Page 14 of Run Rabbit Run

He doesn't look at Vane for instruction. He already knows his instructions. He's known them longer than I've known any of this was coming.

So Vane didn't drive himself. Of course he didn't. Men like him don't drive. They're driven, and they arrive places already knowing how the visit ends.

"Here's where we are," Vane says, and he turns to face me, and he puts his back to the wind so it's in my eyes and not his.

I don't think he did it on purpose and yet at the same time I don't think anything he does isn't on purpose, both at once. "Your brother owes me a sum he will never earn in three lifetimes. We've established selling won't touch it. We've established the courts don't apply. That leaves the two of us and the small matter of how the debt gets settled."

"You said you don't want money."

"I said I don't accept trucks." A flicker at the corner of his mouth. "I'll take money when a man has it. Your brother doesn't, and he won't, and we both watched you tally it up in there and hit the same wall I hit months ago."

Luke's stopped talking entirely. He's gone somewhere behind his own eyes, arms wrapped around his middle like a kid waiting out a fight in the next room. I want to shake him and I want to stand in front of him, and the two urges pull against each other the way they always have, older than either of us.

"Then spit it out," I tell Vane. "Whatever this walk is for. Just say it and stop enjoying yourself."

That gets a real reaction. Not a smile, nothing so warm. A stillness that goes a half-degree deeper, like a man who's found the exact fish he came to the water for.

"All right," he says. "Plainly."

He steps closer. Not a threat in it, not the way a normal man closes distance. He does it the way weather does, the way the cold came up off the river this morning, a pressure that arrives before you've clocked it moving.

"I'm going to give you a chance no one in your brother's position has ever been given," he says. "A game. One night. You against me, on my land, with everything on the table."

The wind gusts and I don't feel the cold of it.

"What game?"

"Halloween night. You'll come to my estate. Thousands of acres, forest most people never set foot in, and a single rule between you and freedom." He watches my face while he lays it down, watches it the way you'd watch a fire you set to see if it catches. "You run. Sundown to first light. If you last the night without me catching you, the debt dies with the dawn. Every dollar. Your brother walks free and clean, and you never see me again as long as you live."

Somewhere far off a truck downshifts on the highway. The sound belongs to a world that's still ordinary, and I can feel that world getting farther away by the second, like I'm being carried out on a tide I didn't feel come in.

"And if you catch me?"

"Then the debt's still paid." His eyes don't leave mine. "By you. Not for a night. For good."

It takes a second for the whole meaning of it to hit me, and when it does my stomach drops the way it does off the top of a climb, that lurch before the rope catches.

He's not talking about money anymore. He hasn't been talking about money since the diner.

He's talking about keeping me.

"You're insane," I say, and it comes out steadier than I have any right to. "You know that. Whatever you think this is⁠—"

"I know exactly what it is." No heat, no offense, the calmness of a man stating the time. "You think I'm insane because you've never met anyone who tells you the truth about what they want. Everyone in your life dresses it up. I'm offering you something cleaner than you've ever been handed. I'm telling you precisely what I intend, and then I'm giving you a fair chance to keep it from happening."

"Fair." The word comes out of me like something spat. "There's nothing fair about⁠—"

"It's the fairest offer you'll get." He tips his head toward Luke without looking at him. "I could simply take the payment. Your brother has no cards left, and you'd give yourself for him in a heartbeat, and we both know it, so I could stand here and name the price, and you'd pay it in that booth by sundown. No forest. No chance. Just a bill and a woman who loves her brother too much to let it come due on him."

The worst part is that he's right, and he knows he's right.

"Instead," he goes on, "I'm giving you the woods. The one place on this earth you're better than almost anyone alive. I've seen what you can do out there. I'm handing you a whole night in your own church and telling you that if you're as good as you believe you are, you walk away free and you take your brother with you."

I make myself stop reacting and start working.

It's what Gramps built into me under everything else, deeper than the fear, deeper even than the love that's got me standing in this lot instead of in my truck driving away. When the ground goes bad, you stop feeling and you start reading. So I read.

"Rules," I say. "If I'm doing this, I need the rules. All of them. Now."