Page 2 of Forbidden Protector

Nobody drives like that in Montana. Nobody drives like that anywhere I've been except the two agents I know who came to the Bureau out of somewhere worse, and neither of them talks about it, and neither ever, ever stops.

He's the one they use, I think. I don't know it. I'd bet the pension on it.

"Riverview Motel," I say, when the silence has gone on long enough to become a thing he's doing on purpose. "It's on the east side of town, if you don't..."

"I know where it is."

Five words. He does not offer a sixth.

The heater ticks. I turn toward the window so I won't have to find something to do with my hands.

For a long time there is only I-15 running north and the white country falling away on both sides, flat, then the first low roll of foothills that lie about what they're building toward. Because off to the west stands the Rocky Mountain Front, and the Front does not rise the way mountains are supposed to, in polite stages. It stands straight up out of the plains: a ridgeline of granite ten thousand feet high, snow-loaded, blue-shadowed, the east faces catching the low February sun and giving none of it back.

Beautiful is too small a word, and too safe. It is the most stunning and most indifferent thing I have ever driven toward.

I've spent my whole life being told one of those peaks killed my grandfather.

I press two fingers to the cold glass without meaning to, as if to prove it's real. Then I catch him not watching the mirror for once, watching me watch the mountain, and I put my hand back in my lap like I've been caught at something worse.

He takes the Highway 89 exit and swings us west and then north, up the spine of the Front. The wall runs along the left side of the truck, granite and timber and the dark line of the Flathead forest climbing into it, while ahead the country rises toward Glacier and the reservation line, everything getting bigger and colder and less interested in me the farther we go.

The last ranches before town slide by behind their gates, every gate a name. I read them like street signs.

Somewhere out past all of them is a mountain I can't see from here and have hated my entire life.

I try once more, because it's the job to try and because I want to watch his face when I do it.

"You knew I was coming. Down to the flight number, I'd bet. That's a lot of trouble for a man who supposedly doesn't work for the family that owns this truck."

A muscle goes at the hinge of his jaw and is gone before I can be sure I didn't invent it. First real thing I've gotten out of him, and I enjoy it more than the job allows.

"Gideon sent me," he says again, which is not an answer, and is.

"You always say that when you don't want to answer a question, or just when it's me?"

He doesn't look over. "Haven't decided yet."

Three words that time, and I count them the way I count everything about him. I hate that some small, ugly part of me is already looking forward to whatever he says next.

That's the whole ride. Ninety minutes, and he gives me maybe twenty words for it. Most of them are the same four in different orders, and in that hour and a half I give him back a mental file thicker than the one the Bureau managed in five months.

By the time the truck stops under the RIVERVIEW / VACANCY sign, buzzing its one dead letter, I understand two things I didn't understand on the plane.

The first: the courtesy pickup is not a courtesy. It's a hand laid flat on the table so I'll know the table is theirs.

The second: somewhere in those ninety minutes, I have noticed the exact line of his throat above the sheepskin collar, the one seam of him that isn't armored, and I've noticed it like a threat gets noticed, filed under vulnerability, tactical.

"Thanks for the ride," I say without meaning it, and get out.

He waits. I feel him wait, feel the truck sit there behind me, engine running, while I get my key from the office and fight the door of Room 6. It's frozen shut, iced into the jamb, and I have to put my hip into it before it gives.

Only when I'm inside does the diesel note change, the tires speak against the frozen lot, and the headlights sweep the curtain once and leave.

Making sure I went in.

Making sure I'm where the family can find me at will.

I sit on the edge of a bed that smells of another decade and do not turn on the television.