Chapter 23
Istood there for another moment, looking out over the mountains.
The fog was rolling through the valleys below like something alive, filling up the spaces between ridges the way water fills a basin.
Somewhere down there was Fontana Dam and Claire and Maggs.
Somewhere in the other direction, beyond the mountains to the northeast was Rocky Start, flooded and broken and waiting.
I turned back to Salome. She was sitting on a rock, watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Not impatient. Just observant. The way someone watches when they’ve learned that patience is the difference between living and not.
Or the way someone watches a potential target.
Because here was the thing I couldn’t shake.
I’d just spent ten minutes with a man I’d met several times who turned out to be a cartel assassin.
Louis had fooled me completely—the huffing, the oversized pack, the bumbling friendliness.
I’d missed every tell. And now, less than an hour later, I was supposed to take at face value that this woman with the scar and the cartel tattoos and the professional-grade marksmanship was the boys’ long-lost aunt?
The photo proved nothing. A picture of a woman with two kids could be sourced a dozen ways.
She knew details—Maria’s name, Carlos, the drug task force, Pike’s Satphone—but those were things the cartel would also know.
In fact, a cartel operative running a long game would know exactly those things.
Build the legend with verifiable details. Make the target want to believe.
And I wanted to believe. That was the dangerous part. The story was too good. Too clean. The sister who survived, who searched for years, who arrived just in time to save the gringo from the assassin. My training instructor would have called it a honey trap wrapped in a sob story.
But she had killed Louis. That was real.
Two rounds to the face, professional distance, professional grouping.
Then the insurance round to the back of the head.
Then she’d policed her brass. You don’t fake that.
And she’d ripped open his shirt to confirm the skull and crossbones tattoo, which suggested she already knew what she was looking for.
Inter-cartel hit? Possible. One splinter eliminating another’s operative to get to the target first. But if she wanted Pike and the boys dead, she could have let Louis finish me and followed him.
Or she could have shot me after she shot Louis.
She’d had my back for a clean thirty seconds before I’d even turned around.
None of this was conclusive. I’d seen better performances. And I’d seen good people get killed because they trusted a convincing story.
“Ready?” I asked.
“I’ve been ready for years.”
Fair enough. But ready for what, exactly?
We hiked together the rest of that day and into the evening, putting as much distance between us and Louis’ body as possible.
Salome moved through the woods like someone who’d spent time in jungle terrain, which tracked with her story.
She was quiet, efficient, and didn’t waste energy on unnecessary movement or unnecessary words.
Under different circumstances I might have appreciated the silence.
But Jackie’s voice was in my head, and Rose’s text, and Luke’s parting words, and pretty much every person I’d met on this trail telling me the same thing in different ways.
So I talked. Partly because I was trying to change. Partly because I was running an assessment.
Not a lot. I wasn’t going to turn into some chatty Cathy overnight.
But I told her about Pike. How he’d been the law in Rocky Start for decades.
How he’d taken in Reggie and Marley when they were small and raised them with Coral.
The stories Rose had told me about them.
I watched her face when I said their names.
I watched for micro-expressions, the small involuntary muscle movements that even trained operatives can’t always suppress. She gave me nothing.
I told her the boys were good. That they were loved. That Pike had done right by them.
She listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a long time.
“My sister chose well with Pike,” she finally said.
Maybe. Or maybe that was exactly what someone who’d studied the file would say.
I kept walking.
We made camp that night off-trail, tactical, no fire. Old habits for both of us. I told her I’d take first watch. She didn’t argue, which told me she understood the protocol. Or it told me she was willing to let me think I was in control.
I used the watch to think it through. The options were simple.
One: She was telling the truth, in which case I was sitting in the woods with a woman who’d been through hell and just wanted to find her family.
Two: She was cartel, in which case I was sitting in the woods with a professional killer who was using me to locate her targets.
Three: Something in between that I hadn’t figured out yet.
If it was option one, the right thing to do was bring her to Pike.
If it was option two, bringing her to Pike would get people killed.
And here was the problem I kept circling back to: I couldn’t verify her story out here.
I didn’t have the resources, the intel, or the communications.
What I did have was a man in Asheville who had known Maria personally.
Who had taken her children and raised them.
Who would know if Maria had a younger sister.
Who would know details—childhood details, family details—that no amount of cartel intelligence-gathering could replicate.
Pike was the verification.
Which meant my job wasn’t to decide if Salome was telling the truth. My job was to get her to Pike and to do it in a way that if this was a setup, I could control the situation before anyone got hurt.
I could do that. Controlling situations was the one thing I’d always been good at. Probably too good, if you asked Rose.
When Salome relieved me at 0200, I slept lighter than I had in days, which was saying something given I’d been sleeping light for weeks. My hand rested on the pistol inside my sleeping bag.
But I slept.