"Not yet." The words taste bitter. "Scared. Has reason to be."
"Then it's still hearsay, Cole." Wiseman doesn't sugarcoat it. Never has. One of the reasons I trust him. "Nothing I can act on across state lines without a witness on record. County sheriff in rural PA — I'd need something solid from your DA before I could even think about crossing jurisdictions, and if your DA's in Calloway's pocket?—"
"He is."
"Then we're back to square one." A pause. I can hear him breathing, the measured rhythm of a man turning overoptions and finding none of them good. "Be careful." The words land the way they're meant to — not concern, warning. A man who's seen what happens when small-town corruption smells a threat. "And get me something solid. Something I can take to a judge without getting laughed out of the room."
"I will." Two words. Flat. I will get something solid, or I'll die trying, and the difference between those two outcomes stopped mattering to me around the time I understood this investigation had no exit and I was fine with that.
I hang up. Set the phone face-down on the table. The screen goes dark. The kitchen's quiet. The fan turns. Down the hall the concentrator hisses its steady rhythm.
Trevor's still in the doorway. Hasn't moved. Arms crossed, jaw set, eyes on the phone like it might hold an answer he hasn't thought to look for.
"Who was that?" Low. Flat. Stripped of the garage heat and this morning's control, replaced with something that might, if I squinted, sound like concern.
"Only cop outside Roan I trust." I pocket the phone. "Only one who might do something when we've got real evidence."
The word hangs there.When.Notif.A promise I've made myself so many times it's become a fact, like gravity.
I gather the notebooks. Stack them — blue on red, red on green, the color system that only makes sense to me because I built it. The covers are soft from two years of handling. I tuck them against my chest and stand. The chair scrapes. The linoleum sticks under my boots.
Trevor doesn't move from the doorway. Arms crossed,jaw set, eyes on me, and we leave the thing between us where it is. I walk past him toward the hall. Our shoulders don't touch. I make sure of it — the careful choreography of two men who crossed a line they can't uncross and are pretending it never happened, because pretending is easier than facing what comes after.
I push through the garage door without looking back. The notebooks are warm against my chest. The case is still there. Hannah is still there. The map with its red lines and its circled lakehouse and its names in my hand is still there, and right now that's enough. It has to be. It's the only thing I've got that doesn't cost more than I can afford to pay.
I close the door behind me. The click is soft. Final.
Chapter Fourteen
Trevor
The alarm goes off at 3:17 in the morning, and it's the kind of sound that doesn't ask permission — it reaches into your sleep and yanks you out by the throat. Mechanical. Insistent. The high wail of something built to wake the dead and indifferent to whether you're only mostly dead.
I'm on my feet before my eyes are open. Sheets kicked to the floor, the bad knee firing a complaint I file away without reading, the hallway creaking under my weight as I hit the doorframe at something between a run and a stagger. The house is dark — the kind of dark that only happens in the dead hours, when even the light from town has given up and gone home. I find the wall with my palm, follow it to Eileen's room, and the scene that meets me is the kind that lives in the part of the brain that doesn't forget.
Cole's already there. On his knees beside the bed, one hand on the concentrator, the other working the mask onto Eileen's face. His hands are shaking — the tremor of fingersthat know exactly how bad this is and are fighting not to show it. Eileen's upright against the headboard, chest heaving in short, useless pulls, the kind of breathing that moves air but not oxygen. Her lips have gone the gray-blue that turns your stomach if you've seen it before, and I have — a rooftop, a kid from Toledo with a sucking chest wound, his mouth doing the same thing hers is doing now while the corpsman worked and I held pressure and the kid died anyway. Her hands are in Cole's, trembling — not cold, not fatigue, the full-body shake of a system running out of road.
"The tubing," Cole says. Low. Steady. The kind of steady that costs a man something, and what it's costing him is written all over his face even in the half-dark — jaw set so tight the muscle jumps, eyes fixed on Eileen's with a focus that's holding them both up. "Check the line. It's kinked somewhere."
I drop to the floor. The carpet's thin, industrial, the kind that came with the house and has soaked up twenty years of spilled medicine and quiet panic. My palms find the tubing where it runs from the concentrator to the bed. Cool plastic. I trace it from the machine, under the nightstand, along the baseboard — and there. A hard kink where it ducks under the nightstand leg, pinched flat enough to choke the flow to a trickle. My scarred shoulder pulls as I reach, the memory of the round flaring white-hot a second before I push through it. I straighten the kink. Feel the tubing give, the plastic warming as the oxygen finds its path.
The hiss resumes — pressurized gas through a narrow channel, the white noise of something working the way itshould. Eileen's chest slows. Not much. A fractional easing, the heaving pulls becoming something nearer to real breaths. Her color comes back. Slowly. The gray-blue receding from her lips inch by inch, like a tide going out, and the slowness is the thing that lands and stays. Last week's episode cleared faster. The one before that, faster still. The arithmetic is simple and brutal and neither of us says it, because saying it makes it real.
Cole has the mask repositioned, his thumb on her cheek, steadying the elastic behind her ear, and the gentleness of it — this man who carries rage like it's part of his skeleton, touching his mother's face like she's something irreplaceable — does something to my throat I don't have time to examine.
"Ambulance," I say. Not a question. Cole's already reaching for his phone.
He dials. Gives the address. His voice doesn't shake. That's Cole — the voice holds when everything else comes apart, and right now everything else is coming apart. I'm at the closet, pulling Eileen's shoes from the bottom shelf. Her feet are cold when I slide the sneakers on — the cold of poor circulation, skin that feels ten degrees colder than the room. I get the cardigan around her shoulders. Light blue, knit, something she's had since before I left, the fabric gone soft from washing. She doesn't help. Can't. Her hands are still in Cole's, still trembling.
When I lift her, my shoulder screams. Full-throated, white-hot, the kind of pain that lives in the muscle and doesn't care what else is happening. I grit through it. Carry her down the hall the way I carried wounded overseas — one arm under her knees, the other at her back, her headagainst my chest — and the weight of her is all wrong. Too light. The wrongness of a body that's been consuming itself to stay alive, and losing. Cole's ahead of us, holding doors, the phone still to his ear, his free hand braced on the frame like he's holding the house up by will alone.
The ambulance takes twelve minutes. We wait on the porch, Eileen between us on the top step, her head against my shoulder because it's the closest solid thing. The night air is cool — August finally doing its one decent trick, cooling off after dark so the heat doesn't kill you twice. The flashing lights appear at the end of Cembrook, red and blue washing across the maples, pulsing on the peeling siding like a heartbeat if you squint.
The EMTs are good. Quiet. The efficiency of people who do this every night and have learned that talking too much just gives the fear somewhere to live. They get her on the gurney, check her vitals, swap her mask for theirs. One looks at the concentrator, makes a note. The other asks questions Cole answers in that same steady voice that's costing him everything.
I ride with her. The interior smells like antiseptic and plastic and canned oxygen. The gurney straps creak. The monitor beeps. Eileen's eyes are closed now, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm that's almost normal if you don't look too close at the numbers.
Roan General at four in the morning makes you wonder whether humanity's progressed at all since the invention of the leech. Fluorescent light that turns skin the color of old paper. The bored night-shift nurse at the desk, eyes on a cracked-spine paperback, looking up when we come throughlike we're interrupting something more important than a life. The antiseptic smell layered over something older, the must of a building that doesn't get enough funding to replace its carpets or its air filters or its sense of basic dignity.
