Page 27 of Forbidden Protector

He is out there right now, awake, in a house with the lights off, doing the same calculations I am doing and getting a worse answer, because I only have to find him.

Whoever paid him has to find him too.

Outside, a vehicle comes down the county road and slows at the mouth of the Riverview lot.

It does not turn in. Its lights are off, so I get nothing off the shape of it. No make, no color, nothing but exhaust standing straight up in a column somebody could see from a mile off. It sits there for seven seconds.

I count them. I do not know if it is his truck come back for another look, or somebody else's, and not knowing is worse than either answer would be.

Then it moves on, north, into twenty miles of nothing, and I sit in the dark with my hand on my weapon and I think: he was going to be my answer to something.

I said no on principle.

Principle is a fine thing to hold at one in the morning in a room with two doors.

Somewhere out there is a man with a confession he couldn't finish saying to a dispatcher, and I am not the only one in this county looking for him tonight.

I need to find him first.

EIGHT

MACKENZIE

The tracker sits in an evidence bag on the dash between us, small, black, and professional, wire trailing off one end like a tail somebody cut. I've been staring at it for six miles.

Both rooms I've slept in since I landed in this county have been a broadcast. Every time I pulled in or pulled out, somebody's phone lit up with my coordinates. The Riverview. The church. The cemetery road. Every drive between them, timestamped and mapped, a clean little line drawing of my investigation handed to the man trying to end it.

I run the argument one more time. I've been running it since he pulled it off my wheel well and held it up in the lot light.

I can drive to Choteau. I can drive to Great Falls. I can check into a motel sixty miles from here where nobody knows my name. But I can’t do it for two reasons: mine is dead in a parking lot with a tow truck thirty minutes out and every motel between here and the interstate is a room with a heater and a flue and a detector that may or may not have a light on it.

Or I can go north with the man who found the thing, who read a rag in a vent in one circuit, who drove sideways into a frozen lot at midnight because he heard my room number on a scanner and did the math before his boots were laced.

The man whose name is still in my notebook, under a question I haven't answered.

"This is not me agreeing with you," I say.

He doesn't look over. "Noted."

"This is me agreeing with the tracker."

"Also noted."

"And if I find out you had anything to do with any of it, I will put you in a room with no windows and take you apart."

Now he looks.

One flat second, the headlights catching those dark eyes, and something in them that I would call respect if I were in any mood to be generous.

"I'd expect that," he says.

Then he looks back at the road, and we don't talk for the next fourteen miles, and neither of us turns the radio on.

"You live here?"

The words are out before I decide to let them go, standing in his front room with my duffel still in my hand, looking at three thousand square feet of timber and river rock and a stone fireplace big enough to stand inside.

The careful file in my head (ranch bunkhouse, functional, cold) bleeds out at the edges like a photograph left too long in the sun.