Page 40 of Soft Flannel Hank

That silenced her, but unlike the last time they were in the truck together, this silence was oppressive. Stifling.

“Look,” he said, desperate to fill the space, “I’m obviously not really arresting you. I don’t have that kind of authority anymore.”

“Because you’re just a glorified bounty hunter,” she spat.

It stung, but she wasn’t wrong. “I guess that’s fair.”

She sniffed. He continued to drive above the speed limit through the darkness, headed down a road he could have driven with his eyes closed.

“I got you out of there because I’m having a hard time believing that you’re capable of doing what they say you did. I just wanted to talk to you. But there wasn’t time. If we’d stayed, they would have taken you. And I… I couldn’t let that happen.”

She didn’t reply, but he knew she was listening.

“I just want to talk. And if you tell me the truth, then I’ll help you.”

“What makes you think I’m not capable of what he says I did?” she asked after a quiet moment.

“Call it a hunch.”

“Where was your hunch when you were so damn convinced yesterday that I was a fucking murderer or whatever that you were such a raging dickhead to me?”

Hank didn’t know how to answer that. He didn’t know how hewantedto answer that. Because the truth made him feel completely unmoored.I was a dick because I was hurt. I was angry because I thought you liked me and you fucked off without even leaving a note and made me feel like a fucking fool.

But he wasn’t ready to give those feelings a voice yet. Not to her, anyway.

And so he simply said, “I was having a bad day. I’m sure you understand what that’s like.”

“You have no idea,” she muttered before reaching forward and turning on the dial to the radio.

It was the news briefing at the top of the hour. They listened in silence to traffic and weather forecasts for the next three days. Just as the DJ returned to the air to introduce the next song, Hank pulled into the parking lot for the beach at La Push. He turned the car off and picked up his phone, which he’d tossed in the center console when he’d gotten in last.

Fifteen missed calls and ten texts from Nat, and one text message from Magda that said “Be careful, Dovey.”

Reading that made his stomach roll. Esther was looking at her own phone, typing feverishly. He opened the messages from Nat, all of them asking where he was, where Esther was, in various levels of panic.

“Did you kill anyone?” he asked, his voice soft and low even though they were in an abandoned parking lot in the dark of night at an empty beach.

Esther’s fingers froze mid text. She took a deep breath before clicking send on her message and turning to face him.

“No.”

“Did you kill any vampires?”

She looked guarded. “There’s no such thing as—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Esther,” he said, shaking his head and gripping the steering wheel. He could almost hear her teeth clack together as she shut her mouth.

“I never killed anyone.”

“Did you willingly poison a dozen or so vampires?”

He couldn’t see her features distinctly, but he heard her sniff as if she was fighting back tears.

“Esther,” he whispered. “Did you do that?”

“It wasn’t poison. I never wanted to kill anyone. I needed them to… sleep for a while so that I could save some people. Save myself.”

The darkness of the truck cab made Hank’s phone look that much more vivid as it rang, Nat’s face filling the screen.