Page 99 of Crosscurrent

The heat lay over the road thick as wet cotton, because nothing moved enough to stir it.

Cara had worn her nerves to the wire, on the flight down, in the long wait at the camp, every hour another turn of the same worry. Not whether Neptune had found Suzette Bennion, but whether she'd trust them if they got there first. Eight months was a long time to learn that survival meant trusting nobody.

Wade pointed at a gray sedan parked where the road gave out, nose toward them, tucked in the shade of a live oak hung with moss. A fast-food bag on the dash. A phone propped where he could watch the house three lots down without lifting his head.

"One," Wade said. "Bored. Local hire."

And that was the thing Cara couldn't make sit right. One bored local, on a witness Cartwright had hunted for months. Where was the crew you'd send to take a woman off the board for good?

"We're early," Gabe said, reading her face. "Barrett bought us the jump."

"Maybe." She made herself set it down. The plan held either way. Get Bennion clear, leave the house breathing behind her, let Thibodeaux spring whatever came after dark. "Rescue first," she said. "The trap keeps without us."

Wade pulled around the bend and stopped. "I'll keep our friend busy. You get her out," he told Gabe, and slid into the wet heat toward the gray sedan.

Cara reached for the door. Gabe's hand found her arm first. "I’ve got you."

A ridiculous thing to say to the one walking up alone. It helped anyway.

"I've talked my way into worse," she said, and stepped out into the heat.

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It closed over her at once, wet and total. Off in the green somewhere a bird she couldn't name made a sound like a rusty hinge, then quit.

She crossed the road running the sequence Skye had drilled into her. The recognition phrase, the cadence, the tells that marked her as Ray's. Memorizing them had been easy. Getting Suzette Bennion to believe them was the job. By the time she reached the steps she'd thrown out half the speeches she'd rehearsed. The woman didn't need a pitch. She needed a reason to believe. Cara hoped the truth would be enough.

Bennion's place stood up off the ground on cinderblock piers, the way everything down here did, a narrow shotgun house, tin roof, a porch screened against the mosquitoes. The swamp came right up to the back of the lot and stopped there, waiting. The house had tells; everyone's did, and Cara read them the way she'd once read a mark's coat for the shape of a wallet. Blinds down, bent in one place at eye height. A sedan in the carport, back seat packed to the headliner.

A woman about to run.

Before she raised her hand, Cara prayed. Lord, help me find the words to make her believe.

She knocked.

For a moment, nothing — the loud kind of nothing that meant someone was standing very still on the other side of the wood, deciding. Then a voice came through it, flat and unsurprised. "I don't know you. And I don't open this door for people I don't know. Get off my porch."

Cara recited the words Skye had made her say over and over on the plane, until they'd stopped sounding like words at all — the code Ray had built into every person he'd ever hidden.

The quiet on the other side changed temperature. Then the distinct click-clack of a shotgun being racked. Cara spun sideways, off the line of the door.

It cracked open to the length of a chain. A few inches of the woman's face, and the dark mouth of a shotgun held low and steady. Fifties. Sharp eyes, no sleep behind them.

"A code's just words." The shotgun didn't waver. "I only deal with Ray direct."

"Ray's dead." Cara didn't dress it up. "A couple of days ago. They pulled him out of the ocean on the Oregon coast."

She let that land, then gave her the part that mattered. "Your relocation stalled eight months ago. That wasn't Ray, that was the system coming apart faster than one man could hold it together. He gave everything he had trying to fix it for you. Now he's gone. My friends and I are what's left. It's me or it's no one, the Neptune Brotherhood is parked down the road. They’ve had eyes on you for days, I’d guess."

Whatever moved across Bennion's face, she shut it down before it finished. "Then who are you?"

There it was, the door Cara was best in the world at talking her way through, except this time the only key that fit was true.

"Another of Ray's witnesses found me. I lived under a name that wasn't mine for twenty years." She kept her hands open, her voice even. "I know exactly how heavy that door is. What it costs to open it for the wrong face. I'm asking you to open it for the right one, but we have to hurry. The guy down the road is nothing compared to the storm that’s coming. My crew’s around the bend. We’re ready to help you disappear."

Bennion's eye moved over her, hunting the seam where a lie would show. “Okay.” The chain came off.

After that it went fast. The woman came out with a go-bag on her shoulder and the shotgun broken over her arm.