Page 72 of The Drifter

"They're here," Brock said.

"Here?"

"Here," Brock confirmed. "Charleston. Most of them under this roof or five minutes from it. You're checked into a hotel their—our—family owns."

I sat there.

I’m not a man who needs things repeated. I heard it fine. It just wouldn't go in the slot. I'd woken up days ago one of seven boys from a horse ranch in West Texas, and I was going to go to bed tonight as—what? A fraction of something. A chapter of a book I hadn't known was a book.

"Somebody get the smelling salts," Tommy announced. "The old boy's about to conk out."

I gave him a middle finger without looking at him. He grinned like I'd pinned a medal on him. Some things are load-bearing.

Fuck, I thought. Just that. A man's whole life gets rewritten at a table before lunch, and the best his mind produces is one flat syllable, repeating.

"How many?" I asked.

"Seven boys from each," my father said.

Still careful. Still watching me, steady, the way you watch a fuse you've lit on purpose, waiting to learn what kind of charge you built.

Seven and seven and seven. Twenty-one. A platoon of us. I looked around the table at my brothers and wondered, for the first time, what this exact moment had looked like for each of them—Wyatt hearing it first, probably, alone, being Wyatt about it. Brock taking it like weather. Tommy making a joke with the floor moving under him, because the joke is how Tommy stands up. Cash—Cash had probably nodded like a man being told the tide schedule. Cash always knew Dad was alive. He'd told me so once, when we were young, in the dark of the bunk room, in that flat, certain voice: he's not dead, Clint, I'd know. I'd wanted to hit him for it then.

He'd been right for all those years.

"So," I said, finally. "What now?"

Silence, for a few moments. Real silence, the kind that means the next thing is the mission.

"Now, there's a man you need to hear about," my father said. "Dominic Craine."

The name came off him different than everything before it. Everything before it, he'd told like history—heavy, settled, paid for. This, he told like weather still on the map.

"Craine is FBI. Deputy Director. He is smart, he is patient, and he has spent his career climbing on intelligence that was fed to him, piece by piece, for years, by a woman named Victoria." A muscle worked in his jaw. "Victoria was Trueborn, like your mothers, at least for a time. They kicked her out and she stacked her grudge until she got back inside. She's dead now. Her grudge outlived her. Craine is what's left of it, and Craine has the weight of federal law to swing."

"He's been trying to frame the company," Grant said. "Build a case that Dominion Hall is the threat. Paint us as the thing we've spent years hunting."

"And he's good at it," my father said. "But he made mistakes, and he's been running since. We put him on his heels. Cash almost had him⁠—"

Max barked. Once. Loud, from Cash’s side.

The table cracked up. Even my father's mouth went sideways.

"My apologies," he said, gravely, to the dog. "Cash and Max almost had him. Cornered him not far from here. And the man went through a hole in the floor, and he’s been a ghost since. He's out there right now. Bleeding, regrouping, and dangerous the way a thing is only ever dangerous at the end."

The questions stacked up in me like planes.

I didn't ask any of them.

It was too much. All of it, at once, was too much, and a man who has spent his life reading ground knows when the ground needs to settle before you build on it. The questions would keep. The questions had kept for years. They'd keep till supper.

"Okay," I said. "So, what do we do now?"

It was Cash who answered.

He was leaned back in his chair with one hand resting on Max's head. He said it the way he says everything—level, unhurried, no heat in it anywhere, a man reading the tide schedule.

"We find Craine," Cash said. "And we kill him."