He said nothing to her. She said nothing to him. She moved.
The ditch was a river.
She stood at the bank and looked down, and what she saw was not a ditch anymore — it was moving water, brown and fast, carrying sticks and debris, and the truck was in it on its side, the passenger side down, the driver’s side up but not clear. The cab was three-quarters submerged. The water had gotten in; she could see it through the driver’s window, the dark interior surface broken by the surface of the water inside, rising. The window itself was still above the waterline.
Barely.
She tracked the angle. The slope into the ditch, the saturation of the bank. The truck had gone in hard — roof down, not nose down, which meant the roll was probably a one-eighty off the shoulder, which meant the driver had been moving when it happened or when the shoulder gave. She clocked all of this in about six seconds and was already reaching for her long line when the truck’s profile resolved in the light.
Beat-up Tacoma. Primer patched across the driver’s side bedside, a repair that had been started and never finished. Tailgate aftermarket, different shade than the bed.
She walked the bank another five feet to get the angle on the rear window.
The Solace Hotshots sticker was in the lower right corner, sun-bleached, half the letters gone. She’d seen it before. She’d seen it in Lila Garrison’s driveway, at the feed store on Route 9,outside the Mad Dog on a Tuesday night when Bear had told her, quietly, with the axe in his hand, that Luke had been at it again.
She already knew. But she looked at the plate anyway, because she always looked at the plate, because you had to be sure before you let yourself react.
She read it.
Her stomach turned over once, clean and cold, and then she put it down.
She turned.
Bear was behind her. Close — he’d come up the bank while she was reading the truck, and he was at her shoulder now, and she didn’t have to say anything. He was looking at the plate. He was looking at the sticker.
She watched the realization cross his face.
twenty-two
Luke.
It was fucking Luke Garrison.
Greta grabbed the front of his vest before he could step off the bank.
“Two feet down from that willow root, the bank’s undermined.” She held his eyes, not asking if he’d heard her, just making sure he had. “You feel it shift under you, you get out. You understand? I pull the rope, you come. No argument.”
He looked at the willow root. He looked at the truck in the water. “Understood.”
She clipped the line to his vest’s D-ring, ran it back through the guide belay, and handed the tail to Hansen without looking away from Bear. She was already reading the current—the angle of the debris moving past the cab, the speed of it, the way the water was pushing the truck’s undercarriage downstream by slow degrees. Her mouth was tight. Whatever she was feeling, she’d put it somewhere she could get to later.
He looked past her at the bank.
Hank Goodwin stood twenty feet up the shoulder, in his department rain gear, one hand on his duty belt, watching. He hadn’t moved since Bear’s rig had pulled in. He wasn’t on theradio. He wasn’t directing anyone. He was just standing there in the spinning lights with the look of a man running numbers in his head— not on how to get Luke out of the water, but on what version of this scene he could bring to the county attorney in the morning.
Bear turned away and stepped off the bank.
The creek hit him like a cold fist — full-body, no easing into it, the water already at mid-thigh at the shallows and moving fast enough to push him sideways on his first step. He leaned into the current and kept going, the line running out behind him, and the noise of the rain and the water swallowed everything except the sound of his own breathing and the scrape of gravel rolling under his boots.
By the time he reached the truck, the water was at his chest.
The driver’s window was still above the surface. Barely. He grabbed the door handle — it didn’t move, frame buckled in the roll — and pulled himself up the door’s edge to look in through the glass.
Luke Garrison’s face stared back at him from six inches under water.
No. Not under. At the surface, nose and mouth still above it, but the waterline inside the cab was at his chin and rising, and his eyes were huge and bloodshot and terrified. He had one hand pressed to the glass. The window between them was intact.
Bear braced his boots on the side of the truck and hit the window twice with the heel of his palm. On the third hit he used the glass breaker on his vest, and the window cratered in a sheet. He got an arm in, swept the glass off Luke’s shoulder and neck, and grabbed the seat belt clip.
