Page 73 of Crosscurrent

Gabe didn't need audio. From two blocks away he could read Owen's body language, the frozen stare that screamed, “Oh, no. No way.”

Skye held out the helmet. She didn't ask. She pointed at the seat behind her.

Owen's resistance lasted less than a second. He jammed the helmet on, climbed aboard with the notebook strapped across his chest and the posture of a man committing fully to a decision he had not made, and grabbed two fistfuls of her jacket.

Skye hit the throttle. The bike shot up the alley, found the logging spur above the tire shop, and was gone — bike, rider, historian, notebook, swallowed whole by second-growth fir, while every eye Neptune had in Tillamook watched a dumpster burn.

The whole transaction took eleven seconds.

"Huh," Wade said through the comlink. There was a note in it nobody heard from the man often. Admiration. "There's a zillion miles of logging road in those mountains between here and Portland. No map has all of it. Four guys can't cover any of it." A pause. "Smart move. She'll be fine."

Gabe started the engine. "Then let's give Neptune something to chase."

Wade rolled out of town first, Fake Owen belted upright in the rear seat with his drugstore readers and his poly-pro and his slightly tilted air of impending lecture.

“Your passenger won’t survive a close look," Reagan said over the comlink.

"He won't get one," Wade promised, and turned north.

The Escalade picked him up before the town limits. The south-lot car, smoke-stained and humiliated, fell in behind it. Tom narrated the drone footage from Reagan's SUV: two vehicles, quarter-mile spacing, committed and northbound. After that, Wade's end of the channel went quiet. The man would be enjoying this, Gabe knew, probably way too much.

The rest of them ran Highway 6 east with the morning commuters.

Just the two of them in the truck, for the first time since this whole thing began. Cara watched the mirror for twenty minutes. Then she stopped watching the mirror.

"Tell me about the team," Gabe said. "What you're seeing."

She slid him a look before turning her attention back to the scenery, one slim finger winding up a hank of dark hair. "Owen's steadier than he has any right to be. Tillamook should have rattled him for a week. Instead he got on a motorcycle. Tom's the one I'm watching. He’s nervous leaving Piper behind. He won't say it, so it'll come out sideways, the constant equipment checks."

Gabe laughed. “Yeah, that’s not about nerves. He’s got it bad for our diner owner.”

Lips parted, she stared at him, wide-eyed.

“What? Guys notice stuff like that.”

“Do they now?” She grinned. “Good to know, sir.”

For no reason at all, his cheeks grew hot. He cleared his throat. "Reagan has the logistics nailed down."

"Reagan has the logistics over-nailed. That's her tell." She shifted in her seat to face him. "You want to know the real problem?"

"I know the real problem.” He flipped on the turn indicators and eased into the fast lane, zipping past an overloaded hay truck and considering his words. “We're flying the one thing Neptune needs straight into their reach, and we still have no idea how to make the list irrelevant to them." He kept his eyes on the road. "We’re holding a bomb we can't defuse and we’re practically delivering it straight to them."

"On ground they picked," Cara said.

"Yup."

Neither of them said anything for a mile. It wasn't a comfortable silence, but it was a shared one.

Thirty minutes out from PDX, Gabe decided it was now or never.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "So." Smooth. Excellent start. "About the kiss."

Cara's eyes went to the windshield and stayed there. "What about it?"

"I'm not asking for a — " He recalibrated. "I just want to know what it was. To you."

The pause went on long enough that he started composing the retraction.