The way the air changes before weather arrives, and Cole sat down the bourbon bottle and straightened and stood there for a moment with both hands flat on the bar. And everyone in the room watched him absorb whatever that name meant. Absorb it the way a man absorbs something he has been half expecting and half dreading for a very long time. When Cole said 3 days ago, the man paused. He knows where you are.
Cole nodded. It was a single small movement and it contained more information than anything he'd said in 11 months. It contained the acknowledgement of something not finished. It contained the recognition that the quiet life was over. And it contained beneath both of those things something that the people who knew Cole Decker best in this room from before would have recognized as the moment a man stops moving away from something and turns to face it.
All right, Cole said. He looked at Reeves. He looked at the eight men behind him. He looked at the door. I'm going to need Cole said carefully to explain some things.
Reeves didn't drink his bourbon right away. He set both hands around the glass and looked at it the way a man looks at something he's been handed that he isn't sure he wants to accept. And the seven men behind him held their positions without anyone needing to tell them to. The way men hold positions when they've spent enough years together that stillness is a shared language. The ninth man, the one who delivered the name Garrison, was still standing just inside the door.
His name was Tuck. And Cole knew him from before, from the life before Harrisville. And the fact that Tuck had been the one sent told Cole something about the seriousness of what was happening because Tuck was not the man you sent with ordinary news. Tuck was the man you sent when the news needed to land correctly. How'd he get out?
Cole said "Sentence reduction," Tuck said. his lawyer found procedural issues with the original filing. Three counts dismissed on appeal. He walked out of Morgan Field on a Tuesday morning and nobody on our end knew until Wednesday. Whose fault is that?
The question was direct and Tuck absorbed it without flinching. Mine, he said. I had a contact inside the legal team. Contact went dark 6 weeks ago and I didn't press hard enough when I should have. Cole looked at him for a moment, not with anger, with the particular attention of a man cataloging information.
All right, he said again. Same word, different meaning this time. The first all right had meant I understand what's happened. This one meant we'll deal with that later. Reeves finally picked up his bourbon.
He didn't drink it. He just held it and said, "You want to tell me what you're doing here?" Cole, not the bartender answer. The real one I was resting, Cole said. Resting.
Reeves said it without mockery, but with the faint bewilderment of a man encountering a concept he doesn't fully recognize. For 11 months, it takes as long as it takes. Garrison's people have been moving for six months, Reeves said. Quietly, but moving. We've had three incidents in the chapter 2 in Knoxville.
One in Bristol. Property damage the first two times. The third time he stopped. He set the glass down. The third time it was Danny Faulk's garage.
Danny got out before it went up, but it was close. Cole was quiet for a moment. Danny Faulk was a name from before. A good name. A name connected to a specific and important piece of the history that Cole had come to Harrisville.
Partly to put some distance between himself and is Danny all right? He's all right. He has a right to be. He's been asking where you are. Reeves said a lot of people have been asking where you are.
I've been the one telling them I don't know. You didn't know? I had a reasonable suspicion. Reeves said a man moves around with no forwarding address and surfaces in a small town doing a quiet job that's not random. That's a man who knows how to disappear and chose a particular place to do it.
I had three candidates. Harrisville was my first guess. Cole said nothing. Why didn't you call? Reeves said.
It was the question underneath all the other questions. the one that had been sitting in Reeves's chest since the moment he'd heard the name Cole Decker from somebody who'd heard it from Dex Holloway's cousin. And it had the weight of something felt rather than just thought. Cole recognized it as a real question, not accusatory, not a setup for an argument, but the genuine bewildered hurt of a man who considered himself a brother and had spent 11 months not knowing. Cole looked at him straight.
because it was over. He said, ""What happened with Garrison? What happened at the end of it?" I needed it to be over. All of it.
You needed it to be over." Reeves repeated. Yes. And now Cole looked at the door, then back at Reeves. Now it apparently isn't.
Patrice Odum was still in the hallway doorway and she was listening to all of this with the expression of a woman who runs a bar in a small town and has heard many conversations she wasn't meant to hear and has always had the good sense to stay quiet until she understood what she was dealing with. But this was pushing the boundary of what she could stay quiet through. She stepped into the room. Cole, she said. He looked at her.
Do you want me to close the front for the evening? He considered that. Kira, he said to the college student who was still frozen between tables with a drinks tray in her hands, "Go ahead and take your break. Take a long one." Kira didn't need to be told twice.