Chapter 30
SASHA
Cash filled the doorway.
Max came in low and fast around his legs, ears up, already reading the room. I felt everything in me let go at once—not relief, there wasn't time for relief, just the hard drop of a body that had been braced for the wrong thing and got the right one instead.
"It's you," I said. "Thank God. It's you."
"Where's my brother?” Not a greeting. Cash's eyes were already moving—the kitchen, the back door, the open phone line hissing on the counter. "Fast."
I gave it to him fast. That's the one thing I know how to do.
"Craine sent Clint down the southfork trail on a gray horse to get your mother.
Cuffed her to something at the end of it, gave him ten minutes, then flew out on a helicopter, gone, west. Clint's been out there—" I didn't know how long.
My sense of time had come apart. "A couple minutes. Maybe more. He's alone."
Cash didn't waste a word on any of it.
He dropped to one knee, fast, and took the dog's head in both hands and turned it to face him. Something passed between them that had no sound in it at all.
"Max." Low. Level. "Find Clint. Go, help my brother."
The dog was gone before the word finished. Out the door, off the porch, one gold streak flattening low over the yard and through the fence rail and out into all that country, running the way a thing runs when running is the whole of what it was made for.
I watched him shrink toward the dust plume where Clint had gone.
Then, Cash was up, and moving, and he looked at me once—just once, a hard, fast read, the same read his whole family did, the one that took your measure in the time it takes to turn a page.
"Stay by that phone," he said. "Don't leave this house."
And then, he was gone, too.