Page 34 of Thunder

"Yeah?"

"She's been askin' about you since the day you named that cat." I shift on the seat, and the hip bites, and I don't care. "Bring whatever. She'll eat anything that isn't a vegetable and she'll talk your ear clean off. Fair warning."

The smile Presley gives me then is the first real one I've gotten from her in a month, small and crooked and worth more than she knows, and she covers it fast by turning back to the pen.

"Go home and ice that hip," she says. "I mean it. If you're limping worse than usual tonight I'm leaving the food and going home."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm serious, Thunder."

"I know you are." I put the side-by-side in gear. "It's one of about four hundred things I like about you."

I make it about halfway back to the cabin before the good mood runs into what's been sitting under all of it since yesterday.

I passed Spur on the way out this morning, down by the clubhouse, and he flagged me and leaned in the side-by-side window with his voice low even though there wasn't a soul around to hear.

Rogue ran the plate.

Comes back to a rental out of an outfit in Dallas that doesn't exist if you dig two layers down—a shell, a cutout, the kind of paper trail that isn't a trail at all because somebody built it that way on purpose.

Which tells us exactly nothing and everything at the same time.

A regular man's truck comes back to a regular man.

That silver three-quarter-ton comes back to a company that evaporates when you touch it, and there's only one kind of person who drives vehicles registered to ghosts.

The Firm didn't send us a bill collector.

They sent us a professional, and then when we made him, he didn't run—he just melted back into paper and quiet, and quiet from those people is worse than loud.

Loud you can see coming.

Quiet means they're still deciding what we're worth to them, and how much of the ranch they had time to photograph before Spur bent his mirror down the road.

I think about that silver truck sitting a quarter mile back, patient as death.

Raine was at Mama Lou's, thank God.

But she won't always be.

Most nights my little girl's asleep down that hall, and a man with a ghost on his roads doesn't get to lose himself like that, doesn't get to stop watching, not even for a woman, not even for one hour in a hot bath.

That can't happen again.

Not while there's a ghost on our roads.

But that's a problem for tonight, for after, for the part of my brain that never really shuts off no matter how much I might wish it would.

Right now I've got a hip to ice and a house to make halfway presentable and a nine-year-old to break the news to.

I do that last part the second Mama Lou drops her off, because I can't hold it in and honestly I don't want to. "Raine. C'mere a sec."

She comes, kitten under her arm, braid coming loose, giving me the wary look she gives me when she thinks she's in trouble for something she hasn't been caught for yet.

"You're not in trouble." I lower myself down onto the couch carefully, so we're closer to eye level. "I got news. Miss Presley's comin' to supper tonight. Here. She's bringin' the food and everything."

For a second she just stares at me like she's making sure she heard it right.