Everything slows down. It isn't peaceful, not the way I always heard it would be. It slows because my brain starts taking in more than it can use, every detail arriving separate and too bright.
The rail jumps up white, each post a hard stripe ticking past faster than I can count. The black behind it is the reservoir going straight down. It has no bottom that I can find, only the fall and the cold water that keeps what it takes.
My foot's already on the brake. It's the wrong thing and I do it anyway, because there's no right thing left. The pedal goes hard, the antilock shudders up through the floor into the sole of my foot, that stuttering refusal, and the back end breaks loose and starts to come around. The tires find ice where the shadow of the rock wall never lets the sun reach, and the car lets go of the road entirely, sliding across the empty oncoming lane toward the outside of the curve.
The tail swings out over nothing.
For one full second the car is sideways across the road. The drop is off my left where the shoulder gives out, the tail hanging over it, and the rock wall swings past the windshield as the nose comes around. The wheel in my hands has gone slackand meaningless, a circle of plastic wired to tires that have quit listening.
My whole body locks. The seatbelt bites.
A sound tears out of my throat that I've never made and won't get to un-remember.
Then the studs catch.
It's nothing I did. The tires find a stretch of dry pavement and grip. The nose tucks back into the curve, and the rear settles in behind where it belongs. I come out the low side with my mirror a hand's width from the rail, close enough that a flinch left would have taken it off, and I'm shaking hard enough that the wheel hands it back to me.
Behind me, the lights trust a line that isn't there anymore.
I hear it before I see it. The long shriek of locked tires on cold asphalt, no give in the sound at all, then the heavier noise underneath, the bulk of the thing skidding sideways with nothing under the wheels to check it.
In my mirror the headlights swing wild, sweep the rock wall and the open dark. Metal screams along the guardrail, on and on, sparks throwing orange off the steel as the whole vehicle grinds down the rail like it's trying to climb over and can't.
It doesn't go over.
But it's done. It peels off the rail at a crawl, sideways across both lanes, and stops. I put the next turn between us, and the one after that, and the lights fall back and keep falling, smaller in my mirror with every switchback, until the last one empties me out onto the valley floor alone.
The road flattens. The reservoir slides past on my left, black and level, sitting over whatever it's taken without a ripple to show for it. The lights are gone. I'm still here, still pointed down the mountain, still carrying the one thing that matters, and I drive a long way before I trust myself to take one hand off the wheel.
Nobody waits on a dark mountain road before dawn by accident. Somebody knew I'd leave this morning, knew which road, knew there's a stretch between the town and the highway where the only witness is the reservoir. Which means somebody knew two things at once: that I'd found what June hid, and that I was running it out of the valley before the sun was up.
I work the problem for the next mile, because working it is better than remembering how close I came to going over the edge.
A town like Wicked Falls watches. I grew up knowing it, and the day I drove back in for my mother a woman at a gas station knew my name before I gave it, so nothing about the attention has changed. So I reach for the innocent versions first, the way you test a sore tooth from the safe side. Maybe somebody sat on the house all night. Maybe a neighbor I don't have saw my lights come on in the dark and made a call. Small towns run on that kind of attention, and June lived inside it for a reason.
None of it holds, and I know it doesn't even as I line the possibilities up, because I'm building this little wall of maybes for one reason: to keep from looking at the name on the other side of it.
But it's a long way from noticing a kitchen light to knowing I'd found a name hidden in the back of a novel and picked which pass to take out of the valley. That isn't a nosy neighbor. That's somebody who knew what I had and where I was taking it almost as soon as I knew it myself.
So I do what I used to do for a living. I take the list of people who could have known and I start crossing names off.
The woman at the gas station knows my face, not my plans. Nobody followed me from the house, I'd have caught headlights on that road in the dark. Whoever tried to run me off the road didn't trail me out of town. They were already in position on the pass, ahead of me, which means they didn't learn where I wasgoing by watching me leave. They learned it before I left. That cuts the list down to the people who knew the night before, and there was only one other person in that house.
Callum. He left while it was still dark. He's the only living soul who knew I'd found what June hid and that I was running it out of the valley before sunup. And a few hours after I told him, somebody was waiting on the pass who knew exactly where to wait.
I don't believe it. I need to be clear with myself about that much, before anything else. I do not want to believe Callum is responsible. But wanting not to believe a thing isn't the same as being able to rule it out, and six years on a crime beat taught me the difference cuts the wrong way more often than it doesn't.
My phone goes off in the cupholder. His name is on the screen, and my stomach does something I'd rather it didn't.
I almost let it ring out. Then I don't, because not answering tells him something too, and I'm not ready to give him that yet. Speaker. Both hands stay on the wheel.
"Where are you?" No hello. Just the question, flat, like he already knows I won't want to answer it.
"Good morning to you too."
"Greer." Just my name, low, and I hate that it lands somewhere under my ribs even now. "You're not at the house. Your car's gone. Tell me where you are."
"Alive. Which is probably disappointing to one of us."
