Page 6 of Flames and Blood

They’ve got something planned for me.

I’m one step closer to finding out what.

And I’m not sure I want to know.

Chapter 2

Crowe

The scale-house log says nothing came through here Tuesday night. I’ve been sitting across this desk for eleven minutes, and the man behind it has told me that four different ways.

“Truck’s not in the book,” he says again. Same hitch before “truck” every time. “I told you.”

“You did.”

“So we’re done here.”

“Not yet.”

He’s mid-fifties, soft and heavy from years of night-shift work. There’s a space heater in the corner that isn’t keeping up. The walls smell of diesel, and they probably have for years. There’s a calendar behind him, three months out of date, and a coffee ring on every page of the log he’s shown me. None on the pages he hasn’t shown me.

“Here’s what happens if your answers don’t change,” I say. “Weighbridge tickets get filed twice. Once here. Once at the terminal that billed the mileage. I find that copy, and it’s got your signature on an empty return that wasn’t empty. That’s not a missing entry anymore. That’s a false one. I come back here. Different conversation. Worse for you.”

He doesn’t answer that.

“You get to pick which conversation we have,” I say. “Pick smart.”

He stares at the log a while longer before he moves. Then he opens the bottom drawer, takes out a second book, and turns it around so I can read it without taking it from his hands. They’re shaking enough that I hear the pages before I touch them.

Two trucks out of the quarry that night. One’s sitting in an empty warehouse outside Coeur d’Alene, plates pulled, nobody’s claimed it in a week. The second changed plates twice before the Montana line, then split into two vans on a service road nobody runs freight on. This scale logged one of them light. Decoy.

The other logged heavy. Heavier than a load that size should run. About one person heavier than the manifest says.

That’s our target. I know it. It should feel like progress. It doesn’t.

Four days behind that van now. Closing slower than I want.

I write the numbers into my own book, thank him for his time, and leave him with the drawer still open.

Outside, the cold hits before the door’s shut behind me. Odile’s leaning against the truck with her arms crossed, black coat down to her ankles, gray silk at the collar. In a gravel lot in Idaho. She watched two hundred years of fashion come and go and kept what suited her.

Small, straight-backed, dark hair pinned up off a long neck. A face that was called striking back when she still had a country to be called anything in. Her eyes are silver in the floodlights, and they’re on the door. She knows exactly how long I’ve been in there.

“Eleven minutes,” she says. “You’re slowing down, monsieur.”

“He had a second book.”

“They usually do.” She pushes off the truck. “Faine’s best chased four truckloads of blood-stock across two continents last year. Now she’s got you working gas-station scale houses in Idaho at midnight. If she knew how this actually looked, she’d laugh.”

“She knows.”

“Knowing and approving aren’t the same thing.”

Odile held the ramp for me at the quarry the night we went in for Val-Serein. I don’t forget that, and neither does she, which is likely why Faine sent her with me.

“You could tell me why,” Odile says.

“Why what?” I say.