The Hunter

Fourteen

The dead man is lying at the fork where the two paths meet. He’s on his left side, his right arm and leg flopping awkwardly, with his curled back to Trey. Even though she’s ten paces away and can’t see his face, she has no doubt that he’s dead. Banjo stands over him, legs planted wide, nose high, howling up into the trees.

“Banjo,” Trey says, not moving closer. “Good boy. You done great. Come here, now.”

Banjo’s howl fades to a moan. This time, when Trey whistles, he dashes over and presses his nose into her hand. She rubs him and talks softly to him, and looks past him at the dead man. There’s something wrong with the back of his head. The shadows bend into it strangely.

Her first assumption, taken for granted without question, was that it’s her dad. The narrow build is right, and the shirt is white and crisp. It’s only on this longer look that she stops being sure. The crisscrossing shadows of branches and the low slant of dawn light make it hard to tell, but the hair looks too fair.

“Good boy,” Trey says again, giving Banjo one more pat. “Sit, now. Stay.” She leaves him behind and moves cautiously, in a wide arc, around the dead man.

It’s Rushborough. His eyes are half open and his top lip pulled up, so he looks like he’s snarling at something behind Trey. The front of his shirt is dark and stiff.

Trey has never seen a dead person before. She’s seen plenty of dead animals, but never a human being. Ever since she found out what happened to Brendan, she’s had a deep, fierce need to see one. Not Brendan’s. She needs to find where he’s laid, but not in order to see him; so that she can go to the place, and so she can mark it, as a signal of defiance to whoever put him there. She’s needed to see a dead body in the same way: so that she can place Brendan clearly in her mind, where she can lay her hand on him.

She squats by the body for a long time, looking at it. She understands this as a part of the interchange between her and whatever brought first Cal and then Rushborough to Ardnakelty. She didn’t turn away from it, and in response it put this in her path.

The birdcalls and the light gain force as the day expands. It seems to Trey that the thing at her feet shouldn’t be considered as a person any more. As a person, as Rushborough, it’s incomprehensible, wrong in ways that her mind can barely take in without ripping. If she looks at it as just another thing on the mountain, it becomes simple. After a while the mountain will absorb it, as it does fallen leaves and eggshells and rabbits’ bones, and transmute it into other things. Seen in this way, it makes clear and uncomplicated sense.

She stays put until the body has become natural to the mountain, and she can look at it without her mind bending. A few more of Malachy’s sheep wander at the edge of the upper path, steadily crunching weeds.

The sound of a phone ringing goes off like a fire alarm. Trey and Banjo both leap. It’s coming from Rushborough’s pocket.

Trey takes it as a warning. The day is starting to gain momentum; sooner or later, someone will come along this path. Trey is well aware that other people aren’t going to see the body as something that can be left to the mountain’s slow processes, and that once she leaves this spot, neither will she. She has no problem with that. She, no less than the mountain, is well able to turn the body to good account.

The liberation it’s brought with it is only starting to sink in. In the changed landscape this has created, she doesn’t need to hang off her father any more. She doesn’t have to twist herself around what he does and thinks and wants. He’s meaningless; he’ll be gone soon enough, and for her purposes, he’s as good as gone already. She’s on her own now, to do things her way.

She gets up, snaps her fingers for Banjo, and heads down the road, not at a run, but at a fast steady lope that she can keep up all the way. Behind her, Rushborough’s phone rings again.

Cal wakes early and can’t get back to sleep. He doesn’t like the way nothing at all happened yesterday. He hung around the house waiting for Lena, who didn’t come, and Mart, who didn’t come either, and Trey, who he knew wouldn’t come. He went down to the shop, where Noreen gave him a new kind of cheddar and Senan’s wife gave them both a blow-by-blow account of her oldest kid’s wisdom-tooth removal. He watered his damn tomato plants. No one had even messed with the scarecrow. Cal knows good and well there was plenty happening somewhere. He doesn’t like the skill and thoroughness with which it stayed out of sight.

And it’s Monday morning. This is the deadline he gave Johnny to skip town. Regardless of what’s been going on beyond his line of vision, sometime today he needs to go up the mountain and see if Johnny is still there, which he will be, and then decide what to do about him. Cal has never killed anyone and has no desire to start with Trey’s daddy, but doing nothing isn’t an option. His inclination is to haul Johnny’s worthless ass into his car, drive him to the airport, buy him a ticket to wherever will have him, and watch him through security, using whatever measures are necessary to make him cooperate. He considers it possible that Johnny, spineless wimp that he is, will be relieved to have matters taken out of his hands, especially if Cal throws in a little extra cash. If that doesn’t work out, he’ll have to move on to methods with less room for disagreement. Either way, it promises to be a long day.

In the end Cal gives up on trying to sleep and starts making bacon and eggs, with the iPod speaker playing the Highwaymen good and loud, trying to distract his mind. The breakfast is just about ready when Rip jumps up and bounds to the door. Trey and Banjo are up early, too.

“Hey,” Cal says, aiming to keep the rush of glad astonishment out of his voice. He wasn’t expecting to see the kid again till after her dad left town, if ever. “You got good timing. Fetch another plate.”

Trey doesn’t move from the doorway. “Your man Rushborough’s dead,” she says. “Up on the mountain.”

Cal feels everything inside him go still. He turns from the stove.

He says, “Dead how?”

“Someone kilt him.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. His head’s bashed in, and I reckon he was stabbed as well.”

“OK,” Cal says. “OK.” He goes to the iPod and turns it off. The things speeding in his mind don’t include surprise; he feels like some part of him has been taking this moment for granted, just waiting to get word. “Where?”

“Below ours, where the road splits. He’s there on the road.”

“The Guards there yet?”

“Nah. No one knows, only me. I found him. Came straight here.”

“Right,” Cal says. “Good call.” He turns off the stove. He’s breathless with relief that the kid came to him with this, but he can’t gauge from her face how much she’s not telling him, whether she came to him for refuge from the shock or for defense against something much bigger. She’s had a shock, regardless, but that’s going to have to wait. He feels a spurt of anger at the fact that, all Trey’s life, any gentleness to her has had to wait till other business is dealt with.

“OK,” he says, dumping the bacon and eggs into Rip’s dish, where the two dogs dive on them joyfully. “We’ll let these boys handle this here.” He opens the cupboard under the sink and pulls out a fresh pair of the latex gloves he uses occasionally for gardening or carpentry. “Let’s go see what we’ve got.”

In Cal’s rickety red Pajero, Trey fishes a paper-towel bundle out of her back pocket, unwraps it to reveal several squashed slices of bread and butter, and gets to work. She seems surprisingly OK: not shaky, not white, shoveling food into her face. Cal doesn’t entirely trust this, but he welcomes it anyway.

“How you doing?” he asks.

“Grand,” Trey says. She offers him a slice of bread and butter.

“No thanks,” Cal says. Apparently he and Trey are back to normal: all the complications between them appear to have been wiped away, like they never existed or like they’re no longer relevant.

“It’s a shock,” he says, “seeing someone dead. I’ve done it plenty of times, and it still doesn’t come easy. Specially when you’re not expecting it.”

Trey considers this, methodically biting the crust off her bread to leave the soft middle for last. “It was weird, all right,” she says in the end. “Not like I woulda expected.”

“What way?”

Trey thinks that over for a long time. A few farmers are out in their fields, but the road is still empty; they’ve only passed one other car, some guy in an office shirt starting off early on a long commute. There’s a good chance no one else has come across Rushborough yet.

When Cal’s stopped waiting for an answer, Trey says, “I thought it’d be worse. I’m not being hard or nothing, not like ‘Ah, no big deal to me.’ It was a big deal. Just not in a bad way.”

“Well,” Cal says. “That’s good.” He’s finally put his finger on how she seems: calm. She’s calmer than she’s been since the day her dad showed up. He can’t interpret this.

“He was only a shitehawk anyway,” Trey adds.

Cal swings the car off the road onto the mountain track. It’s unpaved, narrow and gritty; gorse whips at the car windows, and puffs of dust rise around his tires. He slows down.

“Kid,” he says. “I gotta ask you something, and I don’t want you flying off the handle.”

Trey looks over at him, chewing, her eyebrows twitching down.

“If you had anything to do with this—anything at all, like even if you kept watch for someone and you didn’t know what he was gonna be doing—I need to know now.”

Trey’s face shutters over instantly. Her wariness makes Cal sick to his stomach. “How come?”

“ ’Cause,” Cal says. “We’re gonna do things differently, depending on that.”

“Differently how?”

Cal figures maybe he should tell her a lie, but he’s not going to do it. “If you had nothing to do with it,” he says, “we’re gonna phone the Guards. If you did, we’re gonna load the guy into the back of this car, take him up the mountain, dump him in a ravine, and go on about our day.”

To his utter surprise, when he takes a sideways glance at Trey, her face has cracked into a huge grin. “Some cop you are,” she tells him.

“Yeah, well,” Cal says. Several layers of relief flood through him with such force he can hardly drive. “I’m retired; I don’t have to behave myself any more. Lemme hear you say it: did you have anything to do with this?”

“Nah. Found him, just.”

“Well, damn,” Cal says. The relief has left him almost giddy. “You gotta go and make things complicated. It would’ve been a lot simpler to dump the motherfucker up the mountain.”

“I can say I done it if you want,” Trey offers obligingly.

“Thanks, kid,” Cal says, “but no thanks. I’ve got a little good behavior left in me. I’ll take a look, and then we’ll hand him over to the Guards.”

Trey nods. The prospect doesn’t seem to bother her.

“You’re gonna have to tell them about finding him.”

“No problem,” Trey says. “I wanta tell them.”

The promptness and certainty of that make Cal look over at her, but she’s gone back to her breakfast. “I know you don’t want me sticking my nose in,” he says. “But maybe, when you talk to the cops, don’t say anything about gold. They’re gonna hear about it sooner or later, but they don’t need to hear that you were involved, at least not outa your own mouth. I’m not even certain what kinds of illegal were going on all up in there, what with everyone and his gramma trying to rip off everyone else, but I’d rather you didn’t find out the hard way. I’m not saying lie to the police, kid”—when he catches Trey’s widening grin—“I’m just saying. If they don’t bring it up, you don’t need to either.”

The advice is almost definitely unnecessary—not bringing things up is one of Trey’s main skills—but Cal feels like making sure. Trey eye-rolls so hard that her whole head gets involved, which reassures him.

They’ve come within view of the fork, with the unidentifiable huddle at its center. Cal parks the car. The road here is a double dirt track, dry and pebbly, divided by a patchy line of dying grass.

“OK,” he says, opening the car door. “Stay on the grass.”

“I went on the dirt before,” Trey says. “Right up close to him. Are the Guards gonna give me hassle?”

“Nah. You did what was natural. There won’t be any footprints for us to mess up anyway, not on this surface. I’m just playing it safe.”

They come to a stop ten or twelve feet from the body, where the road broadens out into the fork. Rushborough looks out of place to the point of impossibility, a thing with no relationship to this mountain, like he was dropped from one of Bobby’s UFOs. His fancy clothes are awkwardly stretched and twisted by his curled pose. The air is too still even to lift his hair.

“Banjo found him first,” Trey says, at Cal’s shoulder. “He howled.”

“He’s a good dog,” Cal says. “He knows to tell you when something’s important. This how you left the guy? Anything different?”

“Nah. There’s flies on him now, just.”

“Yeah, well,” Cal says. “That happens. You stay here. I’m just gonna take a closer look.”

Rushborough is dead, all right, and Cal can’t argue with Trey’s conclusion that someone killed him. The flies are thick on his chest; when Cal waves them away, they rise in a furious clump, and Cal sees the crust of blood blackening most of his shirtfront. They’re clustered on the back of his head, too, and under those is a deep dent. Bone splinters and brain matter show for a second, before the flies settle again.

Trey is watching, keeping her distance. There’s a dark stain of blood soaked into the dirt under the body, but nowhere near enough blood. The uppermost side of Rushborough’s face is a clabbered white; the underside, next to the ground, is mottled purple. He was moved after he died, but not long after.

Cal knows better than to touch a victim, but he also knows it could be hours before a medical examiner gets way out here, and there’s information that might not wait that long. He takes the latex gloves out of his pocket and puts them on. Trey keeps watching and says nothing.

Rushborough’s skin is cold; it feels colder than the air, although Cal knows that’s an illusion. His jaw hinge is clamped stiff, so is his elbow, but his finger joints and his knee still move. The medical examiner can factor in temperatures and whatnot to work out an approximate time of death. The flies, resenting Cal’s intrusion, come at his face with a whine like bombers.

“We oughta cover him up,” Trey says. “From them.” She motions with her chin at the flies. “You’ve that tarp in the back of the car.”

“Nope,” Cal says, straightening up and peeling off the gloves. “We do that, we’ll get fibers and dog hair and what-have-you all over him. We just leave him.” He catches himself fumbling for his radio to call Dispatch. He pulls out his phone instead and dials 999.

The cop he gets put through to hasn’t had his coffee yet and is clearly expecting some farmer bitching about his neighbor’s bird scarer, but Cal’s tone wakes him up, even before the situation is laid out. Once Cal manages to get across where they are, which takes a while, the guy promises to have people at the scene inside half an hour.

“You sounded like a cop there,” Trey says, when Cal hangs up.

“I still got it when I need it,” Cal says, putting his phone away. “It got his attention, anyway.”

“Have we gotta stay till they come?”

“Yeah. If we leave, someone else is gonna come along and mess up the scene some more, and call the cops all over again. We’ll stick around.” He doesn’t offer to stand guard and let Trey go home. He’s not letting the kid out of his sight.

The heat is building. Cal was going to get back in the car, where the air-conditioning mostly works, but a couple of crows have settled on the higher branches of the trees overhanging Rushborough, eyeing the situation below with interest. Cal leans up against the hood of the car, where he can eye them right back and warn them off if needs be. Trey pulls herself up to sit on the hood next to him. She seems unperturbed by the idea of waiting around for the Guards; apparently, and reassuringly, there’s nothing else she feels the need to be doing.

Cal has no problem with waiting around, either; he welcomes the opportunity to sit and evaluate. He can’t see much downside to Rushborough’s death, in itself. As far as he can tell, the guy contributed nothing but a heap of trouble to anyone. More to the point, with Rushborough off his back, Johnny is likely to waltz his scrawny ass straight out of this townland, to someplace that has more to offer a sophisticated guy like him. From Cal’s standpoint, that looks like a win-win.

He’s aware that the Guards don’t have the license to see it that way, though, which is where the potential downside kicks in. Depending on who killed this fuckball, and how hard they are to identify, that downside could be considerable. In a perfect world, Johnny would have knocked off Rushborough, and done it incompetently enough to land himself in cuffs by this evening. Cal doesn’t dare to hope for that level of luck. There are too many other, less welcome possibilities.

Among them is the possibility that whoever killed Rushborough doesn’t consider the job to be finished. There are plenty of people around who have reason to be seriously pissed with Rushborough, and who might extend that emotion beyond him. Mart said Trey wouldn’t get any blowback, and Mart’s say-so holds weight in this townland, but Mart isn’t God, regardless of what he might think, and he can’t make guarantees.

“Where’s that road go after your place?” Cal asks, nodding to the lower path. “Alongside some bog and into trees, and then what?”

“Nothing for a good way,” Trey says, “and then Gimpy Duignan’s. After that there was the Murtagh brothers, only Christy died and Vincent went into a home. Then it’s just bog.”

“What about up that way?” Cal tilts his chin to the upper fork. “Malachy Dwyer, and then who?”

“Seán Pól Dwyer, about half a mile on. After that it’s grazing and forest till it turns down the mountain again, over towards Knockfarraney. There’s aul’ Mary Frances Murtagh on the way down.”

“Knockfarraney’s where Rushborough was staying. Right?”

Trey nods. She slides off the hood and goes around to the side of the car. “At the bottom of the mountain. In that aul’ cottage that Rory Dunne rents to tourists.”

“I know it,” Cal says. So Rushborough could have been headed to or from his place, the Reddy place, or Ardnakelty, got jumped along the way, and then been dumped in this spot to widen the suspect pool. Alternatively, he could have been killed somewhere unrelated, and left here to point things in the wrong direction. “You see him yesterday?”

Trey is digging in Cal’s glove compartment, presumably for the water bottle he keeps there in this weather. “Nah. I was home all day, he didn’t call in. You sound like a cop again.”

“Nope,” Cal says. “I just sound like a regular guy who’d like to know what went down here. What, you wouldn’t?”

Trey has found the water bottle. She shuts the car door. “Nah,” she says. “Don’t give a shite.”

She leans against the car door, downs half the water, and passes the bottle to Cal. She’s hardly glanced at Rushborough’s body since Cal stepped back from it. It would be natural enough for her to flinch from the sight, but Cal doesn’t think that’s what’s going on. The kid seems at ease, like the dead man is barely even there, too faint a presence to contaminate her home territory. Whatever terms she needed to make with him, she made them before she came to find Cal.

He’s still baffled by her mood, and disturbed by being baffled. Over the past two years he’s got pretty good at interpreting Trey, but today she’s a mystery to him, and she’s not old enough, or solid enough, that he can afford to let her be a mystery in a situation like this one. He wonders if she’s given a thought to any of the implications and ramifications Rushborough’s death could hold.

There are three or four black-faced sheep meandering across the path and among the trees, cropping at weeds. “You know whose sheep those are?” Cal asks.

“Malachy Dwyer’s. There was more of ’em in our yard. I was gonna go tell him they were loose, only…” Trey motions with her head at the body.

“That’d take your mind off sheep, all right,” Cal says, handing her back the water bottle. So Malachy’s sheep have been out since before dawn, trampling all over any footprints or tire tracks that a killer might have left behind, and covering up any scent that a K-9 could have followed. Sheep do get loose on a regular basis around here, what with most of the mountain fields being bounded by ancient, patched-up stone walls; nobody much cares, and they all end up back where they belong in the long run. But this escape came in pretty handy for someone.

The crows have transferred themselves by degrees to lower branches, testing the waters. They’re a dirty ash-gray, with a sheen like a bluebottle’s on their black wings. Their heads twitch back and forth so they can keep tabs on Cal and Trey while evaluating Rushborough possessively. Cal leans over to find a good-sized rock and throws it at them, and they flap lazily up a few branches, unimpressed, prepared to bide their time.

“When you talk to the cops,” he says, “they’ll likely let you have an adult there. I can do it if you want. Or you could have your mama. Or your dad.”

“You,” Trey says promptly.

“OK,” Cal says. And she came to him rather than to Johnny when she found Rushborough, even though Johnny’s interest in this development would be considerably more intense than his. Something has changed for her. Cal would very much like to know what, and whether it’s something to do with the body lying on the stained dirt. He believes the kid that she had nothing to do with it getting there, but the question of what she might know or suspect is smudgier. “Once the Guards get here, we’ll head back to my place. They can come talk to you there, when they’re ready. We’ll make them tea and everything.”

The sheep have stopped cropping and raised their heads, looking up the road towards Trey’s house. Cal straightens up off the car. There’s the crunch of feet on pebbles, and a flash of white between the trees.

It’s Johnny Reddy himself, freshly shaved and shiny, hurrying down the road like a man with important places to be. He sees Cal’s red Pajero first, and stops.

Cal says nothing. Neither does Trey.

“Well, and good morning to the pair of ye, too,” Johnny says, with a whimsical cock of his head, but Cal can see the wariness in his eye. “What’s the story here? Is it me ye’re waiting for?”

“Nope,” Cal says. “We’re waiting with your buddy Rushborough over there.”

Johnny looks. His whole body goes still, and his mouth opens. The shock looks genuine, but Cal doesn’t take anything out of Johnny at face value. Even if it’s real, it could just mean he didn’t expect the body to be where it is, not that he didn’t expect it at all.

“What the fuck,” Johnny says, when the breath goes back into him. He makes an instinctive move towards Rushborough.

“I’m gonna have to ask you to stay where you are, Johnny,” Cal says, in his cop voice. “We don’t want to compromise a crime scene.”

Johnny stays put. “Is he dead?”

“Oh yeah. Someone made good and sure of that.”

“How?”

“I look like a doctor to you?”

Johnny makes an effort to get himself together. He eyes Cal and gauges his chances of convincing him to dump Rushborough in a bog and forget the whole thing. Cal doesn’t feel inclined to help him reach a decision. He gazes blandly back.

Eventually Johnny, genius that he is, concludes that Cal is unlikely to play along. “Go home,” he says sharply to Trey. “Go on. Get home to your mammy and stay there. Say nothing about this to anyone.”

“Trey here’s the one that found the body,” Cal explains, nice and reasonable. “She’s gonna have to give a statement. The police are on their way.”

Johnny looks at him with pure hatred. Cal, after weeks of feeling that way about Johnny and being powerless to do a thing about it, looks back and savors every second.

“You say nothing to the Guards about that gold,” Johnny tells Trey. Trey may not be taking on board the implications here, but Johnny sure is; Cal can practically see his brain cells ricocheting among them all. “D’you hear me? Not a fucking word.”

“Language,” Cal reminds him.

Johnny bares his teeth in what’s supposed to be a smile but lands closer to a grimace. “I don’t need to tell you, sure,” he says to Cal. “You don’t want that hassle either.”

“Gee whiz,” Cal says, scratching his beard. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll take it under advisement.”

Johnny’s grimace tightens. “I’ve somewhere to be. Am I allowed to head over that way, am I? Guard?”

“Be my guest,” Cal says. “I’m sure the police’ll find you when they need you. Don’t you worry about us; we’re just fine here.”

Johnny throws him one more vicious look, then cuts through the trees to give the body a wide berth and heads up the higher path, towards the Dwyers’ places and incidentally towards Rushborough’s holiday home, at a near-run. Cal allows himself the hope that the little fuck will trip and go head over heels into a ravine.

“Bet he’s going to get your camera,” Trey says. “Rushborough took it offa me. I was gonna rob it back, only I didn’t get a chance.”

“Huh,” Cal says. That camera has been on his mind, along with the fact that it stopped being mentioned right around the time Trey got that fat lip. He was blaming Johnny. “What’s on there that Rushborough wanted?”

“You and them lads putting the gold in the river.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“Didja know I was there?”

“Nope,” Cal says, carefully. She’s not looking at him; she’s watching the path where her father vanished, eyes narrowed against the sun. “I half wondered, but nope, I didn’t know. How come you filmed it?”

“To show Rushborough. So’s he’d fuck off.”

“Right,” Cal says. He adjusts his ideas. Trey wasn’t just doing her filming behind Johnny’s back; she was doing it, with preparation and care, to fuck him over. This leaves Cal even more baffled about what she was doing waving Johnny’s cute little gold nugget around the pub.

“I didn’t know you’d be there,” Trey says. “At the river. You never told me.”

She’s turning the water bottle between her knees, head bent over it. If she’s watching Cal out of the corner of her eye, he can’t tell.

“You figure I should’ve,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“I was planning to. The day before, when I lent you that camera. Only then your dad showed up and took you off home, and I didn’t get a chance.”

“How come you went with them? To the river?”

Cal is moved by the fact that she’s asking: she knows him well enough to take for granted that he wasn’t there to rip off some damn fool tourist. “I wanted to keep an eye on things,” he says. “Rushborough always looked squirrelly to me, and the situation seemed like it could get messy. I like having a handle on what’s going on around me.”

“You shoulda said it to me from the start. I’m not a fuckin’ kid. I keep telling you.”

“I know that,” Cal says. He’s still picking his way with every bit of care and delicacy he has. He knows better than to lie to her, but he also knows better than to tell her he needs to look out for her. “I wasn’t thinking you were too little to understand, or anything. All’s I was thinking is that Johnny’s your dad.”

“He’s a fuckin’ tosspot.”

“I’m not denying that,” Cal says. “But I didn’t want to put you in the middle of anything by sounding like I was bad-mouthing him or his big idea, and I didn’t want to go pumping you for information. I figured I oughta leave you to make your own calls. I just wanted to stay clear on what was going on.”

Trey thinks that over, turning the bottle. Cal wonders whether to bring up the fact, while they’re on the subject, that there’s plenty she hasn’t been telling him. He decides against it. He knows, by everything about her, that she’s not done keeping things to herself yet. She still feels unreachable. If he tries to reach her now, and she lies, she’ll be even further away. He waits.

In the end she looks up at Cal and nods. “Sorry I got your camera took,” she says. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Cal says. All his muscles loosen a notch. He may not have fixed things, but this time, apparently, he’s at least managed not to make them worse. “Your dad might have you give it back to me. Once he’s wiped some stuff off the memory card.”

Trey blows air out of the side of her mouth. “Throw it in the bog, more like.”

“Nah,” Cal says. “He won’t want me kicking up a fuss, drawing attention to it. He’ll delete that footage, send back the rest. It’ll be fine.”

Trey turns her head at the sound of a car behind them. Through the trees and the road twists they can see flashes of it: chunky, white and blue, a marked car.

“Guards,” she says.

“Yep,” Cal says. “They were pretty quick.”

He turns to take one last look at the silent thing under the stripes of shadow. It looks skimpy and easily dismissed, something that’s in the way for now but that’ll be blown to nowhere by the next good wind. Cal understands what Trey doesn’t: the magnitude of the change, far-reaching and unstoppable, that the car is bringing.