Then Marco came back on.
“We’re moving.”
Grim was already on his bike.
Danny was beside him.
Jesse stood in the diner doorway and called out, “What do I do?”
Grim looked back at him.
“Stay with Millie. When the federal people call, and they will call, they have your name. You answer every question they ask. Every one. You don’t leave anything out.”
“And if Clay’s people come here?”
Grim looked at Millie, who was standing in the doorway behind Jesse with the same shotgun from the night before and the same expression she had worn when she said, don’t.
“They won’t,” Grim said.
Then he looked at Millie.
“But if they do, you’ve been managing difficult men in this diner for thirty years.”
“Thirty-one,” she said.
“Thirty-one,” he agreed.
Then he rode.
The distance from Kingman to Laughlin is roughly sixty miles under normal conditions.
Grim and Danny covered it in forty-four minutes, which required a sustained commitment to speed that should not be examined too closely by anyone interested in posted limits.
They did not talk on the ride.
There was nothing to say that the riding itself was not already saying.
They came into Laughlin from the south, away from the main road, the back approach Marco had used to bring Sarah in the night before.
Grim’s phone rang when they were eight minutes out.
His federal contact.
“We have people twenty minutes behind you,” the contact said. “Arizona field office, Nevada coordination. They’re moving fast.”
“Clay Mercer is ten, fifteen minutes from the location,” Grim said, the phone pressed to his helmet. “He has a head start.”
A pause.
“Hayes, do not engage him directly.”
“I hear you,” Grim said.
“Hayes. I mean it. You’ve done your part. You got us what we needed. Let us do ours.”
“Twenty minutes,” Grim said.
Then he hung up.
Danny pulled alongside him.
“Feds are twenty minutes out?”
“Yes.”
“And Clay is fifteen minutes out?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“So there’s a five-minute window.”
“There’s a five-minute window,” Grim confirmed.
They did not say anything else.
They pulled up two streets from Linda’s house and stopped.
Marco came around the corner on foot thirty seconds later, breathing hard.
“They’re at Carol’s. All three of them. Carol put them in the back bedroom, and she is…”
He paused, and something like admiration crossed his face.
“She is a remarkably calm woman.”
“Where’s Clay?” Grim said.
“I saw his truck two blocks east about four minutes ago. He’s circling. He doesn’t know exactly which house.”
Grim took that in.
Clay was close, but not there.
Not yet.
That meant the five-minute window was actually a little more flexible than he had calculated because Clay was working from partial information.
He knew Laughlin.
He might have known Linda’s address.
But he did not know Carol.
He did not know the woman two streets over who had been friends with Linda since 1978 and had put three frightened people in her back bedroom without asking a single question.
The unknowns were buying time.
But not enough.
“I’m going to walk out to the main street,” Grim said.
Marco stared at him.
“Grim.”
“He’s looking for Sarah,” Grim said. “He’s driving around trying to find which house. If he sees me on the street, he stops looking at houses.”
He looked at both of them.
“He knows who I am. He knows I’m connected to this. If I’m standing on a street corner in Laughlin, his entire attention comes to me.”
“And then what?” Danny said.
“Then I keep his attention for five minutes until the federal people get here.”
The silence that followed was the kind that happens when nobody can find the flaw in a plan they really want to find a flaw in.
“You’re using yourself as bait,” Danny said finally.
“I’m redirecting his focus,” Grim said. “There’s a difference.”
“The difference being?”
“I’m choosing it,” Grim said.
Then he walked out to the main street.
He stood on the sidewalk in the morning light with his hands in his jacket pockets, and he waited.
He did not have to wait long.
Clay Mercer’s truck came around the corner forty seconds later, moving slowly.
Grim watched it come, and he did not move.
He did not look away.
The truck stopped.
Clay got out.
Grim had never seen Clay Mercer in person before last night, and last night he had only seen him through a window.
Now he saw him clearly.
A big man, early fifties, the kind of large that comes from spending twenty years doing whatever he wanted and having nobody stop him.
He had two men behind him. Not the eight from the parking lot. Two.
That meant the parking lot crowd had already started thinning, either from the account freeze or from word getting out about the federal movement, or both.
The network was already dissolving.
Clay looked at Grim across the width of the street.
Then he smiled.
Almost pleasant.