested my palms on the cardboard and watched the tree line slide past the passenger window, pine and fir and the occasional flash of sky where the canopy opened up.
Halfway up, on a stretch where the road straightened enough that Mustang could take one hand off the wheel, I glanced sideways at his profile.
Jaw set. Eyes on the road. The scar along his jawline caught the light where it cut through the trees, pale against the stubble.
His hand lay loose on the wheel, those heavy silver rings dull against his skin, the tattoo on his forearm visible where his sleeve had rolled up—dark tribal ink, the pattern disappearing under the leather of his cut.
He drove with the same quiet focus he did everything, his attention wholly on the task in front of him, which was getting us back to the cabin without putting us in a ditch or drawing attention we didn’t want.
I pressed my lips together. Felt them go thin, bloodless, the way they did when I was holding back words that wanted out.
The boot box sat warm on my lap. The trees kept sliding by.
The truck climbed, and the cabin waited at the top of the mountain, and the man beside me had just bought me boots without asking and fixed my chair without mentioning it and sealed a window gap at five in the morning because he’d noticed I was cold, and none of that squared with the man who’d walked through my back door with a gun and zip ties and fifty thousand reasons to pull a trigger.
So, I held the box. Watched the trees. Pressed my lips together until the feeling subsided into a weight I could carry, and decided, without fully deciding, that I would wear the boots tomorrow, and I would not thank him for them, because thanks felt inadequate for a gift that wasn’t really about the boots at all.
Evening came slowly. Slow the way it does in places without streetlights, where dark doesn’t arrive so much as accumulate, filling the spaces between trees first, then the cabin’s corners, then the room itself until the only light left was the blue flame under the skillet and the lantern Mustang had lit and set on the table behind me.