Page 8 of Deacon

“You’re braver than I thought,” I said, and it got a small smile from her.

I walked her out across the lot. It was cold now, the desert kind that bites harder the later it gets, and she pulled her jacket closed.

“So what happens now?” she asked.

“Now you go home, lock your door, and open up tomorrow like it’s any other Thursday.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s your part.”

“And yours?”

“Mine’s two green chile rolls on Friday.”

She laughed, short and tired, and leaned against her car. A shiver went through her and I fought the urge to pull her into the heat of my body.

“Did I do the right thing?” she said quietly. “He’s my dad.”

Harry Laine had always rubbed me wrong. I understood him, which was worse. A man who’d bought half a town at a discount and sat on it, waiting for somebody to make it worth his while. Somebody finally had.

“You did the right thing.”

“You’d say that either way, I think.”

“I would,” I agreed. “Doesn’t make it less true this time, though.”

She looked up at me then.

This was the part where a smarter man stepped back, but I stayed exactly where I was.

The clip in her hair was about to give up completely. A curl had come loose against her cheek, and my hand wanted to touch her face and tuck it in so badly that I shoved both fists in my pockets and kept them there. If I touched her tonight, I’d forget which of us had come here needing help.

She opened the car door. Stopped.

“Deacon.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

She went. The gate rolled open and her taillights swung out onto the road, and I stood there and watched them until they turned onto Main.

The prospect had said the road was clear when she arrived, and I’d believed him. It took me a week to find out we were both wrong. There’d been a car parked dark behind Moreno’s old warehouse the whole time she was inside, and whoever sat in it watched her leave the same way I did.

Difference was, I was thinking about green chile rolls on Friday.

He was thinking about her father’s arrangement with the cartel.

CHAPTER 3

CHELSEA

Ispent Thursday waiting for the sky to fall.

It held. Earl got his bear claw. The Herrera twins split their croissant, and everything seemed suspiciously normal. My phone sat by the register all day, silent, and every time a truck rolled down Main I looked up from the dough. Every single time it was just some rancher’s pickup full of feed sacks.