Page 57 of You Can Run

She held his gaze, wanting to believe it was that simple, knowing it wasn't.

“Come on,” he said. He shifted back on the bed, pulling her with him, and she let herself be pulled—back onto the mattress, back under the rough wool blanket, back into the warmth of him. He settled onto his back, and she curled against his side, her head on his chest, her palm flat over his heartbeat.

It was still pounding. Faster than his steady hands had let on.

“You're not as calm as you pretend to be,” she murmured.

“Never have been,” he said.

She closed her eyes. The storm battered the house and the skiff knocked against the pilings rhythmically.

His hand moved slowly up and down her back, and after a while her breathing began to match his, and the distance between the moment they'd lost and the one they were in now didn't feel quite so far.

TWENTY

Miller closedthe Pelican Club alone.

It was something he'd negotiated when he first started using the place—a key to the back door, the right to stay after the staff locked up, in exchange for a case of Blanton's at Christmas, and the understanding that nobody asked what he did at the corner booth after hours.

He sat in the dark with a glass of bourbon and the remains of the evening's noise still ringing faintly in his ears. The couple had left hours ago. The man—Cruz, Castaño, whatever he was calling himself— had the look of someone running on instinct and not much else. Capable, though. Miller had noticed the way he'd entered the room, the way his eyes had mapped every exit before he'd sat down.

The girl was harder to read. She'd been scared and hadn't been hiding it, which was either honesty or a very good performance. The ring on her finger was real gold, and the way she'd touched it when she thought no one was looking told him it meant something beyond the cover story.

He'd given them the stilt house on the west end. It was a clean place, remote, paid up through the month under a namethat connected to nothing. In the morning, they'd come to the pier and he'd walk them through the next step—new documents, a vehicle swap, a boat ride south that stayed off every grid he knew about. Three days from now, they'd be in Mexico, and a week after that, they'd be whoever he decided they were.

That was the plan. It was a good plan. He'd run it dozens of times with dozens of people, and the ones who listened were still alive and untraceable.

The phone rang at one-fifteen.

It wasn't the phone on the bar, or the burner he used for clients. It was the third phone, the one he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket, the one whose number existed in exactly three places in the world, none of them written down.

He looked at the screen for a long moment before answering.

“Colin,” said the voice on the other end. It was soft, and strangely high-pitched for a man.

“It's late,” Miller said.

“It is. I apologize for the hour.”

Miller took a sip of bourbon and said nothing, because the man on the other end of this phone did not call to chat, and the apology was not an apology. It was a courtesy extended to someone who was about to be told something he didn't want to hear.

“You have new clients,” the voice said. “A man and a woman. They arrived today.”

Miller set the glass down carefully. “I have a lot of clients.”

“Daniel Castaño and Jessica Meeks. Ryan Inglis referred them.” A pause, just long enough to be deliberate. “I'm not guessing, Colin.”

The bourbon sat in Miller's stomach like something that had turned. He'd known this call was possible, he’d known it the way you knew a car wreck might happen. Abstractly, as a risk you'd accounted for without truly believing it would come. In the twodecades of running his operation, the phone had rung like this exactly twice. Both times, he'd done what was asked. Both times, he'd told himself it was the cost of staying in business.

“What do you want?” Miller asked.

“Tomorrow morning. You have a meeting with them.”

“I might.”

“Don't waste my time, Colin.”

Miller closed his eyes.