Page 96 of Crosscurrent

“Because it’s beautiful.”

Wade winced. “You’re on a dead drop.”

Ignoring them, Skye tilted her head. “The R sticks.”

A beat, then Reagan clearly had to ask. “How do you know that?”

“You can tell.”

Another beat.

Owen chimed in. “You absolutely cannot tell.”

Skye straightened now, surveying the empty street. “I can.”

Tom’s voice came over the comms. “Actually, you kind of can.”

She moved on, tote bag still in hand, a small smile curving her lips.

The signal site was two blocks east, a USPS relay box, the big olive kind with no slot, on a corner. Skye took a stub of chalk out of her pocket, worn round as a river stone, and laid one short horizontal stroke at hand height on the back leg of the box. Nothing anyone would see twice. Then she stood there, one second longer than the stroke needed, chalk still touching the metal.

"Done," she said, and walked, and Gabe gave her the block and a half of silence she needed and the truck door already open when she got there.

"So that's it?" Owen, in their ears, almost offended. "A library book and a chalk line? How do we know it worked? When do we know anything?"

"Somebody walks past that box every day," Skye said, settling into her seat, eyes already on the mirrors out of pure habit. "A man on his way to buy his daily lottery ticket, or a woman with one of those tiny, bad-tempered dogs with a rhinestone collar. They see the mark, they service the drop, and the message goes wherever Ray built it to go."

"What do we do until then?" Owen again.

"Until then we won't know." She let it sit. "Then we will."

It took nine hours.

They were all in the basement when it happened, pretending to eat Diane's lasagna around the big table while Tom's biggest monitor glowed on the wall. Fifty-three flags, one for every name in Ray's book, each waiting to confirm a second route gone live. At 7:42 the first one changed. No siren, no banner. A flag the color of a porch light simply went out, and a line of confirmation text crawled beneath it.

Somewhere two thousand miles away, a man walked out of his own life with a go-bag and became someone new, on the word of a dead marshal and four sentences in a library book.

"It's working," Owen whispered.

Reagan bowed her head. The rest of them followed. “Please Lord, protect these many souls,” she prayed. “And help us reach the last one in time.”

“Amen,” the whole team answered, loudly, this time.

Cara stood looking at the dark flag with her arms folded. "No way to stop this now.”

Gabe’s stomach dropped, as if he’d just gotten on a high-speed elevator. “Nope.”

Fifty-one, and Suzette Bennion to go.

41

Tom didn't bother with good morning. "Seventeen of Ray's witnesses have disappeared since midnight." A quiet glee almost overrode the exhaustion in his voice.

It was past 0400, and nobody had gone to bed. The board lit the dim basement like a fish tank. The flags were disappearing in clusters now: two sisters in the Midwest, a man with a fishing boat, a retired court clerk and her grandkids. Each one a household somewhere, folding itself up in the dark and heading out on a quiet, desperate journey to a complete rebirth.

Owen recited their names as they went, an honor roll of people he'd never meet.

Gabe drank coffee that had stopped working two cups ago. An hour later, the arranged channel coughed up a burst.