Page 19 of Her Injured Biker
"You'd better. I have very high standards."
"I know," I said. "I've been paying attention."
She made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh and settled deeper. After a while her breathing evened out and she was asleep.
Saturday was two days out. Cricket on the drive, me on the route from the passenger seat, Detour on sweep where I could see him. The job. I'd done it a hundred times.
What I hadn't done was do it with someone I wanted to show it to.
Something landed at the foot of the bed, careful and four-footed. I kept still.
The cat walked the length of the mattress, assessed the situation with the green-eyed judgment of a creature who had standards and enforced them, and settled herself against Whitley's legs.
"Told you," I said quietly.
Whitley didn't stir.
I lay there with a cat who'd apparently decided I'd passed whatever test she'd been running and Whitley's weight against my arm. Not bad for a man who'd been trying to climb out a hospital window four days ago.
Chapter Five
Whitley
THE CITY GIVES UP FASTon I-10 west.
Past the 610, the billboards thin and then the overpass goes, and then it's just limestone and mesquite and sky running flat to the horizon. Houston doesn't fade on this road. It stops.
Scorch had his arm along the window ledge and his eyes on the glass and had been more or less quiet since we cleared the loop. That was fine. I wasn't talking either.
I knew this road. I'd grown up on it, driven it a hundred times in both directions, in borrowed cars and buses and once, memorably, a truck that shouldn't have made it past Seguin. I'd stopped driving it three years ago for reasons I wasn't going to think about at eighty miles an hour.
Now I was doing eighty with Scorch's jacket close enough to my right shoulder that I could feel the warmth off him every time he shifted, and the Hill Country was starting the way it always started, quiet and certain, getting into everything before you noticed.
"You know this road," he said.
"I grew up on it." I moved left to pass a slow truck. "Boerne's another forty minutes."
"I know where Boerne is."
"Good. Then you don't need to navigate."
"Wasn't planning to." The corner of his mouth moved. "You've got it handled."
The warmth under my ribs went one degree deeper. I kept my eyes on I-10.
"Rally site's outside Bandera," he said, after a minute.
"I know where Bandera is too."
"Just making conversation."
"Sure you are."
He settled back. Outside, the road kept going west, the sky doing what it always did out here, going tall and too big and very serious about it.
I'd come back to Hill Country. I hadn't planned on it being like this.
Around Seguin the conversation ran out and neither of us replaced it. He'd stopped watching the window and started watching me instead. I could feel it at my temple, the steady accumulated fact of it.
