“No,” Jonah said. He checked his hands and frowned. There was a smudge in the middle of his hand, worked into the lines. He rubbed it with his thumb, and it smeared.
Not ash.
Ink. From the clipping that Deborah had given him. It hadn’t washed off.
“Sir?” the clerk prompted, his hand out with Jonah’s change in it.
The cracked two-tone squawk of the truck’s horn went off outside. Jonah turned to look out the window and saw Luke, leaned over with his weight on the horn. The light had dimmed around the truck, filtered through smoke and old stains.
“Keep it,” Jonah said.
There were flies in the chicken grease, thick and unusually active for this time of night. Jonah stepped over them, chucked his coffee cup into the bin, and grabbed a handful of condiments from the stand for Darlene.
Good deed done, he jogged out to the truck. The smell of gas was so sweet it was nauseating, and as he got to the driver’s side, the light overhead burned out.
“It’s coming,” Luke said.
“Probably.” Jonah slammed the door and started the engine. “Did you find anything about the conference?”
Luke twisted around to look out the rear window, his arm hooked around the headrest of the seat. The worn cotton of Jonah’s T-shirt stretched over his shoulders and back.
“No,” he said. “As far as I can tell, Deborah quit practicing law before she moved here. There was a conference in Reno she was meant to attend, but she pulled out three weeks before.”
Ahead of them, the lights changed to red. Jonah licked the taste of whiskey off the back of his teeth and blew through the red. The hex-sign on the mirror caught the flash of the light and reflected it back as it spun. Jonah hoped it worked. He didn’t know if supernatural whiskey would register on a breathalyzer or not. He knew he didn’t want to have to stop for a cop to teach him his ABCs backward.
He braced his wrist on the wheel and rubbed the palm of his hand absently, as if he could feel the stain.
“She played me,” Jonah said grimly. He turned the truck toward Miriam. “I’m not part of your world,” she’d said. And Jonah had bought it. He’d taken her and the gun she’d waved around at face value instead of assuming everything was a prop for the drama of it. “Deborah’s been feeding people to that thing to keep it off her, but it’s not working anymore. Not as well as it did. That’s why she’s cracking open clients’ strongboxes. To pay it off.”
Luke grabbed at the door to steady himself. “Client’s what?”
“Details,” Jonah said. “Don’t worry about it. Worry about Deborah.”
The gates were still closed when they reached the farm. Security lights flicked on as Jonah pulled onto the drive, then immediately blew. Fragments of glass rained down on the front of the truck. Luckily, it had enough scrapes and blisters that a few more wouldn’t make any difference.
“Should I get out and press the—” Luke started to ask.
Before he could finish, Jonah threw the truck into first and hammered the gas pedal into the floor so hard he felt it in his knees. The engine made a harsh, cracked snarl, and the truck lurched forward. Gravel sprayed up from under the wheels, and Luke yelped as he grabbed at the dash to brace himself.
It was a shit pickup. The doors didn’t match, it was more patches than original bodywork, and since this afternoon, it had a hole in the side. It was built like a tank, though, and Jonah didn’t care about it. The car he’d left back in Babylon, it’d have broken his heart to do this to that beauty.
The truck hit the gates at full rev.
Most gates were there to keep reasonable people out. What “Big Gate” didn’t want you to know was that it was really, really hard to stopunreasonable people from doing what they wanted.
Wrought iron wrapped itself around the front of the truck, a spike jammed through the windscreen and scraped over the roof, and the lock held for a second. Then it cracked in half, and the gates slammed open, bent on misshapen hinges. The bar jammed between Luke and Jonah snapped free from its moorings.
The hex marks on the walls flickered with smoke, but either they were just a passive alarm system, or whatever curse they’d spat out couldn’t get through the thick cloud of sourness Jonah had brought with him.
Unlike the unretracted spikes laid along the boundary line, which shredded the tires and made the pickup lurch violently from side to side.
“What are you doing?” Luke asked. “You can’t just break in somewhere.”
“You want to stop outside and hope someone answers the doorbellbeforethe hag catches up with us?” Jonah asked through gritted teeth. He locked his elbows and clenched his hands around the steering wheel as he kept the truck straight on its rims. “Because I don’t.”
The low-hanging branches of the apple trees tapped on the roof of the cab and scraped along the windows. One caught in the cracked windscreen and came with them, spindly branches and raw stump banging against the side of the truck.
Suddenly Jonah’s ringtone went off. Luke, the phone still loosely gripped in his hand, nearly threw it out the window.
