Page 86 of Into the Fire

I stopped at the door, but I didn’t turn around. He didn’t say more.

I walked out.

Ramirez and Teller were at the racks running the re-inspection Boone had ordered, every rig coming down one at a time. They stopped talking when I came around the corner of the ready room. It picked itself back up behind me at a different pitch.

Shep was carrying streamer bags back to the loft. He saw me, lifted the bags an inch like evidence of something, and said, “Putting these away.”

A light was on in Operations. Through the window, Marty stood at the copier, glasses on his forehead, feeding it Niebur’s file a stack at a time. The phone rang, and he wedged it against his shoulder and kept feeding pages. Somebody had to make the paper move, and it was him.

I had the bunkhouse to myself. Everybody was still out at the racks or holding down the kitchen, and my bag was under the bed where it had lived since August.

I lived there, technically. That was what the paperwork said, but the paperwork was lagging.

Packing took four minutes. Unpacking had taken four minutes too, back in August.

My duffel was lighter than when I arrived. My toothbrush was standing in a cup in Boone’s bathroom, and my gray flannel was hanging in his closet, two hangers from his. The charger I coiled into the side pocket was the truck spare with the fraying jacket, because the good one was plugged in at Boone’s house, on my side of the bed.

I zipped the bag and checked my phone. Sixty percent and a charger that worked when it felt like it.

Hollis was on the steps when I came out, clipboard under his arm, done for the night.

“Kessler?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Don’t forget to ice the hip. Motel’s got a machine by the office. It works. Dwyer maintains that one.”

That was Hollis. It could have been kindness. It could have been a man reading off a checklist he kept for damaged equipment. I’d stopped trying to tell by the sound of his voice.

I put the bag on the seat of my truck and backed out, past Shep’s lemon-yellow truck, and rolled toward the gate. In the mirror, the base lay bathed in its yard lights.

The county road ran empty ahead of my headlights, hay meadows going silver-gray on both sides. I’d made the drive a dozen times since August. It was forty minutes, two wide turns, and one long descent into the valley with the lights of Kessler at the bottom like coals raked out flat.

Headlights came up behind me about a mile past where the base road joined the county road.

I didn’t think anything of it. A truck coming down out of the timber at eight-thirty was a rancher, a hunter scouting, or one of our own headed for the Sawtooth. The lights sat back a quarter mile and stayed there.

At the first turn toward Kessler, they turned too.

The lights held their distance. The interval never changed. A man driving his own road at night drifts. He closes on you in the straights and falls back in the curves. He rides up on your bumper when he’s tired of you and swings out to look for a place to pass. These lights held a quarter mile the way a jumper holds his slot in the door.

I slowed down five miles an hour. The gap didn’t close.

I brought it back up. The gap didn’t open.

A cattle guard hummed under my tires. My hands had gone to ten and two without asking me, and my attention divided itself—road, mirror, road, mirror.

Two weeks ago I’d been the truck behind, hanging back at what I’d considered an unnoticeable distance, and Shep had picked me up within two miles. Shep had also shown me what came next, because he’d run me through every counter a bored twenty-five-year-old could invent. Coming into Kessler, there was a loop road around the grain elevator, a long gravel horseshoe that rejoined the main street on the far side of town. It had no purpose. Nobody took it. Shep had taken it purely to make me commit.

I took it.

Gravel popped under the wheels, and the elevator went by on my left, a dark tower against a blue-black sky. I watched the mirror.

The lights joined the loop behind me.

I ran a checklist. Fuel, half a tank. Phone in the cupholder, face up. Doors locked since the base. Ahead, four hundred yards, the back of Kessler—the diner, streetlights, and people.

I didn’t test the follower again. I drove out of the loop at a normal speed, straight down Main Street, and stopped under the Sinclair canopy in all that white light with the pumps on one side of me and the station window on the other.