Page 45 of Flames and Blood

He’s coming.

Chapter 10

Crowe

It took a few hours and one frightened clerk to turn a carrier number into a name and a home address.

The name is Aldo Reyes. I’m sitting at his kitchen table when he comes home, and now he’s sitting across from me, trying to pour himself a drink with hands that won’t hold still.

“Take your time,” I tell him, even though I want him to hurry.

His heart is going hard enough that I could count it from the next room. Under the whiskey there’s the sharp smell of fear.

He’s in his fifties. Thick through the gut, gray in his beard, hands that have done real work. There’s a work jacket on a hook by the door with a carrier patch on the sleeve.

He didn’t scream when he came in and found me sitting here. He put his keys down slowly, looked at the door, worked out he’d never reach it, and sat down across from me. A sensible man.

Kent is leaning against the counter behind him, arms folded. Meyer is outside with the truck.

“I know why you’re here,” Reyes says.

“Tell me, then.”

“The runs.” He gets the bottle open on the third try and pours. He doesn’t offer me one. He’s worked out what I am, and that saves us both some time. “The mountain runs. That’s the only thing I’ve ever done worth sending someone like you.”

“Go on.”

“They stopped.” He drinks. “A few weeks back. No call, no letter, nothing. I ring the number I’ve always rung, and it’s dead. I drive out to the compound, and the gate’s chained. Over a year, twice a week, never missed one, never late. And then nothing, like I never existed.”

“And that scared you.”

“Mister, I’ve been sitting in this kitchen every night since, waiting for somebody to come through that door.” He looks at me over the glass. “People like the ones who paid me don’t leave loose men lying around. I know that. I knew it when I took the money. So go ahead and ask your questions. Whatever you are, at least you’re asking. The next ones they send won’t bother.”

He’s right about that, and I don’t tell him so, because a scared man talks and a terrified man babbles.

“Tell me about the runs.”

“I picked up a case at the quarry compound. I never opened one. It was in the contract that I’d never open one, and for the money they paid, I’d have carried it with my eyes shut.” He turns the glass on the table. “Twice a week I drove it up the mountain, handed it over, and drove back down. That was the whole job. Always the compound. I never collected from anywhere else. They put a second man on when they opened the new place. Never met him. I just knew my runs got shorter.”

“Which mountain?”

He tells me. He tells me the highway, the turnoff, and the private road after the turnoff. He tells me how long the climb takes in summer and how long it takes in winter. He’s driven it more than a hundred times, and he gives it to me in miles and grades and bad corners. I write all of it down. By the time he stops for breath, I could drive that road tonight in the dark without a map.

I know where she is.

Over a year of her blood went up one road. She went up that same road days ago. The road ends at a valley with a house in it, and Reyes has seen the house with his own eyes.

“Describe the handover.”

“There’s a gate.” He holds his hands apart to show me. “Stone posts, steel between them, and a gatehouse with a man in it. The man has a folder. Every single time, a hundred times, the same man knowing my face, he opens that folder, finds my truck, and checks the plate against the list. Then the gate opens, and I drive through.”

“And if your plate wasn’t on the list?”

“Then the gate doesn’t open.” He says it fast. “And don’t think you can rush it, either. I saw a truck try to follow me through once. Delivery firm, lost, nothing to do with anything. It got maybe ten feet past the posts.”

“And?”

He looks into his glass.