Page 59 of Patch

I heard the phone get picked up off the gravel and the line go dead, which meant somebody had looked at the screen, which meant somebody now knew my number.

Then nothing at all, and I stood there for one full second doing the only thing I have ever been good at, which is knowing exactly where everybody is.

North lot. Maple Grove. Dark sedan facing the exit.

I was already moving. “Surge!”

He came out of the common room with his laptop half-closed.

“Maple Grove, north lot, eight-thirty-one. Somebody picked her phone up off the ground and killed it thirty seconds later. I want to know which way it went before it died and I want it now.”

“Give me sixty seconds.”

“You’ve got thirty.”

Leo was coming up the stairs from the bar with a bar towel still over his shoulder and his face already changing, because whatever was on mine was legible from across a room.

“Go stand on that gate and don’t let one damn thing through it until I say.”

He went.

Six years of Sundays. Same route, same spot, same door at the same hour, because routine was the last thing Ruth Hale’s mind could still hold and Maren would have crawled there over broken glass before she’d break it for anybody.

I’d built my whole life on knowing where people were. I had known exactly where she was going.

Fox was already at his desk when I came through the door without knocking.

“They took her out of the north lot at Maple Grove,” I said. “I was on the phone with her when they did it.”

Fox didn’t ask a single question. He came out of that chair. “Go.”

One word. No conditions on it, no questions about how, and no instruction about what to do with anybody I found standing in the way.

Surge caught me in the hallway with the laptop open against his forearm.

“Her phone pinged one tower on the way out and then went dark, which means somebody pulled the battery.” He turned the screen. “But the direction’s good. Southeast off the facility, and that’s away from every highway on-ramp within twenty miles, so they’re not running. They’re going somewhere they already had.”

“Where?”

“Three properties, all the same LLC. Storage off 63, a logistics office in town, and a house on a dead-end road past Belle. The tower puts them in the right quadrant for any of the three.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Surge.”

“I’m not going to guess at you.” He said it steady. “The storage is agricultural supply on paper and pharmaceutical in practice. That’s where the product goes. The office is clean, too clean, it’s a mail drop with a chair in it. The house I’ve got nothing on except a name on the deed from six years ago.”

“Send all three to Brazil’s phone.”

“Already did.”

Brazil was pulling keys in the lot before I got to my bike, which meant somebody had told him and he hadn’t waited to be asked. His Road Captain patch caught the security light. He looked at my face and didn’t say one word about it.

“Three addresses,” I said.

“I got ‘em.”