Page 19 of Switch

The rest of it went past me.

I was on the bike. I don’t remember getting on it. Gage yelled after me. I caught the last word as I passed him.

“Go.”

I took the old track.

The one nobody used. The one that ran up the wash past where my father’s trailer had stood, and cut across the back section to the barns. I’d ridden it on a bicycle with no brakes when I was nine. I’d ridden it on a dirt bike at fourteen. I knew where it washed out and where the rock came up through the sand, and I took it with no lights and rode the throttle the whole way.

The trailer slab went by on my left. A gray smear in the dark. Gone.

I’d sat at the end of her drive once and decided she was better off without me. All the way up that wash I made the other kind of deal. Let her be all right and I’d never leave her again. Let her be all right and she could run me off the place with her own two hands, and I’d go. Let her be all right. Whatever it cost.

I came up over the rise and the whole place was lit up like a stadium. Every yard light burning. Six horses bunched at the far end of the paddock, heads up, watching. The SUV slewed sideways at the barn door with both front doors hanging open. Shade had the driver face down in the gravel with a knee in his spine and the man’s pistol shoved in his own belt.

And the smell hit me. Even over the dust and the engine. Gasoline.

I jumped off the bike at a run. Shade jerked his head at the barn.

The aisle lights were off. Only the glow from the yard came through the doors, long and yellow down the rubber mats, and the mats were shining wet. Gas all the way down, splashed on the stall fronts, pooled under the hay. It stung my eyes.

He had her at the far end.

He was backed into Deuce’s doorway with Savannah pulled up hard against his chest. One arm locked across her collarbone. A knife in that hand, the blade pressed flat under her jaw. In his other hand he had a lighter, and the lid was flipped open, and his thumb was on the wheel.

Behind them, Deuce stood with his hindquarters to the door and his head in the back corner, ears flicking between the man and the aisle. Keeping out of it, the way a sensible horse does.

Savannah saw me. Her face was gray under the dirt. There was a thin dark line where the knife was.

Inside me the noise shut off. The yard, the horses, my own heart. All of it went quiet and cold.

I’d felt it before. Every time a man had to die, I felt it. I’d felt it the morning I left her bed, and I’d hated it, and I’d run from her so she’d never have to see it on me.

She was seeing it now.

“Close enough,” the man said. His voice cracked. “Drop it or I light her up. I light the whole fucking place up too.”

I kept the pistol on him and kept walking. Slow. One step. Another.

“Stop. I swear to God I’ll end her.”

“Eyes on me,” I said. “Not her. Me.”

He did. His eyes were pinned wide, and I saw how young he was. Twenty-two, maybe. Somebody had handed him a gas can and told him to make a woman sorry, and it had all gone wrong, and now he was standing in a barn soaked in gasoline with his thumb on a lighter and nowhere to go.

That made him more dangerous.

“You put that knife on her,” I said. “You know how this ends.”

“You back up. You back up and let me walk out of here with her.”

I couldn’t take the shot. The knife was too close to her throat and the lighter was too close to the gas. If I dropped him, his thumb might spin the wheel on the way down, and the whole aisle would go up with her standing in it.

So I waited. And I watched her.

She was looking right at me. Her hands were down at her sides, open. Her eyes went to the horse behind them, once, and back to me.

I didn’t know what she meant. Then I did.