Too Close To Dark (Point Bluff #2)

Prologue

Voss, Dark, The Truck

Voss, If I Go Down

I'm in a truck at midnight, the city eleven miles behind us and the man I chose at the wheel. We're bound for a house on no list. Everything I own rides in two bags. My shoulder aches when the temperature drops.

He slows for a light with no business being red on an empty road. He reaches into his jacket and sets two things on the seat between us. A small pad, the cheap kind that comes ten to a pack. A click pen to go with it.

"Please, hang onto those for me, ma'am."

"Am I taking notes?"

"The pen, especially." The light goes green and he rolls us through it, unhurried, the eyes never still. "It's already primed."

Primed. I've learned what he says and what he doesn't, and he doesn't spend a word he hasn't weighed. So that one lands with all its weight. A cheap pen that isn't a pen, riding in my pocket, doing something I'm not going to ask about on a dark road at midnight.

"One more thing, then I'll hush." He says it the way he says everything that matters, like there's all the time in the world. "If it comes apart out here, and you lose the road and you lose me in the dark, you don't run. You come to my voice. I'm callin' your name, you walk toward the sound of it."

"Toward the sound." The analyst in me has it apart before he finishes. "Toward whatever just went wrong, in the dark, on faith. That's the worst move on the board, and you know it."

"No argument tonight, ma'am." The voice stays low and easy, and it doesn't move an inch. "Say it back to me, please. Right now."

He waits. He'll wait all night, and we both know it. "I come to your voice," I say. Handing him the words feels like handing him something heavier.

"If this goes wrong out here," he says, "wrong in the way that ends with me on the ground and you in the wind, you keep that pen on you and you keep movin'.

We'll come find you." The gray slides toward green at the edges, there and gone.

"That's a promise, not a maybe. I don't deal in the other kind. Repeat all that to me."

"Go in the wind. Hang on to the pen. You'll come find me."

It's the gentlest thing anyone has said to me in three years. It's also a plan for my own abduction. That those are the same sentence is the truest account of my life anyone has handed me in a long while. I take the pen and put it in the inside pocket, over the ache, where it won't get lost.

***

Voss, The Help I Didn't Ask For

Aidan Kane was the name I gave them.

We'd met once, for the length of a handshake and a demo I controlled. Then I'd routed a warning to him through a channel I built myself. Of everyone in that earlier room, he was the one I'd decided would believe me.

He believed me. We were both alive on the strength of my being right about him, and we both knew it. That was the whole basis I had when I lay in that suite and asked him to keep me alive.

He came to the doorway and didn't come in. He told me no, and I haven't forgotten how, because it was the first honest no anyone had handed me in three years.

He was under contract. He wouldn't break one obligation to take another, and I understood what that told me about how he'd keep the next one. It wasn't a no about me, he said. It was a yes about a thing he already carried.

Then he made a call, and a man came off the west wall.

He crossed the room without hurry, hands loose and where everyone could see them.

He read the politics of that federal suite before a soul briefed him on a line of it.

He stopped at the exact distance a private man stops at in a federal building, so the agents could look at him and decide he wasn't a problem.

Then he spoke, and the room slowed half a step, the way a room will around a voice that's decided not to hurry.

"Ma'am. Name's Nolan. I'm goin' to be the fella rude enough to stand between you and the door for a while." Like we had all the time in the world and none of it was on fire. "I'll do my level best to stay out of your light."

"Can you keep me alive long enough to put this man in prison," I said.

"Yes, ma'am. That part I'm good at."

He'd already set himself a half step to the door side of my chair, without being told which door. Angled so the high narrow window down the corridor sat behind his own back, not mine. Nobody told him about the window. He'd found it the way he finds everything, before it could turn into a problem.

A woman with a round in her shoulder, two hours from a grand jury, and what my body did was track a stranger across the room.

I watched him the whole way, and I've thought about it since, more than I'll admit to him.

Somewhere under the place where decisions are supposed to get made, my body decided it wanted him on the inside of every door for whatever came next.

Voss, 0651

The day I chose him, I can put to the minute. The minute is 0651.

Eleven weeks ago I sat in a witness suite on the third floor of a federal courthouse. Borrowed cardigan. A federal detail outside the door, the grand jury two hours from being gaveled in. For the first time in three years, I felt safe. That was the mistake.

Safe was a thing they sold me and I bought, because I was tired, and the only other option was carrying the fear myself.

The window was tall and narrow, and someone had assured me it was rated. The round came through it at 0651. It took me high in the left shoulder and put me on the floor before the glass finished falling.

The pain isn't the part that stayed. It came later, and it was enormous, and it isn't what lasted. What lasted is the half second before anyone moved.

On the carpet, glass in my hair, I understood the thing the detail hadn't. They'd been watching the wrong things. They'd been sure of a perimeter a man with a rifle had already read and beaten.

They reached me. They were sorry. The lead said the word secure more than once, to me, with a hole in me. And I made my decision with the cold clean part of the mind the fear had burned me down to. Never these people again.

Voss, Eleven Weeks

Long enough to learn a man, if you're built to study one. That's the one thing I've always been.

He isn't my first protector. The network gave me men in good suits who called it security and meant ownership, and the government gave me competent professionals who treated my safety as a service.

Every one of them, in a different accent, taught me that protection is a thing you buy with a piece of yourself.

Nolan has never once sent me that bill.

What the weeks have also taught me, and what I have never written down anywhere, is all the rest of it. That he drinks his coffee standing up, always, near a window and never in front of one. That he goes quiet in a particular way about forty minutes before he decides something.

That his hands are steady doing work that would put a tremor in most men, and that they went carefully around my shoulder the one time he had to move me fast, careful in a way the job did not require of him.

That when he is tired the Louisiana comes further up out of the ground in his voice, and that I have caught myself keeping him talking well past the point of any use, just to hear it happen.

That last one is not threat assessment. I know exactly what it is.

I have run it the way I run everything, from every angle, and it comes back the same every time, and it is the one finding in three years I have no idea what to do with, because the man it concerns is the only thing standing between me and the next bullet.

He tells me where we're going and why. He answers the question I actually asked, not the one a frightened woman is supposed to ask.

The first week, I read a tail off the mirrors before he called it, and he didn't steer me back into my lane.

He took what I'd seen, turned it over, and built the next move on it.

There was a night in the third week. A bad one.

A wrong car on a frontage road and ninety seconds where it could've gone either way.

When it was over and we were clear, he didn't tell me I'd done well.

That's a man praising a pet. He said it with his eyes still on the mirror.

"You called it before I did." That was all.

He handed me back a piece of myself that three years of other men had worn down to nothing, and he did it without seeming to notice he had.

That's the night I stopped sleeping with one eye on the door and started sleeping. The federal rotation came and went around us after that, a new competent stranger every few days, each one a little wary of the private man they couldn't quite write out of the arrangement.

He outlasted all of them the only way that counts. He was still there.

They warned me a few days out. The case had turned a corner, and the detail would be reassigned.

This morning they put the form in front of me. Continued federal protection under a new program, a new rotation in a new place, and a line for my signature. Across the table the new lead used the word secure exactly the way the old one had, one bullet ago. The old anger came up clean and cold.

So I declined it. On the record, in front of a federal attorney and a man named Reyes who didn't like it and couldn't stop it, I declined the protection of the United States government.

I asked to keep the one operator they'd only ever allowed me as a supplement.

The help, as he'd called himself that first morning. The help I didn't ask for.

They made me say it twice. They made me understand that keeping him meant losing them. That a private detail off the federal program is a smaller, thinner, lonelier thing than a government that can build a wall around you. I understood it the way I understand a dataset. Completely.

Then I signed the line that gave me the smaller thing. The wall they offered had a window in it, and I'd already been shot through one of those.

***

Voss, The Man at the Wheel

The truck runs on into the dark, and the city lets go of us by degrees. The man at the wheel hasn't said a word since the on-ramp. The quiet is the most comfortable thing I own.

Weeks now I've ridden beside it. Long enough to learn it isn't empty. The stillness is the work. He's reading the mirrors, the merges, the one sedan that paced us too long back on the surface streets.

Once I'd have called a silent man a man with nothing to give. These weeks fixed that, down where a lesson sticks.

Nolan. Tonight he's the one thing between me and the people who'd rather I never finished another sentence. That didn't happen to me. I reached for it with a torn shoulder and chose it, against the advice of every official in the building.

He feels me looking. He doesn't turn his head. The corner of his mouth moves, the smallest thing, and the gray eyes stay on the road.

"You're runnin' the math on me again, ma'am."

"I do that to everyone."

"I know it." Easy, no edge on it. "Comes out about the same every time, near as I can tell. You just like to check your own work."

He's not wrong. That's the part I've stopped fighting.

What I don't tell him is that the math stopped being math a good while back.

The dash light only reaches so far into the cab. It finds his hands first, one at nine on the wheel and the other loose on his thigh, and then the forearms above them, sleeves shoved to the elbow the way he keeps them in a vehicle.

There is a working architecture to them. Tendon and cord under the skin, a flat plane of muscle that shifts every time his fingers move on the wheel, an old white seam of scar running up from the wrist and going somewhere under the cotton.

The shoulders take up more of the bench than a man's shoulders ought to. Three days of dark stubble along a jaw built at an angle. In profile the whole of him is patience with a frame around it.

And then I am not assessing anything at all. I am somewhere warm and stupid, wondering what those arms would feel like closed around me. Not thrown over me the way a body goes over a body when the glass comes in. Around me. Holding on, with nowhere either of us had to be.

Three years of men in good suits moving me from room to room like something with a handle, and what my body wants at midnight on a dark road is to be held still by this one.

The truck takes a seam in the asphalt and I come back into my own head.

Again. That is the part that lands hardest. Not that I thought it. That I have thought it before, more than once, in more rooms than this one, and that the thinking is getting easier instead of harder.

"Sorry." My voice comes out with something in it. "I was somewhere else."

"No apology owed, ma'am."

But he has glanced over. He has followed the line my eyes were on, and he has followed it all the way down, and I understand about half a second too late that I have not been looking anywhere near his forearms for some time. But below his belt.

The corner of his mouth moves. He puts his eyes back on the road.

"It is my pleasure, ma'am."

Heat climbs my neck and sits there. I look out the windshield at nothing and let eleven miles turn into twelve, and beside me the man at the wheel does not say one more word about it, which is worse, and which he knows.

The house, when we reach it, is a low dark shape at the end of a track that climbs through dry brush.

Every window's dark. The nearest neighbor is a mile off.

He kills the engine and the quiet comes back, and for a moment neither of us moves.

Two people at the edge of a dark we've chosen to walk into together.

"Stay put till I wave you in." And he's out and moving before the dome light dies, a tall easy shape folding into the black toward the door.

Then it's just me and the pen and the ticking of the cooling engine, and the dark past the glass bigger than any wall they ever offered me. I put my hand flat over the pocket and hold it there.