The audiobook was Lost to the West, which was a history of Byzantium. Seth had picked it because the world had gotten strange enough that he wanted to know how people had gotten through a thousand years of things going wrong. And, he was becoming embarrassed in discussions with friends that everything he knew about history was from what he had learned in junior high and high school in Texas, where the curriculum was extremely interested in Texas and not interested at all in Constantinople.
Somewhere past Idaho Springs he noticed the narrator had spent eleven minutes distinguishing between two emperors named Constantine. He let it run another mile and said, “Play music by guns n roses.”
Cooper sat up in the passenger seat.
“Nothing,” Seth said. “Go back to sleep.”
Cooper put his chin on the center console where he wasn’t allowed, drool slowly coming out of his mouth, and looked at the side of Seth’s face. Seth put a hand on him without looking over and scratched his head.
He had made this drive hundreds of times. For ski trips, long summer weekends, multi-day hikes, 14ers, boring events, and even board meetings. He could recite the stops forward and backward. It took between three and four hours to Basalt unless the traffic was stupid, which only happened on a Friday, Sunday, holiday, or if there was an accident. Sometimes he flew on a friend’s plane from Rocky Mountain Airport to Aspen which only took 20 minutes, but he preferred the drive.
He got out his phone at Georgetown, looked at it, and put it away without doing anything. Usually he talked on the phone the entire time on this trip. He realized he was getting a little bored.
He kept thinking about what he wanted to say when Marcus answered his call.
Marcus, it’s Seth. Too flat. Marcus, I’m in your driveway. Not funny, and possibly true. He tried I’m not calling as an investor, but then realized everyone who had ever said that was calling as an investor.
He kept chewing on it past Silverthorne and decided to try it out loud.
“You have twenty seconds to tell me if anybody is dead. Then you can hang up.”
Cooper’s ears perked up.
After a few more miles, he decided that was stupid. And he was tired of GNR so he said, “Play Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd.”
At the Frisco on-ramp a Colorado State Patrol car sat on the shoulder with its lights off. Seth looked down at his dashboard, saw he was going 72, and then looked in his mirror. This was the third state patrol he’d seen on I-70 today, which surprised him.
Not for us, he thought. But then realized it might be for some people he knew well. He put his phone in the cupholder where he could see the screen, just in case, even though he knew a call or a message would pop up on his car display. It was a hard habit for him to go completely phone-in-pocket — something about being able to see the screen made him more comfortable he wouldn’t miss anything.
He stopped at the Vail Pass rest area because Cooper needed to pee.
It was a lot cooler than Boulder and he grabbed his jacket from the back seat. He noticed four semis idling in the lot with their running lights on. Seth stood on the grass with his hands in his jacket while the dog took his time.
“I wonder what is going on,” he said, to nobody. Cooper looked up at the sound of a voice and Seth said, “Not you.”
Back on the road, somewhere past Wolcott he started thinking about Marcus again. Marcus had texted him at three in the morning and then gone quiet. In the decade he’d known Marcus, he’d never known him to start a conversation and not finish it. Actually, most conversations he had with Marcus went on too long and he had to end them.
So either Marcus could not respond, or somebody had told him not to. Seth didn’t like either of those options.
He got to Glenwood a little after one. Cooper was asleep with his nose against the door. At the Basalt exit he slowed and did not take it.
He drove another two minutes, turned around in a gravel pullout, came back, and took it.
He was not being very careful but here he was. He took a deep breath, not knowing what was next.
“Cooper, buddy, get ready for something.”
Cooper looked up and yawned.