Page 92 of The Drifter

Handcuff keys.

I turned them once in my fingers and looked back up at him.

"For your mother," he said. "Don't worry. The cuffs are loose. Padded, even. I told you—I'm not Victoria. I have nothing against the woman." He checked his watch, then, a good one, gold catching the kitchen light. Then, his eyes came back up to mine, and the smile on him now had a new thing in it, a bright, interested, terrible thing, a man arriving at the part of the evening he'd planned the whole evening around.

"I'm going to do you one last favor," he said. "To prove I'm not a complete monster. There's a horse in the corral out there. Big gray. Mean as sin—the caretaker's been trying to break him for weeks and the horse is winning. He told me so himself. Now. If you can manhandle that animal, and ride him down the southfork trail—" he watched my face as he said it, and he knew, the file was that deep, he knew what that trail was, "—the same trail you used to run away on, I believe—and find your mother, and get her uncuffed from the little gift lying next to her, well." He spread his hands. "Then, that's that."

"What about me?" Sasha said.

Her voice came out steady. I'd have known if it cost her, and it cost her, and it came out steady, anyway.

Craine looked at her like he'd only then remembered she made sound.

"You can go with him, or you can stay here. Entirely your choice." A shrug. "You'll be safer if you stay."

He looked at his watch again. He nodded along with something—the second hand, I understood, he was counting it down, savoring it, a man conducting his own orchestra. Then, his eyes came up one last time, bright and warm and void.

"And your ten minutes starts … now. Good luck, Clint."

He walked out the back door.

For one second—one whole second, the longest of my life—I stood pinned to my mother's kitchen floor.

Through the window, his back, crossing the yard, unhurried, wide open. Nine seconds to run him down. Five to finish it. My hands knew the whole sequence and were already warm. And against it: the eyes on the rise. The rifle at the fence. Sasha, three feet away, in the blast radius of anything I started. My mother, cuffed to a gift at the end of a trail, with a clock running that I'd just spent a second of.

Fuck—

"Go."

Sasha. Her voice cut through like a hand on a bridle. She'd already moved—putting the counter at her back, her chin up, her eyes blazing and dead certain.

"I'll stay. Go."

I looked at her for a quarter of a heartbeat. I looked out the window at Craine's back going away across the yard.

Then, I bolted for the front door.

29

SASHA

Clint went out the front, running, his boots gone across the porch and down the steps and away toward the corral. And then it was just me, standing on the worn floor of a stranger's kitchen a thousand miles from anything that had ever been mine, in a silence so total I could hear the windmill turning somewhere outside and my own blood going in my ears.

Three days, I thought.

That was the thing that kept coming back. Three days ago, I had stood behind a marble counter in a pressed pink blouse and watched a man with a canvas bag come through my doors, and now, I was here. In West Texas. In his mother's kitchen. Left behind on purpose as a stranger's insurance while the man I loved ran down a trail on a half-wild horse to save the only mother he had left.

I should have been afraid. Some cold, working part of me noted that I was not afraid, not the way a person ought to be. I moved on—because there was no room for the fear. The fear would have taken up space I needed for other things.

I looked around the room instead.

I couldn't help it. It's what I do. I read a room the way other people breathe, and this room had a woman all through it, a woman I would now, in all likelihood, never meet.

Her kitchen. Her counter, chipped along the front edge where years of hips had leaned against it. Her mugs in the cabinet Craine had known how to find. A calendar on the wall three years out of date, left hanging because somebody couldn't bear to take it down. A child's height marks pencilled up the doorframe, seven separate ladders of them, names gone faint beside the lines. I found the one that said Clint without meaning to. My throat closed.

She'd marked her boys against a doorframe. She'd fed seven of them at this counter. And I would have liked to know her.

Maybe you still will, I told myself. Maybe he gets to her in time and this all comes out the other side and there's a table someday and you're at it.