5. CHAPTER FIVE #2
Pine Creek at mid-morning was what it always was: quiet, slow, a place where the buildings had more history than the people living in them.
A postal truck idled outside the diner, engine running, nobody behind the wheel.
An elderly man swept the porch of the feed store with a broom that had seen better decades.
Two women chatted outside the grocery, their breath fogging in the cold air, mittened hands gesturing at nothing much.
Normal. Routine. A scene that looked exactly like what it was until you looked for what wasn’t there.
The dark green sedan sat across from the feed store.
Parked at the curb, engine off, windows tinted just dark enough that the interior was a guess from the outside.
Ohio plates. Partial visible: 728. The rest was mud-smeared or deliberately obscured—hard to tell from this distance, and getting closer would have meant being noticed, which defeated the purpose.
No movement inside. No exhaust. No driver visible through the glass.
The sedan had the ominous stillness of a vehicle that was waiting for something, and in my experience, vehicles that waited rarely waited for anything good.
I clocked it without breaking stride. One glance, catalogued, filed.
My pace didn’t change. My hands stayed at my sides.
The silver rings caught the morning light and threw it back dull, and I pushed through the hardware store’s door without looking at the sedan again because looking twice was how you got made, and getting made in a town this small meant the sedan would be gone by the time I came back out, and I needed it to stay right where it was.
The hardware store smelled the way hardware stores always smelled: sawdust, metal, the faint chemical tang of solvents from the back room.
I moved through the aisles with the list in my head,propane canisters, weatherstripping, the specific size of wood screw I needed for the bedroom shutter that had started to sag,and gathered each item without pausing to consider alternatives.
The counter clerk was the same one from last time.
Sixty if he was a day, hands mapped with veins that stood proud against thin skin, eyes that had seen enough of the world to know when a man wasn’t from around here and when that wasn’t any of his business.
“Been up at the old Harlan property?” he asked, ringing up the propane with fingers that knew the register without looking.
“Just passing through.”
He nodded. Didn’t press. The total came to forty-three dollars and change. I laid two twenties and a five on the counter, accepted the coins without pocketing them,coins jingled, and jingling carried,and took the bag with a nod that said exactly as much as his had.
The grocery on Cedar Street was next. Smaller than the hardware store, barely a step above a convenience mart, the shelves stocked with inventory that suggested the owner bought whatever the distributor sent and didn’t ask questions.
I picked up coffee, canned tomatoes, and the dried beans Hannah had been working through at a rate that meant we’d be out by week’s end.
The bread flour she’d mentioned running low on sat on the bottom shelf in a ten-pound sack that had probably been there since the last snow.
I lifted it one-handed, feeling the heft, and set it in the basket alongside everything else.
The last aisle held household items nobody in Pine Creek bought unless something had broken.
Duct tape. Light bulbs. A peg hook near the register with three pairs of work gloves hanging by their loops.
Insulated, leather-palmed gloves, the practical sort that actually kept your hands warm when the temperature dropped below freezing, which it did most nights on the mountain and showed no sign of stopping.
Hannah had held these exact gloves two days ago.
I’d watched her pick them up, turn them over, run her thumb along the leather palm, and set them back on the hook without a word.
Her hands had been red from the cold pump water.
The skin at her knuckles had looked raw.
She’d set the gloves down and moved on to the flour, and I’d stood at the end of the aisle pretending to decide between two brands of coffee I had no intention of buying.
I picked up the gloves. Size small. Turned them over once, feeling the weight of the insulation, the flexibility of the leather.
Dropped them into the basket without ceremony and carried everything to the register where the same woman who’d been there last time rang me up without looking up from her magazine.
The route back to the truck took me through the alley behind the diner.
Narrow, gravel-packed, lined with dumpsters that smelled of yesterday’s grease and coffee grounds.
I walked it at an easy pace, the grocery bag in my left hand, my right hanging loose at my side where it could reach the knife in my boot if the alley decided to turn hostile.
It didn’t. The alley stayed an alley. The green sedan stayed parked across from the feed store, engine still off, windows still tinted, no movement visible through the glass.
I sat in the pickup for four minutes. Engine off.
Keys in the ignition but not turned. The rearview mirror showed me Ridgeline Avenue in reverse: the hardware store’s front window, the feed store’s porch where the elderly man had gone inside, the green sedan sitting patient at the curb like it had all the time in the world.
Four minutes was long enough to confirm the sedan wasn’t leaving and short enough that sitting longer would have drawn attention.
Attention was the one thing I couldn’t afford, not with Hannah in the cabin and two burner phones on a scarred table and a client who wanted proof I couldn’t give him.
I started the engine. Let it idle for three seconds,long enough to warm, not long enough to announce,and pulled away from the curb without hurrying, the same pace I’d used arriving.
The route back up the mountain added twenty minutes.
Winding roads, switchbacks that doubled back on themselves, stretches of gravel where the pavement gave out entirely.
The longer route meant more time behind the wheel and less chance of being followed, and if the green sedan had friends waiting on the main road, they’d be waiting a long time for a truck that wasn’t coming.
The mountain rose ahead. Pine and fir crowded the road’s edges, branches scraping the truck’s flanks when the curves tightened.
The grocery bag sat on the passenger seat, the insulated gloves folded on top of the flour sack where the morning light caught the leather and turned it the color of good whiskey.
I didn’t look at them. Didn’t think about why they were there.
Just drove, both hands on the wheel, eyes moving between the road and the mirrors, and watched the mountain take me back the way it always did: slow, patient, keeping its secrets to itself the same way I kept mine.
I set the grocery bags on the counter with the same economy of motion I used for everything that didn’t require ceremony.
Flour sack on the bottom, coffee on top, the gloves folded beside the beans where the morning light from the window caught them and turned the leather the same warm brown as the wood walls.
Hannah stood at the stove. Dish towel tucked into the waistband of her jeans—my jeans, technically, borrowed from the duffel and rolled at the cuffs where they pooled around her bare feet.
She turned when the bags hit the counter, wooden spoon in hand, and took in the contents in a slow, methodical inventory, checking what I’d brought against what we needed, what I hadn’t brought against what she’d expected, and finally landing on me with the same assessing look she’d given the glove hook two days ago.
Checking for tells. For the set of my shoulders, the tightness in my jaw, the hundred small ways a man who’d been doing this for twenty years might betray that something had gone wrong.
Nothing had gone wrong. The sedan was parked.
The clerk had asked his question. The gloves were on the counter.
I moved past her toward the table, dropping my keys beside the legal pad, and pulled the pad toward me without sitting down.
Standing worked better for thinking. Standing kept the blood moving, kept the body ready, kept the mind sharp in a way sitting never did.
Behind me, the soft sound of the gloves being picked up.
The rustle of leather as she unfolded them, turned them over, tested the fit against her palm.
I didn’t look. Didn’t need to. I could feel her standing there, gloves in hand, the kind of silence that meant she was deciding whether to say something or let it lie.
Most people would have let it lie. Hannah wasn’t most people.
“Thank you.”
Quieter than usual. Two words, delivered to my back with a steadiness that carried no expectation of a response.
Thanks that wasn’t asking for anything in return, not even acknowledgment, which was why it landed the way it did: square between my shoulder blades, warm and complicated and entirely her fault.
I nodded once without turning around. Didn’t trust my voice with whatever would have come out if I’d opened my mouth, and some silences were better left unbroken.
She set the gloves down,soft leather on wood, barely a sound,and turned back to the stove where a pot was simmering with garlic and the herbs she’d hung on the windowsill.