Jamie Bennett stared at him. “You’re not going to give me an answer?”
“I’m going to get some sleep,” Ethan said. “And then I’ll give you an answer.”
Alone in the dark bedroom, they spoke in whispers beneath the wailing wind and considered the best-case scenarios and the worst-case. There seemed to be many more options in the latter category.
“Tell me what you think, Allison. What you think.”
She was quiet for a time. They were facing each other in the bed and he had one arm wrapped around her back, her lean muscles rising and falling under his hand as she breathed. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow and touched his cheek.
“You can’t say no,” she said at last.
“You think we have to do it, then?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Clarify.”
She took a deep breath. “You won’t be able to say no. You’ll be watching every news story, searching for some kid who was killed or who disappeared. You’ll be calling Jamie asking for updates she won’t be able to give you. Your entire summer will be lost to wondering if you put him in harm’s way when you could have taken him out of it. Am I wrong?”
He didn’t answer.
“You also believe it,” she said. “And that’s a good thing.”
“Believe her story? Of course I do.”
“No,” Allison said, “you believe that this can help him. That when he goes back to the world to face it all down, he’ll be more ready than he was before he got here. Before he got to you.”
“I think it works,” Ethan said. “Some of the time, I think it works.”
“I know it does,” she said softly.
Allison had understood from the beginning. Or understood how it mattered to him, at least, and believed that he believed it worked. That was a critical starting point. Many people he spoke to about it got the theory of the program without the soul. Maybe that was on him. Maybe he’d not been able to explain it properly, or maybe it wasn’t something you could explain but, rather, something that had to be felt. Maybe you needed to be sixteen years old with a hard-ass, impossible-to-please father and facing a long stretch in juvie and knowing that longer stretches in worse places waited and then arrive in a beautiful but terrifying mountain range, clueless and clumsy, and find something out there to hold inside yourself when you got sent back. When the mountains were gone and the air blew exhaust smoke instead of glacier chill and the pressures that were on you couldn’t be solved with a length of parachute cord and an ability to tie the right knot with your eyes closed. If you could find that and hold it there within yourself, a candle of self-confidence against the darkness, you could accomplish great things. He knew this. He’d been through it.
So you learned to build a fire, his old man had said when Ethan explained the experience, unable to transfer the feeling to him. Yes, he’d learned to build a fire. What it had done for him, though, the sense of confidence the skills gave and the sense of awe that the mountains gave…those were impacts he could not describe. All he could do was show everyone: No trouble with the law since he was sixteen, a distinguished Air Force career, a collection of ribbons and medals and commendations. All of those things had been within the flame of that first fire he’d started, but how could you explain that?
“So you’ll do it,” Allison said. “You’ll agree to it in the morning.”
He offered a question instead of confirmation. “What don’t you like about her?”
“I never said I didn’t like her.”
“I’ll repeat the question. Hopeful for an answer this time.”
Allison sighed and leaned her head on his chest. “She drove her car off the road in a snowstorm.”
“You’re bothered by the fact that she’s a bad driver?”
“No,” Allison said. “I’m bothered by the fact that she rushes, and she makes mistakes.”
He was silent. Intrigued by the observation. It seemed unfair on the surface, critical and harsh, but she was only commenting on the very things he’d taught for so many years. Good decision-making was a pattern. So was bad decision-making.
“Just keep that in mind,” Allison said, “when you tell her that you’re going to do it.”
“So now I’m going to do it?”
“You were always going to do it, Ethan. You just needed to go through the rituals. That way you can convince yourself it’s the right choice.”
“You’re saying it’s not?”
“No, E. I’m saying that I truly don’t know what will come of it. But I know you’re going to say yes.”
They slept then, finally, and in the morning he told Jamie Bennett that he would take the job, and then they set about finding a tow truck to deal with the damaged rental. A simple mistake, he told himself, representative of nothing.
But he couldn’t help thinking, after Allison’s warning, that the first thing Jamie had admitted to him upon her disastrous midnight arrival was that she had heard the forecast and ignored it, convinced she could beat the storm.
Up at the Beartooth Pass, chains rattled and winches growled as they pulled that mistake free from the snowdrifts.
4
Ian was off duty when they came for him, but he was still in uniform and still armed, and usually that meant something to people. Badge on the chest, gun on the belt? He felt awfully strong in those situations. Had since the academy, could still remember the first time he’d put on the uniform, feeling like a damned gladiator.
Bring it the fuck on, he’d thought then, and the years hadn’t eroded much of that swagger. He knew better than to believe he was untouchable-he’d attended too many police funerals for that, and he’d shaken a few too many of the wrong hands and passed cash to too many people he shouldn’t have-but day by day, hour by hour, he still felt strong in the uniform. People took notice. Some respected you, some feared you, some flat-out hated you, even, but they sure as hell took notice.
The single most unnerving thing about the Blackwell brothers was that they didn’t seem to. The badge meant nothing, and the gun even less. Their pale blue eyes would just roll over you, taking inventory, showing nothing. Indifferent. Bored, even.
He saw their truck when he pulled in. That black F-150 with blacked-out windows, an illegal level of tint. Even the grille was black. He expected they were still inside, and he got out of the cruiser and took a deep breath and hitched up his belt, knowing they were watching and wanting to remind them of the gun, even though they never seemed to care. He went up on the porch and flipped the lid on the beer cooler. Ice had melted but there were still a couple cans floating around in relatively cold water, and he took out a Miller Lite and drank it there on the porch, leaning against the rail and staring at the blacked-out truck and waiting for them to appear.
They never did.
“To hell with it,” he said when the beer was done. Let ’em sit, if that’s what they wanted. He wasn’t going to walk down there and knock on the damn door like he was ready to do their bidding. That wasn’t how it worked. They’d come to him, like it or not.
He crumpled the can and tossed it in the recycling bin on the porch, which was so full the can just bounced off and fell to the floor. He ignored that as he went to the door and unlocked it, hating the uneasy feeling that came with having his back to their black truck. Then he opened the door and stepped inside and saw them in his living room.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing? You broke into my house?”
They didn’t answer, and he felt the first real chill. Shook it off and slammed the door behind him, trying to hold the anger. They worked for him. He needed to remember that in order to ensure that they would remember it as well.