Sam hung up on him. That was Sam. When the decision was made she stopped talking and just took action. Get out of Basalt. Thirty minutes. Meet at his house.
Marcus could do thirty minutes. Thirty minutes was a lot of time. He stood in the middle of the kitchen and made a list. He loved making lists.
Jeep. Camping bins from the garage. The good cooler. Water. The Starlink Mini — Sam said it was already in the back, but he’d check, because he’d already screwed up by not checking on the harness. Laptop. Chargers. Cash. He had maybe sixty dollars in the money clip he used for valets. Everything else was Apple Cash. Shit.
Phones off, in the bag. He’d get to that when it was time to go.
He started moving. He was good at moving once the list existed.
The bins were where they always were, stacked next to the kayak he’d used twice. He’d done this drive a dozen times — load the Jeep on a Thursday, be at a trailhead by dawn, back Sunday sunburned and pleased with himself. It was almost automatic. Bin, hatch, bin. He had the second one in before he started feeling he was missing something. This wasn’t a Thursday. This wasn’t a casual camping trip. Beer and weed were unlikely to be included.
He kept packing. His hands and body needed to do something so his brain wouldn’t spiral. Three camp chairs. Then he stood there looking at the three camp chairs folded in the hatch and took them out. They were not going to sit around a fire. Fuck. He didn’t actually know what they were going to do. He stared at the back of the Jeep. His list didn’t have directions. And right now, in this moment, he was a grown man standing in his garage in a fleece, holding three folded chairs, packing for a long weekend that wasn’t what was coming.
The Starlink was in the back, in its case, where Sam said it would be. Of course it was. Sam left things where she said she left them. He felt a small, stupid gratitude for that. Then he was annoyed. Was she going to berate him about the harness. She should have checked it. It wasn’t his fault she just used it.
His phone was on the counter, face up, the way he always left it. Being reachable was his job. Daniel’s message sat there. There’s a clean version of how this goes for you and your partner.
He picked it up. He told himself he was picking it up to turn it off.
He read the message again. Twice now Vlad had told him to kill the phone, and Sam had told him to bag it. He knew both of them were right. But the part of him that always worked the room wanted badly to type three words back. Who are you.
Marcus ached to open that door. Just to see what happened.
He didn’t. He was proud of not doing it for about four seconds, which was how long it took him to thumb out a reply, look at it, and delete it before it sent. Talking soon. Gone before it went anywhere. That counted, he decided. That counted as restraint.
He did not turn the phone off. He’d bag it the second Sam’s truck pulled in, so that if she needed to reach him in the next ten minutes, she could. He set the phone back on the counter. Face up. Reachable.
He picked up the cooler instead and carried it out to the driveway.
That’s when he saw the car that didn’t belong.
End of the street, past the Hendersons’, parked where nobody parked because there was nothing down there but the turnaround and the ditch. Lights on. Engine running — he could see the exhaust under the one streetlight.
Not pulling in. Not pulling out. Just idling.
You’ve got more friends than you think, and fewer than you’ll need.
Vlad’s flat certainty on the call earlier. We are already being watched. Marcus had been the one who said Vlad was being paranoid. He’d said it gently, to calm him down, because Vlad was paranoid. But maybe Vlad was right.
Marcus knew that Vlad was right.
The car sat at the end of his street with its lights on, not moving. Marcus stood there holding the cooler and understood that he had been wrong about which one of them was scared.