Under His Cut

The till came up nine dollars short, and Josie knew before she counted it twice that the nine dollars was hers.

She'd rung Merle's coffee against the wrong key at the top of the night and comped a slice of pie for a trucker who'd tipped her in a story about his ex-wife, and now the drawer didn't balance and Loretta didn't run a place where the drawer didn't balance. So Josie folded a five and four ones out of the tip jar — her own money, chasing her own mistake around in a circle the way it always did — and made the count come out even, and told herself it was fine. Nine dollars. She was still a week ahead of the rent. She had run that math on the walk in and she ran it again now, standing under the one buzzing tube of light over the register with the mop water going cold in the bucket, and the answer was the same as it had been at four in the afternoon. One week. If nothing broke. If the cold held off and the landlord's temper held off and her own body held off, which were three ifs she had no business trusting and trusted anyway, because what else was there.

It was ten past one. Loretta's had been dead since midnight — the bar crowd didn't come this far off the main drag, and the main drag itself had been dying by inches since before Josie was old enough to notice, half the storefronts papered over, the pawn shop and the check-cashing place the only two windows still lit past ten. The foundry had walked out in '94 and taken the town's spine with it. What was left held itself upright the way Josie did, out of stubbornness and no alternative.

She killed the light over the register. She dumped the mop water down the utility sink and rinsed the yellow bucket and set it upside down to dry, because Loretta would notice if she didn't, and wiped down the last two tables that didn't need wiping, and did all of it in the particular unhurried way of a woman with no one waiting up for her. Nobody was going to ask why she was late. Nobody was going to be warm on the other side of the door. The apartment would be exactly the temperature of the night, and the night, up here in the high country in the first hard week of autumn, had teeth.

She was reaching for her jacket off the hook by the kitchen pass when the headlights swung into the back lot.

Josie went still.

Nobody parked in the back lot. The back lot was gravel and a dumpster and the dead sodium lamp that Loretta kept meaning to have fixed, and it faced nothing — the loading door, the fence, the black bulk of the old works two blocks over where the streetlights gave out entirely. Delivery trucks came mornings. At one in the morning the back lot was where you went if you didn't want to be seen from the road, and Josie knew that the way she knew a lot of things, in her skin, before her head caught up.

She didn't turn the kitchen light on. That was the first smart thing, and she'd remember later that she'd done it without thinking, some animal part of her already voting before the rest of her had been asked.

Two vehicles. A low dark car that didn't belong in this county — too clean, too new, the kind of car that got keyed in the diner lot on principle — and behind it a pickup with its lights off. Doors opened. The dome light of the car caught a man getting out of the back of it, and Josie, frozen at the pass with her jacket half on and her heart gone loud in her ears, saw him the way you see a thing under a flashbulb, all at once and printed on the inside of your eyes.

Lean. That was the first thing. Lean in a town of thick men, and dressed for somewhere else — a good coat, a collar, the kind of clothes that said money the way the money out here never said it, quiet and expensive and out of place as a swan in the dumpster gravel. He moved like the lot was already his. He didn't hurry. Two others came around the truck, heavier, hands loose at their sides, and they arranged themselves around a fourth man the way you'd arrange yourself around a thing you were bringing somewhere, and the fourth man wasn't walking right.

They had him under the arms. His feet dragged. His head hung, and even at that distance, even through the smeared glass of the pass window with the whole kitchen dark behind her, Josie knew the cut on his back before she knew his face — the leather vest, the arc of white stitching across the shoulders, the Coldwater Kings' rocker that every kid in this town could draw from memory, the patch that made grown men find something to look at across the street. He was one of the Kings. And then his head came up, just for a second, caught in the wash of the good car's dome light, and the face went with the name like a key going into a lock.

Rook.

Wade Toomey. Rook to everyone, because he'd been the club's youngest wrench and prone to trading his own money at cards he couldn't win. He came into Loretta's on Sundays and ordered the biggest breakfast on the board and tipped her in quarters with grease still under his nails and called her ma'am like it embarrassed him, twenty-three years old and built like a boy who'd only recently been a boy. He'd fixed the diner's walk-in compressor last spring for the cost of the parts because Loretta had known his mother. He was maybe six years younger than Josie and he had never once in his life looked at her like she owed him something.

They put him down on his knees in the gravel.

Josie's hand found the edge of the pass and held it. She did not breathe. She watched the lean man say something she couldn't hear, unhurried, almost gentle, bending a little at the waist the way you'd bend to a child, and she watched Rook shake his head, and she watched one of the heavy men say a word back to the lean man — Cash — she saw the shape of it on his mouth and heard the tail of it carry thin across the lot in the cold still air, Cash, we're clear, and the lean man straightened and stepped back out of the way with the fastidiousness of a man not wanting to get anything on the good coat.

The sound of it was smaller than she'd have thought. A flat hard clap that the mountains ate before it finished. Rook went sideways into the gravel and did not move like a person anymore.

She didn't scream. Later she would hate herself for how easily she didn't scream, how her body just clamped down over the sound and held it, the way it had learned to hold everything, and she stood in the dark with her jacket hanging off one shoulder and the reek of cold mop water in her nose and watched three men she could pick out of any lineup in the world stand over a boy she'd fed on Sundays, and she memorized them because there was nothing else her hands could do. The lean one — Cash. The one who'd said it. The one who'd done it. The plate on the low dark car, lit sideways by the truck's parking lights when they finally came on — she took it and held it and burned it down into the place where she kept the things that kept her alive, three letters, three numbers, out-of-state, and she did not let herself look away to check if she had it right because looking away felt like the kind of thing that got you killed.

They didn't hurry loading him. They were done. The town was asleep and the town's law was —

And there it was, the reflex, right on schedule: call it in. Her eyes had already gone to the wall phone by the pass before the thought finished. Call the county. Nine-one-one and a plate and a name and three faces, and let a uniform sort it.

The thought died the way it always died. She was nineteen again in the fluorescent cold of the sheriff's front office with a black eye going yellow and a story nobody wanted, and Dale Brennan had looked at her across that counter — not unkind, that was the thing, not even unkind, just tired, just already deciding what she was going to cost him — and he'd looked right through her to the clock on the wall behind her head, and she'd learned the whole lesson standing there in one long minute. A badge didn't want the truth. A badge wanted the thing to be smaller than it was, easier than it was, gone by morning. A uniform always wanted something, and it was never the thing you'd come to give it. She'd walked out of that office and she'd never once in ten years walked back in, and she wasn't going to start tonight, on a dead boy and a lean man in a good coat who'd said something almost gentle before he stepped out of the way.

The car pulled out first. The truck followed with Rook in the bed under a tarp she hadn't seen them find, and the gravel crunched and the headlights swung and were gone, out toward the works, out toward the black end of town where the lights gave up. The lot was empty. The sodium lamp Loretta kept meaning to fix stayed dead. It was one-nineteen in the morning and Josie Vance was the only living person in the county who knew what she knew, and there was not one soul on this earth she could carry it to.

She got her jacket the rest of the way on. Her hands were steady, which frightened her more than shaking would have. She went out the front, not the back — never the back, not now, not ever again if she could help it — and she locked Loretta's door with the key on the string around her neck, and she pulled her collar up against the teeth of the night and she did not wait for a bus that wasn't coming.

She ran home on foot the long way, three miles of dead main street and the cold coming down off the mountains like a hand, and the whole way the plate stayed lit behind her eyes, and the name stayed, and the face stayed, and Rook's voice saying ma'am stayed, and behind all of it, steady as her own feet on the broken sidewalk, the one thing she was sure of: she had seen it, and she was alone with it, and being alone with a thing was the only place she had ever been safe.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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