Page 13 of Shatter

I'll make him bleed for every foot of it.

Behind me, boots hit the gravel.

Fast, and not walking anymore.

Running.

I tighten my fist around the rock, roll onto my back with a sob I can't swallow, and wait for him to reach me.

CHAPTER TWO

Hakon

Her roots are coming in again.

A thin blonde line runs down the part in her hair, straight as a ruler under the diner lights, and the copper on either side of it is a shade too even to be anything but a box from a drugstore shelf.

Two weeks ago, it was a shadow.

Tonight, it's a quarter inch, and she's twisted her hair up tight so the knot hides most of it.

Most.

I cut into my pancakes and watch her pour the trucker's coffee without looking like I'm watching.

It's easy.

I've had twenty years of practice.

Her tag says Katie in white letters on black plastic, pinned a little crooked over her left breast.

For the first month I came in here, she was slow to answer to it.

Dale would holler it from the kitchen, and there'd be a hitch, a half-second where her head didn't turn, and then it would snap around too fast, like she'd remembered something she was supposed to be doing.

I know the hitch.

I had it for a year after the plane, every time a teacher called out "Breckett" and I forgot to answer.

She doesn't have it anymore.

Watching her turn to it quickly and easy now lifts the hair on my forearms.

The scrapple's good tonight.

Crispy on the edges, soft in the middle, the way Walt used to fry it in the cast-iron skillet on Saturday mornings in Delaware County, with the radio on the Phillies game and his reading glasses shoved up on his forehead.

Nobody in Florida knows what scrapple is.

Dale does, which is how he got me in here the first time, and she's why I keep coming back.

Not for the reason Dale thinks.

She sits where I sit.

On her breaks, she takes the back booth with the wall behind her and the front door in front of her, and her eyes make the same loop mine do.

Door. Window. Kitchen. The clock over the pie case.