Chapter Thirty-One
WE’D BEEN UP since early morning chasing a ghost, and somewhere around five in the morning the coffee ran out and the men started in on me instead, which is how I knew we’d hit the wall for the night.
That’s what happens when a hunt stalls. You work every thread until there’s nothing left to pull, stare at the same map until the roads stop meaning anything, and eventually a table full of tired men needs somewhere else to put its attention. Usually somebody gives them an opening.
Apparently I’d given them one.
It’s been a while since anybody at that table considered me worth fucking with. Contained, they call it. Cold, when they’re being honest. Either way, you don’t waste a good joke on a man who’s only going to stare at you until you regret making it.
“I’m just sayin’.” Gearhead had his boots up on the table and a look on his face I didn’t like.
“Months of you sittin’ across from that boy grindin’ your teeth to powder.
Every. Damn. Week. Ready to put the kid through a plate glass window over a girl’s hand.
” He spread his hands. “And he shows up here in a little purple shirt callin’ himself the boyfriend, and turns out he’s about as interested in Amy as I am in you. ”
“Less,” Horse said from down the table, without looking up from the map. “Boy’s got standards.”
“My whole point,” Gearhead said, “is our man Rune spent months bein’ eat alive with jealousy over a fella who was never in the race.” He shook his head, mournful. “That’s a lot of teeth to grind over nothin’, brother. You want, I know a guy does dentures.”
“You done?” I said.
“Not even a little.”
Josie set a fresh pot down in the middle of the table and dropped into the chair beside me.
“Leave him be,” he said, and then, immediately, not leaving me be.
“Man finally crawled out of his own grave, is all. Took him months of layin’ in it first, diggin’ it deeper, tellin’ everybody the dirt was good for him.
” He looked at me sideways, warm as anything under the needling.
“Can we move the fuck on?”
“He’s blushin’!” Gearhead announced.
“I’m not — ”
“He’s blushin’, Horse, look at him! The murder monk’s gone pink — ”
“I will bury every man at this table,” I threatened, flipping them off.
* * *
Then Devil came back in from making calls and the room went straight again, because there was still a man out there.
“Nothing,” Devil said, dropping into his chair. “Nothing anywhere. It’s making me crazy.”
That was the wall we’d hit, and it was a bad one.
We had everything about Cal Rickard and none of the thing that mattered.
We had his name, his sheet, his release date, the ugly history of him.
We knew what he’d done and who he’d shared a cage with and why he was here.
What we did not have, what we could not get no matter who we leaned on, was where the son of a bitch actually was.
Because the address we had for him was a dead end. No phone in his name, no car in his name, no job, nothing that touched the grid. A man just out of five years inside knows exactly how to be nobody, and Cal Rickard was being nobody. We had eyes everywhere he’d been.
“He’s close,” Mystic said, from the corner. “Man doesn’t work a girl that patient from far off. He’s got a hole somewhere inside an hour of here. We just ain’t found it.”
“Then we keep looking.” Devil rubbed his face. “Sun’s coming up. Everybody grab two hours, we go again at eight, fresh. Rune — ” he looked at me. “Go on. Get back to her. I know you don’t like leaving her alone.”
I stood and stretched the night out of my back.
“Rune,” Josie said. “Go home, man. You’re swayin’.”
“Yeah.” I shook it off. Tiredness. Had to be. “Yeah. Eight o’clock.”
I went out into morning, with the birds starting up, the dew coming down and my body aching to be with her, I walked down that path through the pines feeling so damn good.
I even had it in my head what I’d do, get my boots off without making a sound, get in behind her, put my face in the back of her neck, sleep till she woke me up complaining I was too hot.
That was all I wanted out of the morning.
That’s how low the bar had gotten and how happy I was to clear it.
The cabin was quiet when I came up on it. Lamp off. Door shut the way I’d left it.
I eased it open soft, not letting the latch click.
And the bed was empty.
* * *
I stood in the doorway and my tired brain tried to make it into something ordinary, because that’s what a tired brain does.
Bathroom. Up early. Went to the clubhouse looking for me and we crossed in the dark.
Something. Anything. I stood there running through the ordinary reasons while a much older, much colder part of me was already moving through the cabin with its hand out, and that part got there first, the way it always does.
The bed was cold. Not just empty. Cold, the sheets gone cool, nobody in them for a good while. Her boots were gone from by the door. Her jacket was gone off the chair.
And there was no note.
She’d have left a note. There was no note. There was nothing. There was a cabin with the morning light coming into it, a cold bed and every one of her small things still on the shelf where she kept them, and her boots gone, and her jacket gone, and no word.
“Amy?” I said it to the empty room. Stupid. I already knew.
The itch from the doorway of the clubhouse wasn’t tiredness. It never had been.
I came apart and put myself back together in about two seconds flat, the way you do, the cold thing taking the wheel clean out of my hands, and then I was moving, out the door, up the path, running now, running for the clubhouse, with the sun coming up red through the pines and one single word going off over and over in my skull like a struck bell.
Gone.
She was gone.