Cutter doesn't miss much in one afternoon, Reeves said. Cole acknowledged that with a nod. It was true. Cutter's talent had always been rapid and accurate assessment. He saw the shape of things quickly and seldom needed to revise his first read. "
What did he tell you?" Cole said that it's real, Reeves said. " That you're not playing at it. That the retired insurance man is the smartest addition to any team he's seen in a long time. And coming from cutter, that's worth more than a formal recommendation from anyone."
He drank. He also told me that you've been careful, that everything you're building is clean. He set the glass down. I needed to hear that from Cutter before I came down. Because you trust Cutter's red, Cole said.
I trust your intentions, Reeves said. I trust Cutter's assessment of execution. He looked at Cole directly, and in the look was the weight of 21 years. All of it, the good and the difficult and the costly, and the things that had no name, compressed into the present moment of a man looking at someone he had genuinely missed and is glad to have back. You should have called Cole at any point in 11 months.
I would have listened. I know, Cole said. Then why didn't you? Cole thought about how to answer that honestly. Because calling would have made it real.
He said, "Whatever I was doing here, the quiet, the ordinary life, the trying to be a regular person, it required a kind of pretending, not dishonest pretending, but a choice to hold something at a distance while I figured out what I was without it." He paused. Calling you would have collapsed that distance and I needed the distance. Reeves sat with that and now he said now I don't. Cole said.
Reeves nodded slowly. He picked up his bourbon and turned it in his hands and said the chapter voted last week about what we you're building here and the chapter's relationship to it. He looked at Cole unanimous. Cole was still Reeves. We're in.
Reeves said, "Whatever you need, whatever the structure requires, however you want to use the chapter's reach, we're in with the conditions you laid out to cutter, which are the right conditions," he held Cole's gaze. " You're not alone in this. You should never have been alone in this." The bar was its usual Friday evening self around them, warm and occupied and indifferent to the weight of what was passing between two men at the counter, and Cole stood behind the bar and felt the accumulated pressure of everything that had been carried alone for two long release. In a single quiet exhale, he picked up the bourbon bottle, poured himself a measure, which he almost never did while working.
Reeves looked at him with mild genuine surprise. One occasion Cole said he raised the glass. Reeves raised his. They didn't say anything because they didn't need to. And they drank.
And it was the specific bourbon of 21 years of something real between two people. And it tasted like what it was. It was 2 weeks before Christmas when the first person walked through the back entrance of the Rusty Spur, who was not Gerald Fosss or Cutter or Reeves or someone Cole already knew. She was 5four years old. Her name was Louise Peton, and she ran a small alteration shop on the county road that she'd owned for 19 years.
She'd heard about the back room through her nephew, who'd heard about it from someone who'd heard about it from Gerald Foss's network of phone calls. She came in the back door at 10:00 in the morning with her hands clasped in front of her and the particular posture of a person who has been told to expect help and doesn't entirely believe it yet. Cole was already there, coffee made, Gerald Fosss across the table with his legal pad. Cutter was in the bar, visible through the connecting door, talking to Kira about something, providing the low-level presence he'd taken to providing without being asked. just there solid in the way that certain people make a space feel safer without doing anything specific to make it so.
Louise Peton sat down and looked at Cole and said, "I don't know if I have a case. I don't know what I have, but something was done to me and I've been trying to figure out for 3 years what to do about it, and nobody seemed to know how to help." " Tell us what happened," Cole said. She told them it took about 40 minutes. It involved a property dispute, a development company with connections to Garrison's network of shell corporations, a predatory loan arrangement, and a pattern of harassment that had driven two of her employees to quit, and very nearly driven Louise herself to close the shop she'd spent 19 years building.
She told it plainly and completely without drama. The way a person tells something true that they've been telling themselves in their own head for three years. All the details already organized and ready. When she finished, Gerald Foss had three pages of notes. Cole had said almost nothing.
He had listened with his full and complete attention. The way he listened to everything and what he'd heard was someone who had been pushed to the edge of a room and ignored and underestimated and who had come through the back door of a bar in a small town because someone had told her that there were people there who might actually see her. Louise Cole said, "Do you have documentation? Any records, contracts, correspondence, the original loan terms, anything? I have everything."
She said 19 years of business means 19 years of records. I never threw anything away. Gerald Fosss made a sound of genuine satisfaction. That he said to Cole is exactly what we need. Louise looked at them both.
Her hands still clasped on the table relaxed slightly. Just slightly. Can you actually help me? She said. I don't want I've been disappointed before.
I don't want to go through this and end up in the same place. Cole looked at her directly. I'm not going to tell you it's simple or that it's fast. He said, "What was done to you was deliberate and it was complicated and untangling it is going to take time. But you have documentation.
You have 19 years of legitimate business history. And what was done to you is part of a larger pattern that a federal case is already building on. You're not starting from zero." He paused. And you're not doing it alone.
Louise Peton looked at him for a long moment. Then she unclenched her hands entirely and placed them flat on the table and she exhaled with the specific quality of a person sitting down something they've been carrying for 3 years and she said, "All right, tell me what to do." Cole told her. 3 days before Christmas, Darnell Webb came in on an off day, not Tuesday, not Thursday, just a Monday afternoon, which meant he'd come specifically and not by routine. He settled onto his stool and Patrice put his tea in front of him without being asked and he sat for a moment just taking in the bar.