The Job She Didn’t Ask For

She drove the truck around for an hour because she could.

Not to go anywhere. Not toward Denver or Chicago or any point on a map that meant something. Just the mountain roads curving through pine trees with the windows down and the cold October air filling the cab. The engine ran smooth and quiet, and every mile felt like an argument she was having with herself about what came next.

Cross's card was in her jacket pocket. She touched it every few minutes without meaning to, the way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts.

She thought about what it would mean to cooperate. It would mean coming out of hiding. It would mean putting her name on documents and sitting in rooms with lawyers who worked for people she did not know and trusting that the system she was being asked to trust was actually trustworthy. It would mean Garrett knowing exactly where she was.

But Cross was not wrong. Sixty dollars a night and a dwindling envelope of cash was not a plan. It was a delay.

She pulled over at a turnout on the mountain road, got out, and leaned against the hood of the truck with the valley spread out below her. Crestone Falls from above looked impossibly small. A handful of buildings and a church steeple and the faint glint of something that was probably the gas station sign. And at the edge of it, just visible, the angular spread of the Iron Vow compound.

She pulled out the burner phone and called Mira.

"Are you okay?" Mira answered before the first ring had even finished.

"The feds found me."

Silence. Then: "Oh God. The loyalty card. I knew that was going to be a problem, I knew it, I just thought it was going to be Garrett's people and not—"

"It's fine. She seemed legitimate. She wants me to testify."

"Are you going to?"

Sloane looked down at the valley. "I don't know yet."

"Sloane." Mira's voice dropped. "I need to tell you something and I need you not to spiral."

"That introduction is specifically designed to make me spiral."

"Garrett was at your building yesterday. He went to the super, said he was your fiancé, said you'd had a mental health episode and he was worried. He got into your apartment."

Sloane closed her eyes.

"There was nothing there," Mira continued quickly. "I already went through and I took everything that mattered. But he knows you left prepared. He knows this wasn't impulsive." A pause. "He's not going to stop, Sloane. He can't afford to."

She stood there on the mountain road with the wind coming down off the peaks and thought about the look on Garrett's face the night she had asked him about the name in the file. The thing that had moved under the surface.

"I'll call Cross," she said.

"Good." Mira exhaled. "Also. Where are you, exactly? The mountains? Because I can hear wind."

"I'll tell you later. I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're hiding in the Rockies from a man who has cartel lawyers on speed dial. But I love you and I believe in your ability to survive things you shouldn't have to survive."

"That's either very comforting or deeply depressing."

"It's both. Call the agent."

* * *

She called Cross from the turnout. Cross answered in two rings.

"I'll do it," Sloane said. "But I have conditions."

"Tell me."

"I stay here. Whatever arrangement we make, I'm not going to a safe house in some suburb I've never heard of. I stay in Crestone Falls while this moves forward."

A pause. "That's an unusual request."

"It's not negotiable."

Another pause, longer. "I can work with that. The town is defensible in ways that are relevant to your situation. We'll keep contact minimal and indirect. I'll reach out through a third party when I need something from you. You don't call me from anywhere that can be traced to a fixed location."

"Agreed."

"Ms. Vega. I want to be very clear about something. Garrett Hale has resources and he is not going to simply accept that you have slipped away. This will get harder before it gets easier. You need to be somewhere you feel safe, and you need to be able to maintain that feeling for what may be several months."

Sloane thought about the room above the Ironside. She thought about coffee that appeared without being requested and a man who could sit in silence like it was furniture.

"I'm somewhere I feel safe," she said.

* * *

She got back to the Ironside at noon. Pearl was behind the bar prepping for the lunch crowd that never quite materialized into anything you could call a crowd, and Sloane sat down and asked, without planning to ask, whether there was any work available.

Pearl looked at her.

"I can waitress. I've done it before. I'm good with people and better with difficult people. I don't steal and I don't drink on the job."

Pearl continued looking at her.

"I'll also clean. Or cook, if you need it. I can make anything that requires four ingredients or fewer."

"You planning to stay a while?" Pearl said.

"I think so."

Pearl seemed to consider this with the gravity appropriate to a major financial decision. Then she said: "Twelve dollars an hour and tips. You don't serve the brothers anything you're not comfortable serving. You don't ask questions about club business and you don't answer questions about club business from anyone who comes in asking. You got a problem with a customer, you tell me or you tell Colt. You do not handle it yourself."

"What if I can handle it myself?"

Pearl's expression indicated this was precisely the kind of answer she had been expecting and also the kind that was going to cause her the most problems. "Then you handle it and tell me after. Deal?"

"Deal."

She started that afternoon, during the three o'clock quiet when there were only four people in the bar and the light came through the front windows at the angle that made everything look golden and slightly unreal. She moved between the tables, learning the geography of the room, the way the third floorboard from the door creaked and the way the table nearest the fireplace wobbled on its near leg.

She was refilling a coffee for a man named Denny, who was one of the Iron Vow brothers and who had the extremely specific quality of someone who had decided within the first ten minutes that she was acceptable, when she heard boots on the stairs and looked up.

Colt stopped at the bottom of the stairs when he saw her with an apron on and a coffee pot in her hand. His expression did the subtle version of surprise, which on him looked like the almost imperceptible lift of one eyebrow.

"Pearl hired you."

"Pearl hired me."

He looked at her for a moment. Then he walked to his usual spot at the end of the bar. "Try not to pour that on anyone."

"Try not to do things that make me want to," she said.

Denny made a sound that was possibly a laugh disguised as a cough. Colt sat down. And Sloane went back to work, and it felt, in a way she did not have the language for yet, like something settling into a place it was always supposed to be.

She was locking up the supply closet at the end of her shift when she saw Colt standing in the parking lot with a man she did not recognize, a man in a suit that did not belong anywhere near this town, and the look on Colt's face was something she had not seen there before: not anger, not concern, but something colder. Something that looked like controlled fury barely held behind glass. The suited man said something. Colt said something back. And then the suited man held up his phone, and on the screen, even from thirty feet away through a window, Sloane could see a photograph she recognized with a full-body drop of dread. It was her. Her real face. Her real name printed underneath it. And the man in the suit was showing it to Colt.