Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Rogue
She has her wedding ring in her grasp, holding onto it like a lifeline.
I'm standing at the front window of my cabin with the front room light burning behind me, which means anybody outside who happened to be looking at my window would see my silhouette clear as a billboard, and I don't move because I don't care.
She's on her porch swing across the yard, ninety yards away through the cedar dark, and she has it in her hand.
She doesn’t do anything except just sit there and hold it.
I stand at the window and watch her sit there.
Half an hour passes. The bunkhouse goes quiet. The guitar somebody was playing earlier shuts off.
Somewhere out past the kennel, a coyote yips and another one answers back, and Hadley doesn't move.
I'm not moving either.
She finally stands up around eleven-thirty and looks at the ring one more time.
She closes her fist around it and goes inside. Within a few moments, her porch light goes off.
I'm still at the window. I think about going to her.
I think about it the way a man thinks about putting his hand on a hot stove because the heat looks pretty.
I don't. I need more time. Hell, she needs more time.
I turn back to the monitors and keep myself busy.
It's two in the morning when the surveillance file pings.
The black sedan was returned at nine forty-seven tonight.
I'm at the desk with my third energy drink and the right monitor showing me the San Antonio Hertz return lot.
The man who brought the car back paid the contract in cash and walked out the front door at nine fifty-one.
I pull the lobby footage.
He's a big man. Six-three, six-four, two-twenty in dark clothes. Wide shoulders.
The kind of military bearing a man doesn't lose even when he tries.
He's wearing a baseball cap pulled low but I can see enough of his face to work with—clean shave, square jaw, a scar across the bridge of his nose that runs at an angle that says somebody hit him with something hard a long time ago.
I pause the footage. Zoom in and stare at him.
I know this type the way a hunter knows the shape of a deer behind brush.
The firm's people always have a tell.
Sometimes it's the watch. Sometimes it's the way they hold their off hand. This one—it's the scar and the bearing both.
He's a contractor. He worked for somebody before he worked for the firm, and that somebody trained him to stand still in ways civilians don't stand still.
I open one of the old back-channels.
I don't use these anymore. Haven't in years. Phantom doesn't know I still have access.
I feed the still frame in. Add a tag with the year I left the firm. Add another tag with the firm's name, which I haven't typed in close to a decade.
I wait three minutes. The hit comes back.
Curt Hartley.
I sit back in the chair. I know that name.
Not the face. The face is older now, harder, scarred. But the name lives somewhere in the part of my head where I filed every man and woman whose roster I ever crossed paths with at the firm.
Hartley was a junior analyst when I was still on the inside.
A kid in his twenties, glasses, doughy.
The kind of analyst they put on the cold-file desk—the surveillance unit that watches ex-assets like me.
Names that were active once, then went quiet.
The cold-file desk doesn't run operations. They just keep eyes on the people the firm hasn't fully forgotten about.
He never worked an op. He read about ops. He sat in a windowless room and watched names get added and removed from the list of people the firm wanted kept track of without bothering.
I was on his desk for the last year before I left.
He never knew me, but I knew him. A decade later he's the man they sent.
That tells me one of two things.
Either Hartley's been promoted into the field—which means the firm thinks the cold-file desk needs a new generation of operator, which means me, or Hartley volunteered. Which means the cold-file desk wanted somebody who'd been studying Rogue for years and finally wanted to come collect.
Either way, the file just went hot.
I pick up the phone.
Phantom answers on the second ring. "Talk."
"The sedan came back tonight."
I hear him shift in the bed. "I know. Banshee saw it leave the county road around six."
"Banshee didn't tell me."
"Banshee told me. I was gonna tell you in the mornin'."
I rub my thumb across the corner of the keyboard, calculating the time the message must've come in. "It went back to a Hertz in San Antonio. Different fake name than last time. I ran the lobby footage."
"And?"
I lean back in the chair. "Curt Hartley. Used to be at the firm. Cold-file desk."
There’s a long silence on the other end.
I can hear Phantom breathing. I can hear Marlena breathing softly on the pillow beside him.
I can hear Cal somewhere in the background making the small wet noise infants make in their sleep.
Phantom says, "So they reopened the file."
"Looks like."
"How long you been sittin' on this?"
"A week."
Another silence. Shorter. "Don't sit on the next one, brother."
"I won't."
"Church at seven. Patched only."
"Yeah."
"You good?"
I think about the answer for a second.
I’m not, but he doesn’t need to be bothered with the bullshit in my mind.
I say, "I'm good."
"Liar."
He hangs up.
I don't sleep.
I sit at the monitors for another hour. Run Hartley through every cross-reference I still have and get next to nothing.
He's been careful, the way men who work at the firm are careful, and his digital trail is professional.
He has a P.O. box in Virginia, a numbered LLC for the rental account, and a cell phone I can ping to a tower in Llano County two nights ago and nowhere since.
He's still local. The motherfucker is still close.
Around four I get up out of the chair, pull on a fresh shirt, and head down to the kennel.
Diesel is up before I get there. The old shepherd-mix can feel things.
He's standing at the chain link with his nose pushed against the wire, his ears forward, and when I open the gate he comes out and falls into step beside me without me having to say a word.
We walk past the barn, past the round pen where the mustang is sleeping standing up.
Past the back of the bunkhouse where the kitchen light is off because Hadley isn't down yet, which means she's still in her bed in the cabin behind the bunkhouse.
I look right at her cabin.
The window in the bedroom on the left side is dark.
She's in there. She's asleep, or she's awake and not turning on a light, and I don't know which one is worse.
Diesel walks beside me without making a sound.
We go out the southern gate and walk the dirt road that runs along the western fence line for half a mile.
The morning hasn't started yet. The sky's still that flat purple. The mockingbirds will start in another forty minutes. For now it's just me, the dog, and the quiet.
I think about the way Thunder made Hadley laugh at dinner.
Open-mouthed laughing. Head tipped back. Her hand on her stomach because she was laughing so hard she couldn't stand straight.
I've never made her laugh like that.
I don't know if I'm a man who can make a woman laugh like that.
I've lived a long time without wanting something that wanted me back, and the next two weeks are gonna decide whether I get to keep that arrangement or not.
Hartley is in Llano County somewhere. The firm has decided I'm worth the trouble of waking up.
I reach the pull-off on the county road where the black sedan used to park.
I crouch down.
The tire tracks are still in the dirt from the last time Hartley sat here.
Front tires angled toward the ranch the way a man parks when he wants his line of sight clear without having to turn his head.
I run two fingers across the tracks.
Then I see the second set.
Not the sedan. Different tread. A wider tire. Truck or SUV.
Parked maybe thirty feet behind where the sedan was, set back into the brush enough that you'd miss it unless you were down on your knees looking for it.
Hartley wasn't alone.
Diesel makes a low sound in his throat.
I scratch his ear with two fingers and stand up.
I'm back at the bunkhouse by five thirty.
Hadley is at the counter with her hair down.
Her hair is never down at this hour.
She sleeps with it braided down her back the way her mother taught her, and she pulls it up before she leaves the cabin every morning. But today she didn't.
Today she walked over here with her hair loose around her shoulders, her face bare, and a set to her jaw that says she didn't sleep last night either.
She turns when she hears me come in.
Her eyes find mine across the kitchen.
She doesn't look down.
I take three steps into the room and stop at the kitchen island.
The skin where the ring used to be is pale. A clean band of color two shades lighter than the rest of her hand, narrow and bright and impossible to miss.
Garrett's ring is still on the chain at her neck. I can see the line of it through the collar of her t-shirt. But her own gold band. The one she's worn for nine years on her left ring finger isn't in her pocket.
Isn't on the chain. Isn't on her finger.
It's somewhere I can't see, and the pale strip on her finger is telling me exactly where she put it last night and where she didn't put it back this morning.
"Mornin', Hadley."
"Mornin', Rogue." Her voice is rough. She’s been quiet for a long time.
She turns to the coffee pot, pours a mug, and brings it across the kitchen to set it on the counter beside my hand.
She doesn't let go.
Her fingers are still wrapped around the handle when mine close over the top of it.
For a half second the mug is between us both—her grip and mine, her thumb a hair's breadth from my knuckle, neither of us letting go.
I close my hand around the mug. Her thumb brushes my knuckle.
It's the briefest contact I've had with another human being in close to a decade.
It's over before either of us can pretend it didn't happen.
Her hand falls away and she steps back from the counter, turning to the biscuit dough on the cutting board behind her.