Page 62 of The Drifter

Then, I stood with my forehead against the door and my hand flat on the wood and I did the thing I had not done in that condo in longer than I could remember. I did not go make coffee. I did not check my phone. I did not find something to hold or something to fix or somebody to be useful to.

I just stood there and let it be true.

I had broken my vow. I had let a Dane all the way in—into my bed, into my kitchen, into the room with the empty morning light, into the one part of me nobody had ever been allowed to touch. And now, he had put on a pistol and walked out my door toward the exact kind of trouble I had sworn I’d never stand next to, and he wouldn’t promise me he was coming back, and the not-promising was the reason I believed he might.

The condo was very quiet.

Out past the window, the harbor was still doing its coin-toss thing with the light, gorgeous, ordinary. I didn’t go stand at the glass to look at it, because he'd asked me not to, and because some cold, reading part of me that never turns off had started, very quietly, to understand that the asking had not been about nothing.

I went and sat down on the floor of the hallway, with my back against the wall between the two closed doors—my bedroom on one side, the empty room on the other—and I pulled my knees up in my towel, and I wrapped my arms around them.

And for the first time since I was a girl in a linen closet, I let myself be a person with nothing in her hands, and nobody watching, and nowhere she had to be.

I didn't cry.

But I came closer than I had in years. I sat there and let myself come right to the edge of it. I didn’t get up to be useful to anybody at all.

18

CLINT

Ididn't take the elevator. Stairs, all the way, fast and quiet. I came out a side door into an alley that smelled like dumpster and jasmine, both at once, which was Charleston all over.

Then, I worked.

Two passes around her building. The first one wide, a full block out, a man walking off a big breakfast. I read the parked cars—every windshield, every mirror angle, every set of shoulders sitting too still behind glass. I read the rooflines. I read the balconies on the buildings facing hers, the ones with sightlines to her window, and I read the marsh grass down along the water where a patient man could sit with a long lens and be a bird-watcher all day.

Nothing.

Second pass, tighter, right in against her building's skin. Service entrances. The parking garage mouth. The little marina dock two lots south where a boat could hold station and look like fishing.

Nothing. No drone in the air. No van with fogged windows. No jogger who jogged past twice. The morning was clean, bright, ordinary, full of people carrying coffee.

And I could still feel it.

That was the part that put frost in me. The eye was still open. Whatever instrument in the back of my neck had been ringing since my first night in this town was ringing yet, low and steady. Years of not being wrong about it said the street being empty meant exactly nothing. It just meant they were good.

A drone six feet off the glass isn't good. That's the thing I kept turning over as I walked. A drone six feet off the glass, in daylight, camera aimed—that's not surveillance. Surveillance, you're not supposed to see. That close, that bold, is one of two things. Sloppy.

Or a message.

I don't believe in sloppy. Sloppy exists, but a man plans on it the way he plans on rain in West Texas.

Which meant somebody wanted me to know.

I was three blocks gone, running the problem, before I realized my feet had been hunting a pay phone. Force of habit older than this century. There used to be one on every corner of every town in America. I'd built half a life on them—quarters and memorized numbers and lines nobody owned. I stopped on the corner and almost laughed at myself. The pay phone is dead. It died while I was walking. The country buried it and never held a service.

There was a convenience store across the street with beer signs in the window.

Inside, in a locked case by the lottery tickets, they had what I needed—cheap phones in plastic clamshells, prepaid, the kind the clerk sells all day to men who don't give their names. I bought one, and minutes to run it, and a bottle of water because a man who buys only a burner is a man who gets remembered. I paid with the black card, which struck me funny in a way I didn't have time for—an untraceable phone bought on the most traceable object in South Carolina. If the company was watching the statement, fine. Let them watch. Faster than a carrier pigeon.

I stood in the shade at the side of the building, cracked the clamshell with my thumbs, and got the thing breathing. Then, I dialed the number Cash had made me memorize at the airstrip—he'd said it once, watching my face, knowing once was all it took.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Yeah."

"It's me."