Page 94 of The Drifter

"He's getting on," I said. My voice had gone somewhere far away. "Ryker. He's getting on it. There's nothing—I can't⁠—"

"I know. I know you can't. Don't you move. Do not go out there."

The rotors climbed to a scream. The dust storm bloomed and flattened. And the dark shape came up off the ground, nose down, sliding sideways and then forward, rising, tilting away over the gold country toward the rim of the world, getting smaller, its beat softening from a pounding to a thudding to a pulse to a whisper.

And then it was a speck. And then it was nothing. And then there was only the windmill, turning, and the dust settling slow out of the air where he'd been, and the enormous silence coming back down over everything.

He was gone.

He'd walked into that house and washed the mug of a woman he'd stolen out of her own bed and told us of the war and set a clock running on a man he'd sent down a trail on a wild horse. Then, he had strolled out the back and gotten in a helicopter and flown away, and there was not one single thing anybody could do about it. He'd known that when he did it. He'd known it the whole time. He was never in that kitchen because he had to be. He was in that kitchen because he wanted to be, because he'd wanted to stand at that woman's counter—at the counter where she'd fed her seven boys—and let a Dane watch him be unhurried, and then leave clean.

"Sasha." Ryker's voice, in my ear, steady, pulling me back. "Are you still with me? Talk to me."

"I'm here." I was still up on my toes at the window, looking at the empty sky. "He's gone. The helicopter's gone. I can't see it anymore."

"All right. That's all right. We'll find where he went, that's not your job, that's ours." A breath. "Where's Clint? Can you see Clint, or his mother, anything, the trail⁠—"

I turned from the window and looked out the front, through the wavy old glass, toward the corral and the country past it where Clint had gone. Dust hung out there, too, a thinner plume, moving—something moving, fast, a long way off, too far to make out.

And that was when I heard the other thing.

Not the helicopter. The helicopter was gone. This was closer. This was in the yard.

Footsteps on the porch.

Slow. Deliberate. Boots on old boards, coming toward the front door I'd watched Clint run out of, and I stood frozen in the middle of that kitchen with the phone cord stretched across the room and that missing woman's calendar on the wall, and I understood in one cold rush that Craine leaving did not mean Craine had left me alone. He'd had men at the fence. He'd had eyes on the rise. And a man who thinks of everything, a man who wanted a little insurance in the room, does not fly off and leave his insurance standing unwatched in a kitchen.

"Ryker," I whispered. "Someone's coming."

"Sasha—"

The doorknob turned.

I did the only thing there was to do. I set the phone down on the counter, gently, without hanging it up, the line still open, still live, Ryker's voice going small and urgent out of the receiver—Sasha, Sasha, talk to me—and I turned to face the door with my chin up.

The door opened.

30

SASHA

Cash filled the doorway.

Max came in low and fast around his legs, ears up, already reading the room. I felt everything in me let go at once—not relief, there wasn't time for relief, just the hard drop of a body that had been braced for the wrong thing and got the right one instead.

"It's you," I said. "Thank God. It's you."

"Where's my brother?” Not a greeting. Cash's eyes were already moving—the kitchen, the back door, the open phone line hissing on the counter. "Fast."

I gave it to him fast. That's the one thing I know how to do.

"Craine sent Clint down the southfork trail on a gray horse to get your mother. Cuffed her to something at the end of it, gave him ten minutes, then flew out on a helicopter, gone, west. Clint's been out there—" I didn't know how long. My sense of time had come apart. "A couple minutes. Maybe more. He's alone."

Cash didn't waste a word on any of it.

He dropped to one knee, fast, and took the dog's head in both hands and turned it to face him. Something passed between them that had no sound in it at all.

"Max." Low. Level. "Find Clint. Go, help my brother."