Page 30 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
A man has come in alone and taken a seat two booths down. Nothing remarkable about him except that Logan, who has been relaxed and loose-shouldered since we sat down, has gone marginally more still. Wholly present in a different way. His eyes move to the man briefly, assess, and move away. Move back once. Then he picks up his coffee as if nothing happened.
"You literally checked that guy out," I remark.
Logan glances at me. "I’m merely aware of the room."
"You've been aware of the room since we walked in," I tell him, because I have been watching and I notice things. "You clocked everyone in here within thirty seconds of sitting down."
He considers that for a moment. "Old habit," he offers.
"From what?"
"From running an operation in a remote location where paying attention to who's around you is practical," he replies evenly. "You get used to reading a room."
I look at him—the easy way he's sitting, the stillness that isn't tension, the gray eyes that are calm and alert at the same time—and think that there's probably more to that answer than he's giving me and that I don't mind and that the not minding provides its own information.
"Fair enough," I concede.
We order more coffee because neither of us suggests leaving, and the morning stretches out around us with nowhere particular to be. He's telling me something about the conservation parcels the operation manages—something about an easement dispute that took two years to resolve—and I'm actually listening, not performing listening, genuinely interested in the specific way that comes from caring about the person talking rather than the subject itself.
I catch myself mid-thought and make myself look back out the window.
But the window shows me his reflection too, and that doesn't help.
"You've gone quiet," Logan observes.
"I'm listening," I tell him.
"You were listening," he replies. "Then you stopped."
I look back at him across the table. The morning light is coming through the diner window, finding the gray of his eyes and pulling them somewhere past steel?—
"I don't want to get there yet," I admit. It comes out quieter than I intend it to. "To wherever we're going, I don't want the drive to be over."
His eyes find mine and stay, and there it is—that shift, that quiet acknowledgment—and then he picks up his coffee.
"Then we don't rush," he replies simply.
I smile at that, small and real, and look back out the window.
That's when the bell above the diner door chimes, and a group of three comes in—two women and a man, mid-thirties, the kind of people who look like they've stopped somewhere on the way to somewhere else. They take a table near the center of the room. Unremarkable, except that within about thirty seconds, one of the women has her phone out and she's looking at the screen and then looking up and then looking at the screen again.
Looking at me.
She says something quietly to the woman beside her. The second one looks too—a quick, practiced glance that tries to be subtle and isn't. The man leans over to see the screen.
I feel it the way you feel a room change its temperature. Slowly at first, and then all at once.
Across the table, Logan has already gone still.
12
LOGAN
Iclock them the moment they walk in.
Three of them—two women and a man, road-stop energy, nothing particularly remarkable on the surface. They take a table near the center of the room, and I go back to my coffee and the conversation, because three strangers in a diner is not inherently a problem, and I've learned not to treat everything like one.
Then one of the women pulls out her phone.
