1. Promises on the Rooftop #2
A semi comes the other way on the two-lane and Walt lifts a hand off the wheel as it passes.
Western wave. The driver lifts one back.
Holt waved at every truck on every road.
"Every fucking truck, every fucking time," the way Reyes used to put it.
And Holt would say, "It's because somewhere in that truck is a man who needs to know one other man saw him today, brother. "
A muscle in my jaw ticks. My hands are wrong. My breath has gone somewhere I can't reach. No door. No contact coming. Just a Wyoming highway and the memory of the whole team running their mouths in a Humvee — Holt loudest of all, and Holt doesn't run his mouth anywhere now.
This is how it comes now. Sideways. A wave from a stranger.
The smell of someone's coffee. The way the light hits the dash late in the afternoon.
The therapist at the VA calls it PTSD. I sat there the whole hour wanting to tell him the acronym was for men who couldn't hump their own fucking ruck.
Army, mostly. Then he said the thing nobody off a pamphlet says — that it doesn't come at you head-on, it comes sideways. So I shut my mouth. He’d worn the uniform too, and I could hear it.
I go operational and the mission is grief and there is nobody to assault.
I have not cried.
Fifteen years in the teams. Thirteen months out. Holding the line.
The line does not break on a Wyoming highway in a stranger's truck.
What happens instead is the pressure behind my eyes. My throat closing to a straw. My forearms aching before I even notice I'm gripping. Then the moment passes. Then a breath. Then the next mile marker.
Walt glances over once. Does not say anything. Reaches across the console and hands me a dented thermos. I unscrew the cap and pour a capful. Black. Hot. Strong.
"Keep it."
"Thanks."
A mile later, without looking at me. "You military?"
"Was, sir. Navy. Fifteen years."
He nods. "My nephew was Army. Second Batt. Went down in '09."
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah."
That's the whole conversation. Neither of us needs more than that. The thermos says the rest.
Then a sign comes up at the side of the road. Coldwater 3.
Over the next rise the town spreads out below us all at once. A valley. A church steeple. A green water tower. Main Street, old brick storefronts, one stoplight blinking yellow on its cable. And behind all of it, the mountains, taking up the whole sky.
Walt rolls down Main at twenty-five and waves at a woman in an apron outside a diner.
We pass a hardware store with his name painted on the window — Mercer Hardware.
Halfway down the block, a bar with red brick and black-painted trim and a hand-lettered sign on a wrought-iron bracket. The Devil's Daughter.
A woman is crossing the street in front of it, a case of bottles balanced on one hip like it weighs nothing.
Small — she'd have to look up at most every man in this town — but there's not one thing small in how she crosses that street.
Dark hair cut short around a jaw that's set like she's decided something, and a streak of turquoise above one ear, the single bright thing on her, like a flag she planted there on a dare.
Heart-shaped face. Dark eyes. Easy to look at and plainly not working at it, which is its own kind of trouble.
She moves the way I move through a room I don't trust: fast, economical, eyes on the far side before her feet get there, nothing wasted. A woman who's walked this street ten thousand times and still checks both ends of it.
Halfway across she catches sight of the truck.
Then me. And she doesn't do the thing — the glance away, the small adjustment a woman makes when a strange man looks.
She holds it. A beat longer than a stranger should, level, like she's deciding something and isn't in a hurry about it.
Then she looks off and keeps walking, easy, unbothered, the case of bottles riding her hip like it grew there.
Nobody's looked at me straight-on in days. She did it like she was reading me, and didn't much care for the print.
First thing that's pulled my eyes off the mountains.
"Interesting name," I say, once the bar's behind us.
Walt glances at me. "It is."
Two blocks later he pulls into a gravel lot at Ed's Auto.
A man comes out of the bay wiping his hands on a rag that's past helping them.
Mid-fifties, give or take, and built the way men get built by the work and not the gym — thick through the forearms, a little stooped in the shoulders, but nothing soft on him anywhere.
Cap turned backward. Coveralls worn pale at the knees.
Grease worked so far into his hands it's not coming out this side of the grave, the hands of a man who's never once in his life been paid to sit still.
"Ed."
"Walt." They shake. "This the one you called about?"
"Started knocking, then quit on him east of the cutoff."
Ed looks at me. "Ed Larsen."
"Cole Mathison."
He pops my hood. Takes him all of a minute. "Timing chain, most likely. Won't know for sure till I'm in there." He wipes his hands. "Three, four days. Parts have to come from Casper. Call it twelve hundred, maybe two grand if the chain took the gears with it."
"Do it. I'm good for it."
Ed nods. Walt claps him on the shoulder. "Come down to the Daughter Thursday. Sloane's tapping that amber you like."
"I'll be there. You still owe me from the last game."
"You can't count cards for shit, Ed." Walt heads back to his truck, telling me he'll run me up the street.
Three, four days.
Holt would have something to say about that. Holt would say the mountain has been there for ten million years, Mathison, it can wait three more days for your sorry ass.
Back in the cab Walt takes the alley and comes out on Main going the other direction.
"Eleanor Voss. B&B on the corner of Main and Third. Best pie in the county." A pause. "Don't tell Rena."
"Who's Rena?"
"Runs the diner I just waved at."
"Copy."
He slows at the corner. Big place — three stories, wraparound porch, flower baskets already hung for the season.
A woman sits in one of the rockers with a mug cradled in both hands.
Seventies, silver hair cut short and neat, small and trim, glasses on a beaded chain.
She lifts a hand off the mug as we slow — an easy wave, like she's been expecting us, which it turns out she has.
The kind of woman who looks like she's got a pie cooling somewhere and an opinion about everyone on the street, and is pleased to share both.
"That's her. Only rooms in town. I called ahead while Ed was under your hood — she's got one made up for you."
"You didn't have to do that."
"Wasn't going to leave you sleeping in Ed's lot for four days." He pulls to the curb. "Go on. She'll feed you too, whether you're hungry or not."
A laugh comes out of me. Surprises me. Been a while.
My hand goes to the door handle — but Walt hasn't reached to put the truck in park, and a man doesn't hold a stranger in his cab after the ride's over for nothing. I leave my hand where it is.
"Something on your mind, sir?"
He's looking past the porch, down the block, to the bar at the far end of Main — red brick, black trim, a sign swinging on an iron bracket. Something works in his jaw.
"That's my daughter. Down there. Runs that bar."
The bottom drops out of my gut. The woman with the bottles.
"Sir, I —"
"Whatever you think you saw crossing that street, son — you didn't. Pie's at four."