Page 67 of Runaway for the Grumpy Daddy

Cash kept looking at the concrete between us.

"Wyatt went to call the lawyer from the main house. I took south shelter. When I came back, Biscuit was scratching at the cabin door from outside." His voice failed once, came back rough. "Her truck's gone. From the equipment barn. Her bag, too."

The room went still around me.

"When?"

"Don't know. Forty minutes. Maybe an hour."

"Phone."

"Off."

"County road?"

"No one saw which way."

"She leave anything?"

That was when Cash held out the paper.

I reached through the bars and took it.

A square torn from the small pad she kept beside my bed. Her careful loops sat in the middle, five words counting the name.

Boone—

I'm sorry.

Josie

Nothing else.

Of course nothing else. Explanation creates delay. Explanation gives people something to argue with. She had learned that leaving clean meant leaving before anybody could stop you, with half a tank and the mirrors running.

I read it again.

Cash finally looked at me. His eyes were red and wild. "We've got people checking the road. Wyatt called Hutchins. He's putting the plate out."

"She went to Derek."

Cash's face tightened. "We don't know that."

"I do."

The whole trade laid itself out in one cold pass.

Derek had built the charge. Derek could withdraw the complaint, change his statement, admit confusion, make the trap open as easily as he'd shut it. He had spent three years teaching Josie that every punishment ended if she surrendered the correct thing. Come home. Behave. Stop making trouble. Make the big man safe by giving the smaller man what he wanted.

She had told the truth and watched it put me in cuffs.

Now she was going to pay for the truth herself.

The bars stayed cold inside my hands. Steel set into concrete, county-built, designed for men exactly my size. For five years, I had carried the Rusty Spur in silence because Marnie's safety mattered more than my name. I had thought that made the lie mine to control. I had been wrong. Silence didn't stay where you put it. It spread. It became record, reputation, probable cause, steel around my wrists. It became Josie's truck leaving Carrow Creek before a storm.

"I'll find her," Cash said.

"Go."