Page 52 of Forbidden Protector

John checks his watch and winces. "Six hours to Lake Louise, and that's if the border's kind to us." He drains the last of the beer and sets the bottle down. "Should've been on the road an hour ago."

"Stay for coffee."

"Can't. Kid needs three stops as it is, and I've already blown one hotel check-in window this year." He calls across the yard. "Miles. Let's load up, bud."

Miles tosses the stick one more time for Gus and comes at a dead run. I brace for it out of habit, catching him around the ribs when he hits. He hugs me hard and quick, the fierce all-in kind only a kid manages. Then he lets go and steps back grinning like he's already halfway up the mountain.

"Get some face shots for me," I tell him.

"I will. I'm gonna get so many." He's already backing toward the truck, still talking. "I'll show you pictures when we get back, okay? All of them."

"Deal."

Miles climbs into the booster on his own, still narrating something about wax and edges, and John reaches in to buckle him anyway. He shuts the door on the tail end of the sentence, then turns to me, hand out.

"You did good work getting me through that," he says. "I don't say it enough."

"You don't say it at all."

"Exactly." He claps my shoulder once, hard, and looks past me at Mackenzie on the porch. "Whatever this is. Don't talk yourself out of it because it showed up wearing a badge."

"Drive safe."

"Coward," he says, grinning, and gets in the truck.

I watch the taillights go all the way to the county road and turn north, toward a week of powder and a boy who gets to be a kid instead of evidence in a custody file.

I stand there a while after they're gone.

Then it's just the porch, and her, and the afternoon still bright over the mountains, hours of daylight left to fill.

"He's a good man," she says.

"Best I know."

"You drove to Butte for him. Twice, during the custody thing. Just showed up and wouldn't say why?"

"He talks too much."

She looks at me a beat too long, like she does when she's deciding whether to let something go or dig it up anyway, and then she surprises me.

"I think I should go back to the Riverview."

I don't say anything for a second, because the sentence lands somewhere I wasn't braced for it.

"Why?"

"Because I've been under your roof for four days, and I have a new rental car, and Room 6 is a crime scene I still haven't closed, and it's starting to feel like I'm hiding instead of investigating." She turns the mug in her hands, not looking at me now. "I've got a job to do, Blackwater, and it's hard to do it objectively from your guest bed."

"You want objectivity?"

"I want to not lose the thread of what I came here to do."

"You think a motel room gives you that?"

"I think it gives me a door I can lock that isn't yours."

That one gets under the collar, quick and mean. I let it sit there a second before I answer it, because she meant it to.