Chapter 3: The Part After
Here is what you know about disappearing, which is nothing, because you are a lineworker from a timber town and the most dangerous thing you'd ever done before yesterday was work a downed line in an ice storm on Christmas Eve.
Here is what Leon knows about it, which he tells you sitting on the edge of the bed in his jeans and nothing else, with his elbows on his knees and the gun on the nightstand and the room still smelling like sex and cheap shampoo, in a flat calm voice that you've learned overnight means he's furious.
"There's a company called Tricell," he says. "Or there was. Then it was called something else, and something else after that. Every time one of these labs goes bad, somebody's left holding the bill. And the cheapest way to make a problem go away is to make sure nobody who saw it ever says so on the record."
"I didn't see anything. I fixed a power line."
"You saw everything. You were forty feet up for two hours with a clear view of the storage site. You saw the trucks come out before the alarms went off." He rubs his face. "You told me about them yourself, in the car. Hunnigan put it in the report. That's my fault."
"It's not your fault, it's my mouth."
"It's a great mouth." It's automatic, dry, and he doesn't smile when he says it. "But it's my report."
You sit up against the headboard and pull the duck bedspread around you. Outside, the sky over the ridge is still black. The glow from Harlow Gap has dimmed to a dull orange smear. It's half past three.
"So what happens?" you ask. "They come knock on the door at seven and I go with them, and then what? I get a nice apartment in Nebraska and a new name and a job counting paperclips?"
"Best case."
"And worst case?"
He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to.
"Okay," you say. You're surprised by how steady your voice is. "Then what are we doing about it?"
He turns and looks at you over his shoulder. The lamp is on now, and in the warm light he looks younger and older at once, the stubble and the grey at his temple and the hair in his eyes.
"We?" he says.
"You heard me."
"I've got a helicopter at five."
"So skip it."
"I can't skip it. That's not how it works." He gets up and paces to the window, pulls the curtain back an inch with two fingers, looks at the lot. "Hunnigan's already working on it. She can get you into DSO protective custody, but it has to come through channels, and channels take time, and the contractor team lands at six-thirty."
"Then put me on your helicopter."
"There's one seat."
"I've ridden in the bed of a bucket truck at sixty miles an hour on a logging road. I can sit on the floor."
He turns around. He looks at you, sitting up in that awful bedspread with your hair a mess and your chin up, and something happens to his face that you've never seen happen before. It goes soft, all at once, from the eyes outward, like ice breaking up on a river.
"You're serious," he says.
"I've been serious all night. You're just noticing."
He crosses the room in three strides and sits on the bed and takes your face in both hands and kisses you, long and slow and searching, nothing like before. When he pulls back he keeps his forehead against yours.
"Here's the thing," he says quietly. "The part after. I'm bad at it because I don't let there be one. Twenty years of this. I walk out of the building, somebody blows it up behind me, I get on a plane. If I don't stay, then I don't have to find out what the morning looks like. I don't have to find out who's still standing." He swallows. "Raccoon City, I got out with two people. Claire Redfield and Sherry Birkin. I spent the next twenty years making sure I never needed anyone else to get out with me."
You put your hands over his. You don't say anything. You wait.
"I don't want to get on the helicopter without you," he says. "That's what I'm trying to say. And it's got nothing to do with Tricell."
He calls Hunnigan back. You listen to his half of it from the bed.
"Yeah. No. I know what time it is. Listen. She's a material witness to a federal bioterror incident and she's in DSO custody as of now. My custody. Put it in writing. I don't care. Then make it through channels faster." A pause. "Because I'm asking. When was the last time I asked you for anything?" A longer pause. He closes his eyes. "Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Ingrid."
He hangs up and stands there with the phone in his hand.
"She called you Leon," he says, a little dazed. "She never calls me Leon. She said, Leon, it's about damn time, and then she hung up on me."
"So?"
"So the pilot's going to be very confused about who's sitting on the floor."
You laugh. He comes back to the bed and you pull him down into it, bedspread and all, and he lands on top of you with a grunt and a laugh of his own, real and loose, the first time all night you've heard him sound like he isn't keeping watch.
"We have an hour," you say.
"Fifty-two minutes."
"Fast thinker."
"Somebody taught me." He pushes the bedspread down off your shoulders. His mouth follows it.
It's different this time. Slower, unhurried, the urgency of the first time burned down to a steady glow. He kisses you everywhere, like he's mapping you for later, like he wants to be able to find his way back in the dark. You touch him the same way. You find the long scar on his ribs and trace it with your tongue until he's breathing hard. You find that the inside of his wrist makes him shiver. You find that if you say his name just so, low, against his ear, his whole body jerks like you've hit a nerve.
He rolls you on top of him. "Your turn," he says, hands on your hips. "Show me those steady hands."
You sink down onto him slowly, taking him in inch by inch, and watch his head fall back against the pillow and his throat work. You brace your palms on his chest. You ride him slow, rolling your hips, finding the angle that makes you gasp and staying there, and he lets you, holding your hips and watching you with his lips parted like he's memorizing it. The lamp throws your shadows huge across the wall and the moose painting.
"Look at you," he breathes. "God, look at you."
He sits up. He wraps his arms around you and holds you against his chest, skin to skin, and you move together like that, tight and close, his mouth on your neck and your arms around his shoulders, barely moving now, just grinding, just the slow building heat of it. He slides a hand between you and touches you in tight small circles, and you come apart in his arms with your face pressed into his neck. He holds you through it. He holds you until you stop shaking, and then he groans into your hair and follows you over, his arms locked around you like he's never going to let go.
You stay like that. You don't move. His heart is going hard against yours.
"Hey," he says, eventually, into your hair.
"Hey."
"After all this. After DSO, after the witness thing, after they figure out what to do with you." He leans back enough to look at you. "We could get dinner. In daylight. Somewhere without ducks."
"Are you asking me out, Agent Kennedy?"
"I think so. I'm out of practice."
"You're doing all right," you tell him again, and this time he smiles all the way.
The helicopter comes in low over the ridge at five on the dot, kicking up gravel and cigarette butts and a startled Guard private's cap. The sky behind it is just going grey.
Leon has his jacket on again. He's got your work bag over one shoulder, the canvas one, and his gun on his thigh, and when the pilot leans out and starts yelling something about one passenger he just holds up a sheet of paper that Hunnigan faxed to the motel office, and the pilot reads it and stares at you and shuts up.
You stand on the edge of the lot with the downdraft whipping your hair across your face and look back at the STA ITE MOTO INN, and up the highway, at the dull smear of smoke over Harlow Gap, where you grew up, where you learned to climb.
"You okay?" Leon shouts over the rotors.
You hold out your hand, flat, fingers spread, into the grey morning.
Then you turn it over and slide it into his. He laces his fingers through yours, tight, and he doesn't let go, not when you climb in, not when you sit down on the floor between the seats with your back against his knees, not when the helicopter lifts and tilts and the motel sign drops away beneath you, flickering its broken letters at the dawn.
Somewhere over the Cascades his phone buzzes. He reads the message and laughs, a short surprised sound, and passes it down to you.
It's from Hunnigan. It says: The contractor team never landed. Their plane got turned around at Redmond. Someone called in a tip. Guess who.
Under it, a second message, from a number with no name attached. No greeting. Just a red lipstick kiss, and four words.
Take care of her, Leon.