* * * *
The world at eight a.m. was a different universe from the one that existed in the small hours, but only in the sense that it was even less forgiving. By then the cold wasn’t just an absence but an organism, alive and crawling under my skin, laying eggs of ache in every joint.
I pulled on the jacket, then a second flannel shirt under it, then the stiff pair of jeans that still crackled with soap where the rinse hadn’t finished the job.
I laced up my boots, gave the radiator a reassuring pat as if I was leaving it in charge of the room, and crept down the narrow staircase that led to the back alley.
The Main Street was the opposite of busy. There were three trucks already parked outside the hardware store, a battered Land Cruiser idling in front of the post office, and across the street, a flatbed full of feed bags being unloaded by a man whose hat looked like it had been stepped on every day since the Reagan administration. I kept my head down and my hands in my pockets, but I kept count, and I kept my ears open.
Two blocks down, Patsy’s was already open for business. Patsy herself wasn’t in today, but the girl running the counter was exactly the type who remembered faces and never forgot a tip, which was a problem, since I was running on borrowed cash and the toast-and-coffee special was already stretching the budget.
I slid into the booth at the back, the only one where you could see both exits and the street through the slanted blinds. The seat was patched in three places with blue electrical tape, but the foam still had a little give left.
The menu hadn’t changed since 1975. I ordered black coffee and dry toast and got a look of pity from the counter girl that she didn’t bother to hide.
I watched her in the reflection of the napkin holder: every time she bent down to refill a coffee cup, her ponytail swung in a precise arc, like a metronome keeping time for the slow march of the regulars filtering in.
They all sat at the counter. The men with hands like old tools, their voices as slow as their chewing. At the far end, a feed delivery guy in coveralls with a name patch that read simply “Bud.” He was eating hashbrowns with the focused intensity of a man who’d done the same thing for thirty years. Next to him, a younger man in a green John Deere cap, talking with too much energy for the hour.
It was in their conversation, the way news traveled in towns like this—not in a headline but in a relay, baton passed with every second sentence.
“—yeah, she came through around closing,” Bud said, not bothering to lower his voice. “Black Escalade, out-of-state plates. Montana plates, but rich-people ones, you know?”
“Like those white ones with the tiny numbers?” John Deere Cap asked.
Bud nodded, mouth full. “She asked about a blond guy, early twenties, said he was her cousin, but I didn’t buy it. She was too serious. Wrote it all down, too. Who does that?”
“Cops,” said the kid. “Or lawyers.”
“Or wives,” Bud countered. “Or the kind of people who get paid to track you down.”
I sipped my coffee, letting it scald the roof of my mouth just to anchor myself in the moment. I kept my posture loose, like I was half-asleep, but my eyes tracked the rhythm of the room, each face, each glance toward the door.
When the waitress brought my toast, she leaned in close. “You staying at the motel up on Route 16?” she asked, voice pitched just for me.
I shook my head. “I’m up at the feed store for a couple days. Helping out.”
She nodded, making a show of not caring. “Had a woman come in last night. Dressed like she was headed to church. Left her card at the register and at the gas station, too.” The words were slow, precise. “Said she was looking for her cousin, worried he was in trouble. Just thought you’d want to know.”
I kept my expression neutral. “Haven’t seen anyone like that,” I lied, and she accepted it.
“Sure,” she said. “But if you do, you ought to tell him to lay low. She was the type that doesn’t leave without what she came for.”
She walked away. I crumbled a corner of the toast, the brittle sound as satisfying as breaking glass. The food didn’t taste like anything, but it filled the right space.
At the counter, Bud had switched topics to the possibility of a storm coming in from the west, and the kid in the cap was talking about chains on the front tires. But every few sentences the conversation looped back: the Escalade, the woman, her weird way of talking.
I took a slow scan of the room, memorizing the faces, then ran a second check through the warped glass of the window for any sign of a car that matched the description.
Nothing. Just the usual: a sedan too old for the badge to be readable, and a pickup that might have been green once but had faded into a color best described as “disappointment.”
I finished my breakfast, dropped the last of my change on the counter, and left with no tip. I could feel the waitress watch me go, but she didn’t say anything.
I took the long way back to the feed store, using alleys where I could and side streets where I couldn’t, checking each intersection twice before I crossed. The wind was up by then, sharp enough to make my eyes water, and the clouds had startedto bunch at the ridgeline, fat and gray and heavy with the promise of snow.
When I made it back to the feed store, the back door was still propped with the splinter of two-by-four I’d wedged in on the way out. I climbed the stairs three at a time, heart not quite at panic but at least in the neighborhood. The radiator was waiting, full of itself and clanging harder than before.
I didn’t take off my boots. I sat on the edge of the mattress, running the math again, tracing out the moves that would have to follow this one. The Escalade meant Eleanor wasn’t in Casper anymore. She’d closed the net, moved the search here, and if the waitress and Bud and the John Deere kid already knew about it, there were maybe twenty-four hours before someone put together my blond hair and the woman’s questions and decided to make the introduction in person.
