She nodded. Her fingers dropped from her throat.
“He grabbed me.” Her voice came out level, and she seemed faintly surprised by this, like she’d expected it not to be. “I knew he was going to, but I didn’t move fast enough.”
“You hit him first.”
“I hit him first.” The faintest twist crossed her face, more grimace than smile. “Should’ve hit him harder.” She looked past him at the man on the floor, at the knife on the tiles, at the general disaster of the shop.
Then she looked back at Bear.
“You stopped,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You knew exactly how hard to hit him.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him for a long moment. The rain was coming down harder against the front window. Atlas had found a lower gear, the barking going from frantic to steady to the cadence of a dog that had committed to this and was going to see it through. Somewhere out on the highway, a semi downshifted, the engine brake loud and mechanical in the gray morning.
Then she was across the room.
She stopped in front of him and put her hand flat on his chest. Right over his sternum, the same place it had been that morning in his bedroom.
He looked down at her face. At the mark on her throat and the blood on her hand and the rain-damp wisps of strawberry-blond hair at her temples, and her pale green eyes with the gold in them, looking up at him with an expression he could read now.
She wasn’t afraid of him.
He reached up and covered her hand with his. Her fingers were cold. He closed his palm over them and held them to his chest, over the place where his heart was doing something loud and unsteady, and he held them there.
twenty-one
The pager went off at three-fourteen, and she was already reaching for it before the second tone, her hand finding it on the nightstand by feel in the dark the way her hand found her knife or her radio or the strap of Atlas’s vest — without looking, without thinking, the body ahead of the mind.
Bear’s phone buzzed on the nightstand beside it. Same second, or close enough.
She sat up. He sat up. The rain was coming down in sheets against the window, the hard, driving kind that turned gutters into rivers and made the wind sound like something large and unhappy, and she registered all of this in the space it took her to read the pager display: BRAVLIN COUNTY SAR — FLOOD EVENT — REPORT TO ROUTE 12 STATION.
Bear answered his phone on the second ring. “Yeah.”
She got up and started pulling on the clothes she’d left on the floor — cargo pants, base layer, the heavy wool socks she kept in her bag for extended callouts. Atlas pushed to his feet from his spot at the foot of the bed and shook, his tags chiming once in the dark.
“How bad.” Bear’s voice was flat and quiet, the way it got when he was already calculating — already building the picture,sorting what mattered. She could hear Walker’s voice, tinny and distant, but not the words. She didn’t need the words. She read the shape of the call from Bear’s half of it. Yeah. Both roads. Lower barn or the creek? He paused. Yeah. Twenty minutes. I’m bringing Logan with me.
She turned and looked at him. He was sitting up against the headboard, one hand still on her hip through the sheet without seeming to know it, the phone to his ear, his face in the dark going through the particular expression she’d learned to recognize over the past weeks — not worry exactly, but the narrowed, inward look of a man assembling a problem. He glanced up. She held up two fingers: I’ve got the SAR call, I’m going. He nodded.
She pulled her hair back, clipped it, grabbed the fleece off the post at the foot of the bed, and was already at the door.
They hit the hallway at the same time and split without a word — she took the stairs, he went left, toward Logan’s room. Behind her, she heard him knock twice, low and firm: Logan. Get up, we gotta go. The muffled protest of a teenager dragged out of sleep. Then the door opening. Bear’s voice again, quiet and steady in the dark.
Downstairs, she shrugged into her jacket and filled Atlas’s travel dish and set it on the floor while he drank, and she did a mental inventory of the Jeep: long line already coiled in the cargo area, SAR vest latched to the passenger seat hook, radio on the charger where she’d left it when she’d come home — had it been yesterday? Two days ago? The week had gone fluid and strange since Spokane. Since the shop in Hamilton. Since Bear’s bedroom, and the rain, and Logan on the porch steps asking her quietly in the mist not to wreck his father.
She shook it off. She had a callout.
She got her boots from the mat by the back door, sat on the bottom stair to lace them, and listened to the sounds of thehouse waking up over her head. Logan’s footsteps, slower than Bear’s and less certain — the shuffle of someone finding their shoes in the dark. King’s nails on the floor. The thump of Bear’s closet. Water running in the bathroom for thirty seconds.
She was up and out the front door before any of them came downstairs. The rain hit her in the face when she stepped off the porch, and jogged across the street to her Jeep. Atlas loaded himself in, turned a circle, and settled. She pulled the cargo door down and went to the driver’s side.
Across the street, the light in Bear’s kitchen was on. She could see it through the sheeting rain — the yellow square of the window, the moving shadow inside. The truck was already running. He’d started it remotely, probably from upstairs, because of course he had.
