Page 28 of Forbidden Protector

"Built it myself. Mostly." Holt sets my second bag down like it weighs nothing, which to him it probably does. "Took two winters."

"With what, spare time?"

"With what I had instead of a life."

He says it dispassionately and walks off toward the kitchen before I can decide if that was a joke.

I count the windows out of habit before I let myself look at anything else. Three in this room alone, all facing the drive, nothing facing blind. It takes me a second to realize I've already started running this house like a scene.

The floor is wide plank, honey-colored, worn soft in a track from the door to the stairs like a hundred years of boots already lived here instead of two. A leather couch that's actually been sat in, not staged. The chimney runs two stories up into a loft I can't see the top of, and I catch myself wondering what a man builds a house this size for when he lives in it alone. I catch myself wondering it in the same voice I'd use on a suspect's bank statement.

Gus meets me at the hearth rug before I've made it three steps. Nine years old, grey at the muzzle. He crosses the room low and fast like he's been waiting since the truck door opened. A strange dog is supposed to stop at my knee. He doesn't. He leans. His whole weight, every solid pound of cattle dog he's got, against the outside of my leg, looking up at me like I already belong to something.

"Traitor," Holt says from the kitchen, not looking over.

"He's got good instincts."

"He's got no standards left. First warm leg he finds."

I put my hand down without deciding to, and Gus pushes his head into it. I stand there, in a stranger's front room, scratching a dead man's dog behind the ears with my duffel still in my other hand. I hate how little it took.

I make myself keep moving instead of standing there with it.

The bookshelf runs the whole east wall floor to loft, and I go to it because it's something to read the man by and something to do with my hands that isn't touching the dog again. Lonesome Dove, spine cracked white from rereading. Field guides on birds and wildflowers and alpine rock, the kind of books a man buys because he wants the name of the thing in front of him, not because somebody assigned it.

Beside the shelf, a record player and a short stack of vinyl, and on top, worn soft at the corners from handling, John Coltrane. A Love Supreme.

"Coltrane," I say, before I can stop myself.

"Trane." He says it easy, a word he's said ten thousand times. "If you want to sound like you know jazz."

I don't say anything else about it. I put the word away instead of the record, because something in how he says it tells me it means more to him than an album does, and I don't want him watching me notice that yet.

The refrigerator gets me.

Stainless steel, professional grade, and stuck to the front of it with a horseshoe magnet, a single sheet of paper gone soft and curled from years on that door. Crayon. A black truck, wheels too big, mountains scribbled purple behind it, a tall stick figure in a black hat with a hand the size of the truck's tire. Underneath, in the careful backward letters of somebody just learning them:

UNCLE HOLT

"Whose?"

He comes to stand beside me, close enough that I feel the heat off him before I feel anything else. Then he looks at the drawing the way a man looks at something he's looked at a hundred times and still hasn't used up.

The black goes out of his eyes, dark brown gone warm and unguarded. It’s a color I haven't seen on him once since the airport.

"John's boy. Miles. Eight now." A beat. "Drew it when he was four. Wouldn't let me throw it out even after he got better at drawing trucks."

"Who's John?"

"Spotter. Ranger days. Lives in Butte now."

That's all he gives me, and it's more than he's given me about anything else in this house. A friendship that earns refrigerator space like this is data, whatever else it is.

"This isn't what I expected," I admit, because it needs saying out loud or it's going to sit in me and rot.

"What'd you expect?"

"A bunkhouse. Gun rack. Something that smelled like a man who doesn't own a couch."