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An old woman who couldn’t run, in a building with a broken camera, for a few more days.

“Monday morning,” I said.

“Done.”

I waited. Fox is not a man who says two questions and then asks one.

“Second one,” he said.

“Ask it.”

“What do you want out of this?”

I turned that over and came up with nothing that would survive being said in a gravel lot. “I want her problem solved,” I said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“It’s what I’ve damn well got.”

“Patch.” He turned and looked at me straight on, which he does maybe twice a year. “You’ve been on that gate for twenty years. In all that time you’ve asked for exactly two things, and one of them was a different shift for Yankee when he came home. You volunteered for this woman in Church before I could open my mouth, and every man at that table clocked it, including Hornet, who is not subtle, and Brazil, who sure as hell is.”

“I know what I did.”

“I’m not asking you to justify it. I’m asking what you want, because I’ve got to know what I’m authorizing.” He shrugged. “If you want her safe, that’s protection and it ends when the threat ends. If you want her here, that’s a different thing entirely, and it doesn’t end, and I need to know which one I’m signing off on before it costs somebody something.”

The security light buzzed on its pole. Out past the fence, somebody’s dog was raising hell about nothing.

I could have answered him. I had the answer. I’d had it since about ten seconds after Maren put both palms flat on that table and started shaking, having held steady for forty minutes with my brother open in front of her, and it had been sitting in my chest ever since like a stone I’d swallowed and never passed.

“I’ll get you an answer,” I said.

Fox looked at me a second longer. “That’ll do for tonight,” he said, and went back inside.

Chapter Ten

Maren

I heard the car before I saw it, which told me something, because everything else I’d seen come through that gate had two wheels and announced itself for a quarter mile.

Dark sedan. Rental plates. Leo checked the list, nodded, and swung the chain-link.

I was in the doorway of prospect row number three with a dressing tray in my hands. Eight in the morning and Freak was due for a change. I had been on this compound long enough now that nobody asked me why I was walking around with medical supplies.

Patch waited at the bottom of the clubhouse steps. Arms crossed. He had been standing there eleven minutes. I know because I had been not-watching him for eleven minutes.

The man who got out of the car was tall and broad through the shoulders with gray at his temples and a leather bag in one hand, and he stood a moment scanning the compound the way you scan a room you’ve been away from.

“Freak’s in the prospect row,” Patch said. No hello. No welcome back.

They walked the gravel together. Neither of them said anything for most of it, and then I heard Patch ask about the honeymoon and the other man laugh, actually laugh, and say something about Katy and six months.

I went back inside and put the tray down and didn’t examine why my hands had gone still.

Freak had the door propped with a boot. He was on the couch with his arm in the sling and his phone in his good hand. His color was better than it had any right to be.

“Doc’s back,” he announced. To the room. To nobody. He’d been waiting for this.

Dread set his bag on the coffee table and unzipped it and pulled out gloves and snapped them on, and he did all of it without saying a word.