Page 17 of Dread

The room went quiet for half a second. Then Hornet threw his head back and howled, the sound raw and genuine, and the laughter that followed had a different quality to it -- surprised, pleased, the kind that comes when the straight man finally throws a punch.

I didn’t smile. Didn’t need to. The deflection had landed exactly where I’d aimed it, which was far enough from the truth to be funny and close enough to be believable. There were no anatomy coloring books in my house. There were, however, three generic ones -- animals, vehicles, geometric patterns -- sitting on my kitchen table where I’d left them two nights ago after deciding they looked too deliberate and moving them to a drawer instead. The juice boxes were in the refrigerator. The cereal was in the cabinet. The Popsicles were in the freezer behind a package of venison I’d been meaning to thaw for a week.

Standard inventory for a man who’d spent twenty years keeping his home stocked for emergencies that never arrived on schedule.

Fox had been watching from the far wall the whole time. I’d registered him early -- the stillness of him, arms crossed, back against the paneling, his gaze moving over the room with the unhurried attention of a man who let scenes play out before intervening. He hadn’t laughed. Hadn’t joined. Just watched, his expression giving away nothing, same as always.

When the noise quieted -- Hornet moving on to fresh material, the room’s attention dispersing back to pool and beer and the routine of an evening with nowhere to be -- Fox caught my eye. One tilt of the chin. That was all. No gesture, no word, just the slight upward angle of his jaw toward the hallway that led to the club offices.

I set my beer on the bar. Didn’t finish it. Followed.

The hallway was cooler. The clubhouse’s ancient AC pushed more air toward the back rooms than the main floor, and the concrete underfoot carried a chill that the wood planks up front had long since surrendered to body heat. Fox stopped at the junction where the hallway met the short corridor to Church. Not inside. Just far enough that the jukebox became background, the bass still present but the lyrics lost.

He turned. Looked at me. His arms stayed crossed. No preamble. No lead-in. Just the facts, delivered in the flat, measured tone he used for things that mattered.

“Your freezer’s got Popsicles in it.”

I held his gaze. Said nothing.

“Fridge’s got juice boxes. Cereal on the counter. Coloring books on your kitchen table.” He paused. Let each item land. “Yesterday there were crayons in your center console. I saw them when you handed me your keys at the gate.”

The crayons had been an oversight. I’d meant to move them to the glove box. The center console was too visible, too easy to spot when the lid was up. I’d bought them the same day as the coloring books -- a forty-eight pack, the kind with the sharpener in the back, because the twelve-packs never had the right shades of green and Ellie had been particular about the caterpillar drawing.

“I like to be prepared for visitors,” I said.

Fox gave nothing away. Arms crossed, expression unreadable, he waited. The longer he did, the harder it became to pretend I didn’t know exactly what he was asking.

The jukebox cycled to a new song, slower, with a guitar line that carried down the hallway in fragments. I could hear Hornet’s voice from the main room, pitched at its usual volume, the words indistinct but the rhythm unmistakable -- he’d found a new target, or circled back to an old one, and the room was laughing again without us.

Fox waited. He was good at waiting. Had been good at it for longer than I’d known him, which was going on fifteen years now. Waiting was its own kind of speech for Fox, and what he was saying in that silence was clearer than anything Hornet had been shouting across the bar.

I looked away first. My gaze found the concrete at our feet, the seam where the foundation met the wall, a hairline crack that had been there since before either of us had set foot in this building. I studied it with the focused attention of a man examining a wound that suddenly required his full concentration.

Fox didn’t push. Didn’t follow up with the question hanging in the air between us, the one about what exactly I was preparing for and who exactly I was preparing it for and how long I planned to keep preparing it without admitting what I was doing. He didn’t need to ask. The inventory had been enough. The crayons in the center console had been enough.

He uncrossed his arms and pushed himself upright from the wall he’d been leaning against. The movement brought him closer for a moment -- close enough that I caught the smell of leather and road dust and the faint, clean note of whatever soap he used -- and then he was past me, walking back toward the noise with the same measured stride he did everything.

I stayed where I was. The hallway held its cool. The jukebox played. Somewhere beyond the compound fence, a dog barked once and fell silent.

The crayons were still in my center console. The coloring books were on the table. The juice boxes were in the refrigerator, arranged in a row beside the milk because that’s where they belonged. I hadn’t bought the Popsicles for myself. I hadn’t bought any of it for myself.

I knew that. Fox knew that. The knowledge sat between us like a weight, and neither of us had touched it.

I went back to the bar. My beer was where I’d left it, the bottle sweating a ring into the wood. I picked it up. Drank the last inch. Set it down empty.

Hornet was across the room, holding court by the pool table, his voice carrying over the music. He saw me. Grinned. Raised his bottle in a toast that was equal parts challenge and affection.

I didn’t toast back. Just nodded, once, and turned for the door.

* * *

The sun sat directly overhead, flat and white and without mercy. No angle to it. Just heat falling straight down onto gravel and patchy grass and the backs of necks, the kind of heat that made the air above the compound shimmer if you looked at it too long. I’d planted myself against a fence post near the prospect row, one boot braced against the bottom rail, arms crossed, and let the post hold me up while I watched Ellie chase a red rubber ball across the yard.

The ball had appeared sometime yesterday. One of the Prospects’ kids, probably, or maybe Harlow’s father. It was the cheap kind, the hollow rubber that bounced unpredictably on uneven ground, and Ellie had adopted it with the fierce devotion children reserve for objects that haven’t been formally assigned to anyone else. She’d been at it for twenty minutes now, running full-tilt after each wild bounce, her light brown hair coming loose from whatever braid someone had put in that morning, damp strands clinging to her temples in the heat.

I wasn’t hovering. I made a point of not hovering. The townhome was thirty yards behind me, its screen door closed, the interior shadowed and presumably cool. Katy was inside, or at the clubhouse, or somewhere in the compound I hadn’t catalogued -- not my business to track her movements. I’d come out to check the fence line where the lab mix had been digging, found nothing new, and stayed. The post was as good a place as any to stand. The view was adequate.

Ellie cut left after a bounce that sent the ball skittering toward the gravel drive. Her sneakers -- pink, worn at the toes, the laces double-knotted -- hit the loose stone at speed, and the physics were simple and unforgiving. Traction failed. Ankle turned. Knee met gravel with a sound that traveled -- the scrape of denim tearing, the harder impact of patella against stone.