Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Cole
The heat in the cab is a solid thing. It sits on my skin like a damp blanket, pressing through my shirt and into the vinyl seat that's been baking in the July dark for two hours and counting.
My back is slick where it meets the seat.
My neck is worse — a slow drip working down between my shoulder blades no matter how I shift, and I'm trying not to shift, because the springs complain every time and sound carries at night.
Voss's house sits across the street like someone planted it there without caring how it looked.
A ranch box, beige siding, a porch that sags at the left corner.
One dim bulb burning by the front door, yellow light falling on crabgrass and cracked concrete.
The blinds in the front window are drawn but backlit, a thin strip of yellow where the fabric doesn't quite meet the frame.
The Silverado's in the drive, nose-in, bumper kissing the edge of the overgrown lawn.
The AC unit on the side of the house drones, the one steady sound since I parked.
I lift the binoculars. Driveway first. Empty. Side door — closed, dark, no motion. The gap in the blinds. Yellow. Still. I lower the binos and jot the time on the spiral notebook on my thigh: 12:47 a.m. Nothing.
The street is the kind of quiet that belongs to the east side after midnight — no traffic, no porch lights, just a breeze moving through the maples along the curb.
A cat crosses the road thirty yards down, unhurried, like it owns the night.
I track it through the binos out of habit, then feel stupid and put them down.
My neck cramps. I roll my shoulders, feel the joints pop, reach for the water bottle on the passenger seat. Warm. Everything in this cab is warm. The water tastes like plastic and regret. Two swallows, then back.
Headlights at the far end of the street.
I slide lower — not hiding, just smaller, the way you make yourself when you're parked on a block where the cars know each other and yours doesn't belong.
The car comes slow. A sedan, dark, county plates.
I jot the plate and time: 12:53. It rolls past Voss's place without slowing and turns at the next intersection. Nothing.
Driveway. Empty.
Side door. Closed.
Blinds. Yellow.
12:59.
A light goes off in the back of the house — a window on the east side, the glow cutting out like someone flipped a switch.
Three minutes later another comes on, what might be a bathroom, a harsh white gleam that lasts maybe twenty seconds before it dies.
After that, nothing. No shadows behind the blinds.
No doors. No Voss stepping out for a smoke or the mail or any of the things a man does when he can't sleep.
Just the house holding its secrets behind beige siding, the AC droning into the dark.
My jaw tightens, the muscle ticking in my cheek — the tension of wanting something to happen and watching nothing happen instead. I lower the binos and stare at the house like it's personally responsible for my wasted evening, which it is, which doesn't make the staring any more useful.
The notebook's open on my thigh. I flip back to the Voss section, entries in my cramped, right-leaning hand.
Silverado, HS lot, 6/14, 10:17 PM. Lot empty except custodial.
Below it: K. Ramirez mentioned a ride from Coach V.
5/22. "He's nice. Always asks how things are at home.
" And under that, eating half the margin in block letters pressed hard enough to dent the page: HANNAH brOOKS? ???
The question marks are big. Aggressive. They take up the same room in my head, lodged behind my eyes every time I close them.
Hannah got into Voss's car three weeks ago.
I watched it from across the lot — watched her shoulders hunch and her head dip, watched her make herself small as she slid into that Silverado like she was stepping into a room she'd been in before and didn't want to enter again.
I stare at the page. The words don't change.
Three weeks of the same words, riding under my passenger seat, waiting for me to turn the question marks into something with teeth.
Something that would make Calloway sit up in his chair instead of looking at me with those dishwater eyes and that flat, practiced voice — let it go, son, some girls just run.
The page doesn't owe me anything. I stare at it anyway, like the answer might surface between the lines if I look hard enough, and when it doesn't — when it never does — the conviction settles deeper.
A stone, cold and smooth and immovable. The kind of certainty that comes not from evidence but from the absence of it, from the way a town arranges its silences around the things it won't have known.
I close the notebook. One more pass through the binos.
Driveway: empty.
Side door: closed.
Blinds: yellow.
2:17 a.m.
Four hours. Four hours of sweat and stiff joints and the AC drone and two cars and one cat and no Denny Voss doing anything worth writing down. My focus is going soft at the edges, the way it does when your body's had enough and your brain's too tired to argue.
The thoughts come in sideways. Cembrook Road.
The house with its peeling paint and listing porch and the stillness of a place where too much has happened for the walls to hold it.
Eileen's concentrator hissing in the back room.
The kitchen with its sticky linoleum and one working burner and the pill organizer in its spot, because God forbid anything in that house sit in the wrong place for more than five minutes.
Trevor.
The name arrives without warning and closes around something vital.
Trevor asleep down the hall. Or not — lying awake, probably, the way he has since he got here, watching the stain on the spare-room ceiling and listening to the house breathe.
A hallway between us. A locked door. Ten years of silence packed into a distance I could cross in three strides if I wanted to. Which I don't. Which is the problem.
My hand goes still on the notebook. I stare at the dark windshield, at the reflection of nothing — my own face ghosted on the glass, pale and hollow-eyed in the spill from Voss's porch — and for a beat too long I'm not in the truck.
I'm in the kitchen doorway, days back, my hand on Trevor's forearm, his pulse against my thumb, two seconds that felt like twenty, both of us frozen like we'd touched something we weren't allowed to.
The memory has weight. I feel it in my shoulder, where his brushed mine, a warmth that has nothing to do with July and everything to do with the fact that Trevor Hollander's body against mine is something my skin remembers even while the rest of me works to forget.
I catch myself. Blink. The windshield is a windshield again. The house is a house. The AC drones. The street's empty.
One last pass through the binos — not because I expect anything to change but because the routine is what I've got when certainty's in short supply. Porch light: on. Silverado: in the drive. Blinds: yellow. Nothing moving. Nothing worth staying for.
Nothing here tonight.
I cap the pen. Tuck the notebook under the driver's seat, spine flush to the rail the way I always set it.
The key goes in. The engine turns over louder than it has any right to be in the quiet, and I wince and glance at Voss's house through the passenger window, half expecting him at the door, squinting into the glare with a hand raised against it.
He doesn't come. The house stays dark. The blinds stay drawn. The AC drones.
I pull off the curb with the lights still off, rolling slow until I'm a block down before I flip them on.
The street falls away in the rearview — porch light to a pinprick, then nothing, just dark houses and darker trees and the emptiness of a stakeout that gave me exactly what I came for, which is nothing, and the stone in my chest doesn't lighten on the drive home.
The headlights die before my brain catches up to my hand.
Muscle memory — I've killed the lights at the end of this drive for years, rolling the last twenty feet dark so I don't wake Eileen, and the habit's so deep I don't register what I'm seeing until the engine cuts and the gravel goes quiet under the tires.
The garage light is on.
A pale rectangle bleeding under the side door, throwing the weeds beside the steps into a sick glow that shouldn't be there. I sit with my hand still on the key, the metal warm from four hours of driving, and the wrongness of it lands cold.
I did not leave that light on.
I know I didn't. I left in a hurry — pushed out of the house after the kitchen, angry and off-balance — but I always kill the garage light.
Always. The notebooks are in there. The maps.
The satellite image with the routes in red.
The whole case lives on that bench under a fluorescent tube I switch off every time I walk out, because the one rule in a town where walls have ears is you don't leave it lying in plain sight, even if the plain sight is your own garage.
My eyes cut left. The kitchen window is lit.
Yellow spilling through the glass above the sink, the same as the garage but brighter, and my stomach drops through the floor of the cab. Not a slow sink — a plunge, the ground gone before the body understands it's falling.
I get out without closing the door all the way. The latch catches at the last inch and holds, a soft click that's almost worse than a slam, because a slam would mean I've stopped trying to be quiet, and quiet is the only advantage I've got. My boots hit the gravel and I go still, listening.
The neighborhood is dead — the kind of dead that belongs to four in the morning on a weeknight, when the people who make things happen are asleep or somewhere they don't want witnessed.
Crickets in the weeds along the fence. A dog barking two streets over, once, unanswered.
No cars on Cembrook. No headlights. No cruiser at the curb with its engine idling and its radio low.
Nothing out of place but the lights in my house.
I scan the street left to right, the way Mick taught me to read a perimeter. No strange vehicles. No county plates. No dark sedan with tinted glass parked with the engine off.
The garage side door is unlocked. I push it open and step inside.
The tube buzzes overhead, throwing that sick yellow over everything — my skin, the concrete, the workbench, where the top notebook is sitting at an angle.
Not a big one. Maybe fifteen degrees off true.
But I left it flush to the edge, spine parallel to the front rail, the way I always set it, because the system only works if it's consistent.
The corner of the blue notebook — Annette's — hangs a quarter inch over the lip, and the sight of it hits like a round from a .
22. Small caliber. Precise. Built to do maximum damage with minimum fuss.
My eyes go to the shelf. The coffee can — red Folgers, emptied and repurposed for the loose pages that don't fit the notebooks — sits an inch forward of where it lives.
I can see the dust ring it left, a clean circle of pine against the grime, and the can isn't in it.
Someone lifted it, looked inside, set it back without lining it up, because they didn't know the ring was there, didn't know the position of a coffee can on a garage shelf is a piece of data, same as a timestamp or a plate, if you're the one who set it.
Someone's been through this.
The knowledge sits in my throat and won't go down.
I stand still in the middle of the garage, under the buzz, and let it settle into my bones.
The notebooks. The maps. The satellite image, facedown where I left it but dog-eared now, a crease that wasn't there.
Hannah's card out on the bench instead of tucked inside the blue notebook.
The red pen uncapped, on its side near the edge, the point gone dry.
Someone stood where I'm standing. Lifted these pages.
Read the names in my hand, the dates, the routes in red, the question marks beside Hannah Brooks and Denny Voss and Dwight Calloway — and that they did it here, in my garage, on my bench, while I sat four hours on the east side watching an empty drive, brings the anger up so fast and clean I can't see past it.
I turn. Move to the interior door, the one between the garage and the kitchen. Push it open.
The kitchen light is bright after the garage.
The linoleum gleams under the overhead, the same brown-and-cream worn smooth at the stove where generations of Hollanders and Mareks stood making meals they didn't want in a house they didn't want to live in.
The refrigerator hums. The fan turns its circle over the table.
Trevor is sitting at the table.
Gray t-shirt and sweatpants, forearms on the wood, hands loose around a mug of something that's probably coffee and probably cold.
His dark hair is pushed back the way it gets when he's been dragging his hands through it.
His jaw is set. His eyes find mine the second I clear the door, and they don't move.
We look at each other across the kitchen.
The space between us might as well be nothing, might as well be everything, and in the quiet — the hush that belongs to four a.m. in a house where two men have ten years of unsaid things hanging in the air — I can hear the concentrator down the hall and the refrigerator cycling and the old pipes ticking in the walls, and under all of it, louder than any of it, the sound of something breaking that's needed breaking a long time.
His mug sits between his hands, a thin curl of steam dying off it.
His fingers are loose around the ceramic, easy in a way that tells me he's been here a while.
Waiting. And that he was waiting — that he knew I'd come through that door and set himself here to meet me — lands alongside the anger and the violation and the cold certainty that whatever happens next has been building since the day he walked back in and decided the walls were too thin for both of us.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't need to. The question is all over his face — in the set of his jaw, the stillness of his hands, the way he holds my eyes without blinking — and it's simple and impossible and exactly what I've dreaded since I saw the kitchen light from the drive.
What are you doing, Cole?
And behind me, on the bench, bathed in that sick yellow, the answer waits in notebooks and maps and a coffee can an inch out of place — and the distance between his question and my answer is just the distance between this table and that door, and neither of us has moved to close it.