"Don't."
"It worked for years. Wore right through and it still worked. Worked every time it was cool. It only quit when things got hot." He leaned forward on his stool, his hands dangling between his knees. "You been riding on a wore-through wire for a year now, kid. You taped it real good. Best tape job I ever saw. But it's getting hot."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she picked up the socket roll Deacon had given her and put it in her milk crate and got on her bicycle, and she rode home without saying goodbye, and she did not go out to the Haskett place the next Saturday, or the one after that.
* * *
The first real cold came the second week of October. Snow fell on the Rubies on a Thursday, and by Friday night the whole range stood white above the town like a wall of sheets on a line, and the thermometer outside the kitchen window said nineteen degrees.
Josie woke at 2:10 because her room was cold.
Not cold like a cold house. Cold like outside. Cold moving, a draft along the floor. She lay there a second in the dark listening, and she knew before she knew. She was out of bed and down the hall in her socks, and the door to Aitona's room was open and his bed was empty, the blankets thrown back, his slippers still side by side on the rug.
The front door was hooked. The back door was hooked. The kitchen window over the sink was open as far as it would go, and the screen was lying in the side yard on the frosted grass, and his big canvas work jacket was gone from the hook by the stove.
She ran out into the street in her socks. Pine Street was empty under the yellow streetlight, white with frost. His truck sat in the side yard, dead, because she had made it dead. She ran to the corner and looked both ways down Fifth and there was nothing, nothing moving anywhere in the whole frozen town, and she screamed his name once, as loud as she could, and a dog started barking three houses down, and nobody came.
She ran back in. Her hands were shaking so hard she dialed wrong the first time. Not the card on the refrigerator with Ms. Ochoa's number. Not 911. The number on the red shop rag tacked to the wall by the phone, written in marker in blocky capital letters, the one Boone had left there in September and said was for nothing, just in case.
He picked up on the second ring.
"Haskett."
"He's gone," Josie said. "He went out the window. He's in his jacket, he doesn't have shoes, I don't know how long, I don't—"