A pause.
“Rosie ate four.”
Grim let out a breath.
“Good. Stay there. Don’t move anyone until I call you.”
“Understood. Hey, Grim.”
“Yeah.”
“She asked about you. Sarah. She wanted to know who you were. How you…”
Marco paused, choosing words.
“How you ended up being the one.”
Grim was quiet for a moment.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her a kid walked into a diner and made a very smart decision.”
Another pause.
“She cried a little when I said that.”
He hung up and sat with it for a moment.
The image of Sarah Cole crying over pancakes in a house in Laughlin.
Crying not from fear this time, but from something else.
The overwhelming, disorienting relief of discovering that the world had, against all available evidence, sent someone.
Danny appeared from the booth where he had been sleeping, moving with the stiff-shouldered purposefulness of a man pretending he had slept better than he did.
He poured himself coffee, looked at Grim, and said, “Feds moving?”
“Feds moving,” Grim said.
“Clay cornered.”
“Clay cornered.”
Danny drank his coffee.
“Cornered is when they’re most dangerous.”
“I know.”
Then, as if the conversation had been a kind of summoning, Jesse came out of the back room.
He looked better than he had the night before.
Not good, but better.
The specific improvement of a person who had crossed from one side of a threshold to the other and was now living in the aftermath rather than the anticipation.
He had a mark on his cheek from the folded tablecloth.
He looked at Grim and said, “Did they freeze the accounts?”
Grim looked at him.
“How did you know that was the next step?”
“Because it’s what I would do,” Jesse said simply. “If you freeze the accounts, Clay can’t pay anyone. The people he uses work on payment. The whole network runs on payment. You dry up the money, and loyalty goes with it.”
He poured himself coffee with slightly unsteady hands.
“He’s going to panic.”
“People who panic reach for the thing closest to them,” Danny said. “Which in Clay’s case is violence.”
Jesse said, “It’s always been violence. But the money gave it structure. Without the money, it’s just…”
He stopped.
“It’s just the violence.”
The three of them sat with that for a moment.
Then Grim’s phone rang again.
Different number this time.
An area code he recognized. Wikieup adjacent.
He did not know the specific number, but he knew the geography of it, and the geography told him enough.
He picked up.
There was breathing on the other end.
Then a voice he did not recognize.
A woman, older, shaking slightly with controlled anger rather than fear.
“Is this the man who got Sarah Cole out last night?”
Grim said, “Who is this?”
“My name is Patricia Guerrero. I live three properties down from Clay Mercer. I have for eleven years.”
A pause.
“I have a video on my phone from this morning. Clay left his property at 6:15, and he was not alone. I know where he’s going because I heard him say it on his phone before he got in the truck, and he didn’t know I was outside.”
Grim’s hand tightened on the phone.
“Where is he going?”
“Laughlin,” Patricia said. “He said he needed to get to the woman before the morning was over.”
The bottom dropped out of Grim’s stomach.
Clay knew where Sarah was.
He looked at Danny.
Danny read his face and was already standing up, already reaching for his jacket.
“Mrs. Guerrero,” Grim said, keeping his voice level and clean of everything he was feeling. “I need you to send that video to a number I’m going to give you right now. Then I need you to go inside your house and lock your door.”
“I’ve been locking my door for eleven years,” she said. “What I want to know is whether this is going to stop. Whether this actually stops.”
“Yes,” Grim said. “It stops.”
She sent the video.
Grim forwarded it to his federal contact before he was even fully out the door, with three words in the message.
Laughlin. Right now.
He called Marco.
“Listen to me carefully,” Grim said.
Something in his voice made Marco go completely silent on the other end.
The kind of silence that means, I am listening with everything I have.
“Clay knows where you are. He left Wikieup twenty minutes ago. He has people with him. You need to move Sarah and the kids right now. Not in five minutes. Now.”
Marco said one word.
“Where?”
Grim thought for exactly three seconds.
He had a map of that part of Nevada in his head, built over thirty years of riding roads other people did not know existed.
“Millie’s sister’s neighbor. Does she know anyone nearby? Anyone with a house Clay wouldn’t connect to any of you?”
A shuffling sound came through.
Voices in the background.
Then Millie’s sister’s voice, Linda, direct and unflustered in the way her sister was direct and unflustered.
“My friend Carol, two streets over. I’ve known her since 1978. She has nothing to do with anyone in Arizona.”
“Go there,” Grim said. “Walk. Don’t take the car. Go right now.”
He heard movement.
He heard Sarah’s voice asking a question, urgent and low.
He heard Ethan’s voice, that familiar flat calm, saying, “Let’s go, Rosie. Come on.”