Page 2 of Travis
That’s because I was fucking talking through my teeth. My left side was taped from hip to armpit—ribs bruised from last Tuesday that lit up every time I reached above shoulder height.Like right now, when I’d stretched for the energy drink. I let the breath out carefully, where he couldn’t hear it.
“I’m fine. Your feed’s live.”
“Uh-huh.” The particular brand of skepticism that only a decade of friendship could produce. “Hey, let me switch to video real quick. I want to show you something on the south side. There’s been a car sitting in the same spot for?—”
“Can’t. My camera’s down.” Because I hadn’t turned on the on switch, but still.
“Are you fucking serious? It’s been?—”
“Three months. I know. It’s a driver issue.” And also that I refused to turn it on. If I turned it on there would be all sorts of questions from my friends all the damn time.
Why the fuck do you have another black eye? Why are you holding yourself like your shoulder’s out of socket? Is your lip split or did you decide to start wearing lipstick?
“It’s a webcam, Travis. You’re a fucking tech guru. My thirteen-year-old niece could fix it.”
“Your thirteen-year-old niece also got locked out of her own TikTok account twice, so maybe she’s not the technological benchmark you think she is.”
He laughed. I almost smiled. Almost.
On the second monitor, the one Beckett would never see, I had a topographic map pulled up. A stretch of rural road outside Polson, about ninety miles north. A cluster of buildings I’d been watching for six days. Maude had flagged movement there this morning. A van registered to a shell company that connected, through four layers of paperwork, to people I knew well.
Not personally. Never personally. But I’d been studying their operation for three years, and I knew their patterns the way I knew the layout of this room—every route, every rotation, every vulnerability.
I minimized the map as Beckett kept talking and picked up the tablet I kept off network. Pulled up a gear checklist. Started running through it while his voice filled the room.
“So, Hunter’s doing the team dinner next week. At Resting Warrior. Lark’s in charge this month and has been planning the menu for three days already. Last I heard, she was brining something. I don’t know what brining means but she was very intense about it.”
“Good for Lark.”
“You should come.”
“No.”
“It’s been three months since any of us have seen you at all, Trav. Coop’s convinced you’ve been replaced by a very convincing chatbot.”
“Tell Coop my personality has always been indistinguishable from a chatbot. He just never noticed.”
“See, that’s funny. That’s a funny thing you just said. You could say funny things in person, at dinner, around other humans. It’s a concept.”
I set the tablet face-down on the desk. “I appreciate the invitation. I’m not coming. You know I’m not coming.”
I never did. In three years of living in Garnet Bend, Montana, home of Resting Warrior Ranch and Warrior Security, I had not once attended the “family” dinners. I’d never strolled down the street and had coffee at Deja Brew. I’d never gone over to Pawsitive Connections to let Al Pacachino spit aggressively at me.
I had no idea why anybody would do the last even if they went outside like normal people.
The pause that followed wasthe Beckett pause. The one that meant he was deciding how hard to push. I waited, because there was no rushing this part. He’d either let it go or he wouldn’t, and nothing I said would determine which way it went.
“When’s the last time you got outside?”
Evidently not letting it go today.
When did I get outside? Every six to twelve days, depending on the intel. So, last Tuesday. The time before that, nine days earlier. Before that, a three-week stretch that had almost killed a girl because I waited too long to move.
“I don’t keep track,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure it was 1997.”
“Okay.” He let out a breath. “Okay, Trav. If you don’t want to go outside, that’s fine. We get it, man. Just—you know the door swings both ways, right? We can come to you. Bring the brined whatever-it-is to the compound. Hunter’s idea, not mine, before you think I’m getting sentimental.”
Hunter Everett, our Warrior Security boss, was the least sentimental man either of us had ever met except for when it came to his wife Jada.
