Page 4 of Switch

“Draw them a map, then.”

“At night? With armed men using your fence line for a highway? I still know it better in the dark than anyone else would.”

I had nothing for that, and he knew it.

“Fine.” The word came out through my teeth. “You want my spare room, you take it on my terms. Your bike goes behind the hay barn where nobody can see it from the road. My owners come Tuesdays and Thursdays. When they’re here, you’re invisible. You don’t talk to my clients. You don’t wear that where they can see it.” I pointed at his cut.

“The cut stays on.”

“Then you stay out of sight.”

“Done.”

“And you keep your hands off my horses.”

He looked toward the paddock where Whiskey stood watching us with her ears up. “Little late for that.”

I went inside before he could see what that did to my face.

The spare room was at the end of the hall. I pulled a towel out of the closet and dropped it on the quilt, and I heard him come in behind me and stop in the doorway.

“Bathroom’s across the hall, but then you know that, don’t you?” I said.

“Savannah.”

“Coffee’s put on at five.”

“Savannah…”

“Don’t.”

He stood aside so I could get past him without touching, and I made it all the way to my own door before I looked back. He was still in the doorway of the spare room, watching me go.

The last time Switch spent the night in this house, he’d been gone before the sun came up.

This time, I’d be the one holding the door.

CHAPTER 2

SWITCH

One wall. That was all that stood between me and the bed I’d walked out on, and I spent the whole damn night listening to her toss on the other side of it.

Some time after midnight she got up. Bare feet on the hall boards, the fridge door, the faucet. I lay there with my hands locked behind my head and stared at her ceiling and counted every step back to her room. Nine. Then her mattress took her weight again and the house went quiet, and I stayed where I was, hard and wide awake and hating myself in a way I’d gotten pretty good at.

I was out on the porch in the morning while it was still full dark.

The desert does a thing just before sunup where the dark goes thin and blue and every shape sits up out of it one at a time. The barn. The arena rails. The hay barn with my bike tucked behind it like a dog that had been told to stay. Then the land falling away toward the back, and the pale line of the wash cutting through it.

I knew what sat down there without having to see it. A slab of cracked concrete where a single-wide trailer used to be. I’d lived in that trailer from the age of six until the day Jack McGuire drove down the wash in his truck and told my father to be off his place by the weekend. Twenty-one years ago. I hadn’t been down there since.

Now I was sleeping in Jack McGuire’s daughter’s spare room. My old man would’ve laughed himself sick.

When the kitchen light came on, coffee started gurgling. Through the screen I watched Savannah pour one mug, carry it out the back door and head for the barn without looking at the porch once.

I poured my own. It was strong enough to strip paint, which was about what I needed right now.

She came out of the barn a while later pushing a wheelbarrow, and I quit pretending I was watching the road.