Luke grabbed his arm with both hands.
“I’m so sorry.” His voice was slurred, wrecked. “I’m sorry, I’m — I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry?—”
“Stop talking.” Bear got his thumb on the belt release and pushed. The buckle held. He worked it again. “Luke. Luke. Look at me.”
Luke looked at him.
“I need one hand.”
Luke let go of his right arm. Bear worked the buckle, felt it give on the third push, and got his arm around Luke’s chest.
He’d spent twelve years building the physical control he now had over himself. In the bar at twenty-six, he’d been drunk and wrong and the man had been goading him, but none of that had mattered once his fist had connected. There’d been no precision, no calibration, no space between the swing and the result. Just force and consequence. In the years since prison, he’d turned himself into something else— a man who could haul a hundred-and-eighty-pound drunk out of a submerged truck without losing his grip, who could feel the exact amount of pull needed and apply it and no more.
He started pulling.
Somewhere in the back of his head, in the quiet place below the noise of the water: Logan at Valor Ridge, asleep in the bunkhouse by now or watching something on his phone, safe above the floodline. And Greta up on the bank, the rope in her hands, and the solid certainty of that. And the sobriety chip in the chest pocket of his vest, tucked under the trauma shears, right against his ribs where he’d worn it for years.
He pulled harder.
Luke came through the window frame in a scramble of wet denim and gasping breaths, and Bear got him up across the door’s edge…
And that was when the bank went.
Right where Greta had said. A chunk the size of a dining table crumbled into the water, and the current surged, hitting the door and knocking Bear sideways.
The water closed over his head.
Cold. Dark. The rope pulled taut against his chest like a fist.
Luke’s arm was still in his grip. He held on.
He thought: pull the rope.
He thought: Logan.
The rope snapped tight a second time — Greta, he knew it was Greta without seeing anything — and he got his feet back under him in the silt and drove upward. His head broke the surface and he pulled air in with his whole chest, and Luke came up half a second after, coughing creek water. Bear turned upstream, locked both arms across Luke’s chest, and drove for the bank.
Hansen was in the shallows to his knees, reaching. Bear shoved Luke at him, and Hansen got him by the collar and hauled.
The truck groaned behind him. He didn’t look back. He kept moving, slogging through the current with the rope still tight across his chest, and climbed the bank on his hands and knees while the roar of displaced water told him the truck was going.
By the time he made the shoulder, the cab was gone.
He stood on the asphalt and breathed.
Luke was on his hands and knees five feet away, coughing in long, guttural heaves. The EMTs were already coming up the shoulder at a jog, and Bear stepped back and let them come. He unclipped the line from his vest. His hands were steady. He focused on that fact, on the steadiness of his hands, while the rest of him tried to catch up to the last ninety seconds.
Lila Garrison came out of the dark at a dead run, still in her clinic vest over rain gear, her face doing something he’d never seen it do before — the composure stripped all the way down, nothing underneath it but terror and relief going to war.
She dropped to her knees in the wet gravel beside her brother. “Luke. Luke, look at me.”
Luke looked at her. His eyes were wet, or maybe that was the creek.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and she put both hands on his face and her head went down against his, and Bear turned away.
Boone was at the back of the rig.
He wasn’t doing anything. Standing there in his ranch coat with the rain coming off the brim of his hat, watching Bear the way Boone watched everything — assessing, quiet, taking the full measure of a situation before he’d say a word about it. When Bear got close enough, Boone gave him one look — a long, level one — and nodded.
