She said crane's with me. We'll be there in 12 minutes. She got to the truck and opened the door and the dome light came on and in the light she could see her own hands on the wheel. Steady, calloused, the grease lines in her palms.

Don't let him stall you, she said. Don't let him get to a conversation. If he comes to that shop tonight, he's not coming to talk. I know what he's coming for, Silas said.

Then don't be alone when he gets there, she said. Promise me that. A pause. The length of it told her something she didn't want to know.

Silas, she said. I promise, he said. She ended the call and started the truck and pulled out of the driveway and onto the county road heading north. Crane's headlight behind her and the 12 miles opened up ahead in the dark.

And she drove them with the particular focused emptiness of someone who has compressed everything unnecessary and is running on the one thing that remains, the absolute certainty of where she needed to be and the absolute refusal to arrive too late. 5 mi north, her headlights hit something on the road. A truck, dark colored, stopped sideways across the county road, blocking both lanes. She hit the brakes.

The truck was empty. Nobody in the cab, nobody on the road, just the vehicle, sideways, lights off, engine off, sitting across the road in the dark like a decision that had already been made. And from behind her, from the direction of Eleanor's house, she heard an engine start, not Crane's Road Glide, something she didn't recognize, something that had been waiting in the dark on the south side of the road behind her, between her and the shop. in the exact position that meant she was not driving north anymore until someone moved the truck that was blocking the road or she found another way around it. And that 12 minutes had just become something she didn't yet know how to calculate.

She looked in the mirror. Crane's headlight had stopped behind her. She could see him getting off the Road Glide, reading the situation, his hand going to his radio. Her phone buzzed.

Silas. She picked up and he said before she could speak, "He's here." She looked at the truck blocking the road and she looked at the mirror and she looked at her phone with Silas's voice coming through it saying, "He's here." And she made three calculations in the space of 2 seconds. The truck across the road was not there to hold her indefinitely. It was there to hold her long enough.

Long enough for whatever was happening at Crow Iron to conclude before she arrived. That was the architecture of it. split her from the shop, split Crane from the shop, reduce what Silas had around him at 2:30 in the morning to whatever remained inside those walls.

"How many?" she said into the phone. "I can see two vehicles from the window," Silas said.

His voice was even controlled, the voice of a man who had been in worse positions and had survived them through the specific discipline of not allowing his voice to tell anyone how bad it was. "Massen and at least three others. They're in the lot."

"Are they inside?"

"Not yet. Decker's here. Moss. Puit."

"Decker's here," Silas said. "Moss. Puit."

"Puit?" she said.

"He's not leaving," Silas said. It carried something she didn't have time to unpack. A note of something that was almost surprised respect from a man who didn't surprise easily.

"Rex?" she said.

A pause.

"Rex went out the back 20 minutes ago," Silas said. "I couldn't stop him."

She looked at the road. She looked at the truck blocking it. Crane was beside her window now on foot. The road glide on its kickstand behind them.

And he was looking at the blockage with the same assessment she'd been running. "Side road," Crane said quietly.

Not a question. She knew it. 2 miles back. A farm access road that ran parallel to the county road through the Okafor property. The Okafor property that Harrow had been trying to acquire.