Page 58 of Ransom
Ransom's mouth tightened. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. The two of them had been locked onto each other and the room had narrowed around it. I had the feeling I was sitting in on the back half of a conversation, and the front half had been about me.
Rafe broke the look first. He turned to me.
"Winston. Step outside a minute."
I started to stand.
"He stays," Ransom said.
Rafe didn't look at Ransom. He kept his eyes on me. "Stays for what, son?"
"Whatever you've got to say to me, you can say in front of him."
"You sure about that?"
Ransom didn't answer.
I sat back down slowly.
"All right," Rafe said. "Then I'll lay it out plainly. I don't care that you're sleeping with him, mijo. A man's got needs and wants, and how he sees to them is his business. What I care about is your ability to prioritize accordingly."
The question sat there on the table between the three of us like something Rafe had set down and was waiting on Ransom to pick up.
Ransom's jaw worked. He drew a breath to answer.
He didn't.
The silence went on a second too long. Then another. Long enough that I felt it in my back teeth. Long enough that Rafe's face changed by a quarter of an inch, the way a man's face changes when he's just gotten the answer to a question he didn't ask out loud.
"I'm loyal to Pae Saco," Ransom said finally. The words came out level, but they came out a beat after they should have, and all three of us at the table knew it. "Same as always."
Rafe didn't speak.
"Rafe," Ransom said.
"I heard you, mijo."
"Same as always," Ransom said again, like saying it twice would put the missing beat back where it belonged.
Rafe looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked down at the petrified wood under his hands, ran his thumb along a vein of turquoise, and didn't lift his eyes when he answered.
"Go on. Get up to Los Lunas."
Ransom stood. He waited for something else, some softening, some sign that the answer he'd given had been the answer Rafe was looking for. It didn't come.
The chair under me had gone cold. I held my face still and stood up with him.
I followed Ransom out of the office. Behind us, Rafe didn't move from the table. When I glanced back from the doorway, he was still looking down at the wood, thumb still tracing the same vein of turquoise, like the answer to whatever he was working out was somewhere down inside the stone.
Winston slipped the COthree hundred-dollar bills in the parking lot like he was tipping a valet.
The guy pocketed the money without counting it and walked us through a side entrance that had no sign-in sheet, no intake desk, and no camera. There was just a heavy door and a corridor that smelled like bleach, floor wax, and something underneath both that you couldn't scrub out of cinderblock if you tried for a hundred years.
Winston put his hand on my back going through the door. I let him. I was too busy processing the fact that Ranger Winston Valverde bribed a corrections officer like most men buy a round of drinks.
The CO brought us to a storage closet with a table at the end of the hall. "Thirty minutes," the CO said, and shut the door.
Winston pulled out a chair and sat down, legs stretched out, boots crossed at the ankle. He tipped his hat back and looked at me.
