Page 13 of Mustang

He nodded.Didn’t press.The total came to forty-three dollars and change.I laid two twenties and a five on the counter, accepted the coins without pocketing them,coins jingled, and jingling carried,and took the bag with a nod that said exactly as much as his had.

The grocery on Cedar Street was next.Smaller than the hardware store, barely a step above a convenience mart, the shelves stocked with inventory that suggested the owner bought whatever the distributor sent and didn’t ask questions.I picked up coffee, canned tomatoes, and the dried beans Hannah had been working through at a rate that meant we’d be out by week’s end.The bread flour she’d mentioned running low on sat on the bottom shelf in a ten-pound sack that had probably been there since the last snow.I lifted it one-handed, feeling the heft, and set it in the basket alongside everything else.

The last aisle held household items nobody in Pine Creek bought unless something had broken.Duct tape.Light bulbs.A peg hook near the register with three pairs of work gloves hanging by their loops.Insulated, leather-palmed gloves, the practical sort that actually kept your hands warm when the temperature dropped below freezing, which it did most nights on the mountain and showed no sign of stopping.

Hannah had held these exact gloves two days ago.I’d watched her pick them up, turn them over, run her thumb along the leather palm, and set them back on the hook without a word.Her hands had been red from the cold pump water.The skin at her knuckles had looked raw.She’d set the gloves down and moved on to the flour, and I’d stood at the end of the aisle pretending to decide between two brands of coffee I had no intention of buying.

I picked up the gloves.Size small.Turned them over once, feeling the weight of the insulation, the flexibility of the leather.Dropped them into the basket without ceremony and carried everything to the register where the same woman who’d been there last time rang me up without looking up from her magazine.

The route back to the truck took me through the alley behind the diner.Narrow, gravel-packed, lined with dumpsters that smelled of yesterday’s grease and coffee grounds.I walked it at an easy pace, the grocery bag in my left hand, my right hanging loose at my side where it could reach the knife in my boot if the alley decided to turn hostile.It didn’t.The alley stayed an alley.The green sedan stayed parked across from the feed store, engine still off, windows still tinted, no movement visible through the glass.

I sat in the pickup for four minutes.Engine off.Keys in the ignition but not turned.The rearview mirror showed me Ridgeline Avenue in reverse: the hardware store’s front window, the feed store’s porch where the elderly man had gone inside, the green sedan sitting patient at the curb like it had all the time in the world.Four minutes was long enough to confirm the sedan wasn’t leaving and short enough that sitting longer would have drawn attention.Attention was the one thing I couldn’t afford, not with Hannah in the cabin and two burner phones on a scarred table and a client who wanted proof I couldn’t give him.

I started the engine.Let it idle for three seconds,long enough to warm, not long enough to announce,and pulled away from the curb without hurrying, the same pace I’d used arriving.The route back up the mountain added twenty minutes.Winding roads, switchbacks that doubled back on themselves, stretches of gravel where the pavement gave out entirely.The longer route meant more time behind the wheel and less chance of being followed, and if the green sedan had friends waiting on the main road, they’d be waiting a long time for a truck that wasn’t coming.

The mountain rose ahead.Pine and fir crowded the road’s edges, branches scraping the truck’s flanks when the curves tightened.The grocery bag sat on the passenger seat, the insulated gloves folded on top of the flour sack where the morning light caught the leather and turned it the color of good whiskey.I didn’t look at them.Didn’t think about why they were there.Just drove, both hands on the wheel, eyes moving between the road and the mirrors, and watched the mountain take me back the way it always did: slow, patient, keeping its secrets to itself the same way I kept mine.

I set the grocery bags on the counter with the same economy of motion I used for everything that didn’t require ceremony.Flour sack on the bottom, coffee on top, the gloves folded beside the beans where the morning light from the window caught them and turned the leather the same warm brown as the wood walls.

Hannah stood at the stove.Dish towel tucked into the waistband of her jeans—my jeans, technically, borrowed from the duffel and rolled at the cuffs where they pooled around her bare feet.She turned when the bags hit the counter, wooden spoon in hand, and took in the contents in a slow, methodical inventory, checking what I’d brought against what we needed, what I hadn’t brought against what she’d expected, and finally landing on me with the same assessing look she’d given the glove hook two days ago.Checking for tells.For the set of my shoulders, the tightness in my jaw, the hundred small ways a man who’d been doing this for twenty years might betray that something had gone wrong.

Nothing had gone wrong.The sedan was parked.The clerk had asked his question.The gloves were on the counter.I moved past her toward the table, dropping my keys beside the legal pad, and pulled the pad toward me without sitting down.Standing worked better for thinking.Standing kept the blood moving, kept the body ready, kept the mind sharp in a way sitting never did.

Behind me, the soft sound of the gloves being picked up.The rustle of leather as she unfolded them, turned them over, tested the fit against her palm.I didn’t look.Didn’t need to.I could feel her standing there, gloves in hand, the kind of silence that meant she was deciding whether to say something or let it lie.Most people would have let it lie.Hannah wasn’t most people.

“Thank you.”

Quieter than usual.Two words, delivered to my back with a steadiness that carried no expectation of a response.Thanks that wasn’t asking for anything in return, not even acknowledgment, which was why it landed the way it did: square between my shoulder blades, warm and complicated and entirely her fault.

I nodded once without turning around.Didn’t trust my voice with whatever would have come out if I’d opened my mouth, and some silences were better left unbroken.She set the gloves down,soft leather on wood, barely a sound,and turned back to the stove where a pot was simmering with garlic and the herbs she’d hung on the windowsill.

The legal pad held yesterday’s work: Decker Holt, circled.Partial plate from the Tahoe.Distribution network through three counties.I uncapped the pen and added today’s entry below it in the same block handwriting:Green sedan, OH plates partial 728, parked across feed store 0945, no driver visible, tinted windows, engine cold.Position suggests surveillance on Ridgeline/Cedar intersection.Not local.Not random.

The new detail connected.Holt’s network had a distribution point forty miles south of Pine Creek, a warehousing operation that moved product through back roads and county highways with the practiced invisibility that came from bribing the right people and avoiding the wrong ones.The sedan’s partial plate matched a vehicle registered to a shell company that leased storage units along that corridor.Two coincidences.The third would be the one that confirmed it, and confirmation in this business usually came with a price attached.

I wrote the connection beneath the sedan entry.Drew a line between Holt’s name and the plate number.Added a question mark beside the shell company, the same mark I’d put beside Holt himself, and sat with the pen poised above the paper while the pieces arranged themselves into a picture I hadn’t been looking for.

Simple witness elimination didn’t require a mid-level distributor sitting outside a bakery.Didn’t require a green sedan with Ohio plates parked across from a feed store in a town nobody visited unless they had business there.Didn’t require three encrypted messages demanding proof of death from a client who’d never asked for verification before.What it required was a messier truth: someone above the client wanted assurance that Hannah Morgan wasn’t just dead but un-found.That whatever she’d seen or was thought to have seen died with her in a way that left no thread for anyone to pull.Not elimination.Erasure.

The pen pressed into the paper.The tip dug a groove beside the question mark, and I set it down before the groove became a hole.

A mug appeared beside the legal pad.Coffee, black, steam rising in a thin curl that caught the firelight from the woodstove.Hannah set it down without being asked, her hand withdrawing before I could thank her or not thank her, the same economy of gesture she’d learned from watching me move through this cabin for a week.I wrapped my hand around the mug.Felt the heat through the tin, through the calluses, through the silver rings that caught the light and held it.Didn’t look up.Didn’t need to.She was already back at the stove, wooden spoon scraping against the pot, the soft sounds of someone who cooked the way other people breathed: without thinking, without stopping, because stopping meant the room went quiet in a way that neither of us had figured out how to fill with anything but the things we weren’t saying.

The cabin kept us inside its log walls, beneath the low ceiling and exposed beams where the firelight moved in patterns that had been the same for twenty years and looked different tonight because she was here.Hannah hummed under her breath now, three notes of a melody I almost recognized before it faded back into the scrape of the spoon.The legal pad sat open.The question marks multiplied.Coffee warmed my hand through the tin, and outside the window the mountain sat in afternoon quiet, keeping its secrets the same way I kept mine.The distance between those secrets was getting smaller by the day.

I tore the page out.Folded it twice along the creases my pen had already made, edges meeting edges with the precision of a document that couldn’t afford to be misaligned.The metal box came out from under the floorboard.Key in the lock, hinge opening on well-oiled pins, the folded page joining the burner phones and the cash and the photograph of Hannah Morgan that I still hadn’t moved from the table because moving it would have meant a truth I wasn’t ready to mean.

I locked the box.Set it back under the floorboard.Pressed the wood flat with my palm and sat back in the chair with the empty coffee mug between my hands and the legal pad blank in front of me and the sound of Hannah moving around the kitchen behind me like she’d been doing it here for years.

Maybe she had.Time worked differently in cabins.Days stretched and compressed based on nothing but the light through the window and the wood in the stove and whether the person cooking dinner hummed while they worked or stayed quiet because their mind was somewhere else.Hannah hummed tonight.Low, absent, the melody coming and going between tasks the way it did when she was comfortable, when the room felt like a room and not a place she’d been brought to against her will.

I listened to it.Let it fill the space between the fire’s crack and the scratch of my pen, which had stopped scratching because there was nothing left to write that the box didn’t already know.Decker Holt had a question mark.The green sedan had a question mark.The client had forty-eight hours and a lie about mountain terrain that wouldn’t hold past the first frost, and somewhere beneath all of it was the thing I’d known since the first night in her kitchen: fifty thousand dollars bought a lot of things, but it didn’t buy the certainty that required three follow-up messages and a sedan with Ohio plates parked across from a feed store in a town that didn’t exist on most maps.

Hannah’s spoon kept scraping.The fire kept burning.The mountain outside kept its silence, and I sat at the scarred table with my hands around an empty mug and listened to the woman behind me move through a kitchen that wasn’t mine anymore—hadn’t been mine since the first time she hung herbs on the windowsill and the cabin decided it preferred her version of itself to the one it had been for twenty years.

Some surrenders happened quietly.No fanfare.No negotiation.Just a man at a table and a woman at a stove and a set of gloves on a counter that fit her hands perfectly because I’d been paying attention even when I pretended not to, and attention, in my experience, was usually the beginning of a road that ended badly for everyone involved.

The spoon kept scraping.I stayed seated.For now, with the woodstove going, the mountain outside, and two burner phones locked in a metal box under the floor, it was enough.