Page 89 of Into the Fire

I knew that meant a long morning for me. “Okay.”

“Marty has the schedule. I’m telling you so you hear it from me.”

“Take the discharge summary,” I said. “He’ll want the medical.”

“It’s already with me in the truck,” Dante said.

I didn’t ask when he was coming back to the house, or whether he was checking out of the motel in the morning.

“What are you doing in the morning?” Dante asked.

“Starting over.”

“With what?”

“Everything.”

“Good plan,” he said. “I’ll be there at noon. I still work there.”

“Of course you do.”

“Night, Boone.”

He hung up first. I stood holding the phone a while after the screen went dark, and then I put my keys back in the enamel dish where they belonged, leaving them there for the night.

I slept badly. I lay on my side of the bed with Dante’s charger plugged in on the other side, the little light glowing green.

One question wouldn’t let go. Who would hurt him? I’d made lists and taken his name off the board because I couldn’t sort it out. I had a legal pad full of the names of men I liked and no answer at all. Somewhere around two in the morning, I climbed out of bed.

Who would hurt him was a question about Dante. How somebody did it was a question about Silvertip.

Someone had opened a packed rig behind a locked door and closed it clean. Someone had put a saw to a link on a tower in an open yard at lunchtime. Eleven statements agreed that nobody saw anything. They might all be true.

I’d been asking who. I was going to start asking how.

I made coffee and drank it standing at the counter in the dark.

At two-thirty, I turned on the television. I found a romantic comedy that Dante had told me to watch three times.

Twenty minutes in, the best friend was obviously in love with the sister. Dante would have spotted it from the beginning.

I watched the whole thing. At four-fifteen they kissed in the rain. I turned off the television, read some McMurtry, showered, and drove to Silvertip.

I drove through the gate at ten to six. Silvertip was asleep, except for the yard lights. My office window was dark. The loft had a light on.

Inside, the cold hadn’t lifted yet, and under the canvas and sewing-machine oil, the building smelled faintly of propane heat. Nash was at the long bench with the walking boot propped on a crate. He hadn’t turned the main lights on. Just the bench lamp that cast one pool of yellow at the end of the dark table.

“It’s not six yet,” I said.

Nash looked at me. “You noticed.”

I crossed to the bench and stood at the end of it, where I’d stood the night Dante packed his chute.

“I need something from you,” I said.

“More sign-out sheets?”

“No. I need you to show me something.”