I don’t know how much time passed after that.I was aware of his breathing, even and slow, and the far-off sound of wind in the pines, and then I was less aware of anything.
What I did feel, somewhere below sleep, was the weight of an arm settling across my shoulders.Slow.The slow easing of a man who’d held his arm rigid for a long time and finally let it rest.His shoulder was warm under my cheek.The arm was heavy and solid and mine in no way I’d been given permission to name yet.
I let it be there.
I didn’t open my eyes.
Then there was nothing but sleep.
* * *
Rogue
She was at the kitchen table with her coffee when Cole knocked -- a Prospect’s knock, three short raps with too much knuckle.I was already at the door before the third one landed.
He was seventeen months in and still hadn’t learned to keep his face neutral when he had something to report.He’d been moving fast.He was trying not to show that.
“One of those black SUVs,” he said.“Same model as the one at the gas station.Tinted out, Tennessee plates.It’s sitting on the two-lane east of the property line, just past the bend in the tree line.I clocked it twenty minutes ago.It hasn’t moved.”
Twenty minutes.Probably running it by someone first, probably wanting to be sure.I didn’t hold it against him.I went for my jacket.
“How far past the line?”I said.
“Forty yards, maybe fifty.Right where the trees thin out.”
I turned back into the room.Lennox had put her mug down.She’d heard enough from the table to piece it together, and she was sitting with her hands flat on the wood, watching me.Not the door.Not Cole.Me.It was the same way I’d seen her sit in Church when she didn’t want anyone to see that she was afraid -- very controlled, very contained.
“Stay inside,” I said.
She opened her mouth.
I picked up the key from the nail by the door and I locked it from the outside, and I didn’t wait for what she was going to say.I told myself it was efficiency.I told myself it was the right call.The lock clicked in the frame and I turned away from the door and put it behind me.
Cole fell in on my left.One of the other Prospects -- the one who’d been on the yard when we came down the porch steps -- picked up my right, which meant he’d been watching the road, even though I hadn’t.I hadn’t told him to.I’d have to say something about that later.Today it was the right call.
I crossed the long yard toward the eastern fence at an even pace, hands loose.The Prospects matched me.A north wind moved through the pines, carrying the cold smell of the creek.We passed the garage and the wood pile, heading for the break in the trees.
The tree line ended at a low drainage ditch, and past it the scrub opened into a stretch of dead grass before the two-lane road ran east.The SUV was there.
Black.Tinted completely.Engine idling -- I could hear it from the ditch, a low, expensive purr.Tennessee plates, clean, no mud on them, which meant they’d come up from the south on the interstate and turned off recently.The vehicle sat on the road’s edge with its nose pointed west, toward the compound.
I stopped at the property line.
The ditch was behind me.Twenty feet of scrub and dead grass between me and the road’s shoulder, and the SUV at the edge of it.I planted my feet and I looked at the vehicle and I waited.Cole and the other Prospect stopped when I stopped.Nobody said anything.
The driver’s window slid down two inches.A dark slit appeared, just enough to confirm someone was watching me.A beat passed.The glass slid silently back up.
I took one step over the property line.
One step.My boot on the shoulder grass, past the invisible boundary.I didn’t go any further.I just stood there, the other side of the line, with my hands at my sides and my gaze on the driver’s window.
The SUV pulled forward.
Slow at first, then faster.The rear tires found the asphalt and it straightened out and headed east, and I watched the taillights shrink against the gray afternoon sky until the road bent at the far tree line and they disappeared.
I stood at the shoulder.
My chest was working harder than the walk warranted.I could feel it in my throat, the sharp heat of something that had no clean outlet -- not fear, I hadn’t been afraid, but the close relative of fear, the one that came when you’d watched something you cared about get measured by someone you couldn’t reach.The road was empty in both directions.The wind moved the dead grass at the shoulder.
