Chapter Eight: The Phone
He was across the kitchen before the chime finished fading.
The phone lay on the counter where she'd left it that first night — face down, ordinary, a cheap prepaid thing with a cracked corner, the kind you bought at a gas station and forgot you owned. It lit up again as he reached it. Another text. UNKNOWN NUMBER. The preview was enough:
nikki. answer me
Max's stomach went cold in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with arithmetic. A phone that was on was a phone that was talking. Towers. Pings. Every few minutes, a little hand raised in the dark saying here I am, here I am, here I am.
Nikki stood in the hallway, white-faced, her hands twisted in the hem of her shirt — and he could watch the math catch up to her in real time. Surprise. Horror. Then the worse thing underneath, which was understanding.
"How long," Max said. It wasn't really a question.
"Since — " She swallowed. "The bridge. It was in my pocket when I — when the car — " Her voice thinned to nothing. "I forgot. Max, I swear to God, I forgot I even had it."
He didn't answer. He was already doing the thing he'd done a dozen times on jobs — the small practiced violence of it. Thumbnail under the back cover, pop, battery out. The screen died mid-glow. He pried the SIM free with his nail, a sliver of gold and plastic, and held it between two fingers like a splinter he'd pulled from something living.
Too late. He knew it was too late, and he could see in her face that she knew he knew.
"They only have to ping it once," he said quietly. "One ping while it's on and talking, and he doesn't need it on anymore. He has the dot. He has this house."
Nikki's hands twisted harder. "I didn't — I wasn't thinking — "
"I know." He crossed to her. Careful — the way he'd learned to be careful with her, all his edges rounded off. He put his hand over her hands and stilled them. "Nikki. Hear me. This is not your fault."
"It is, though." Her voice was small. "He could have been tracking me the whole — "
"No." Firm. "Listen. You were running for your life. You went into a river. You woke up in a stranger's house with river mud in your hair." A beat. "Forgetting a phone is not a sin. And I have been in this house the whole time with it sitting on my counter. If anybody should have thought of it, it was the bounty hunter."
Something in her face eased. Not much. A fraction. The fraction mattered.
"He's coming," she said.
Max nodded. He didn't lie to her — that was the thing he'd decided back in the bedroom doorway, and he held to it. No lies. Not to her. "He's sitting in that hotel room trying your number, the phone answered, the towers answered. He'll have the location now. Maybe already. He's packing his bag."
She breathed in, slow. Held it. Let it out. When she spoke again, her voice had steadied — and that steadiness scared him more than the shaking had. "How long do we have."
"Hotel into town? Twenty minutes if he speeds. Thirty if he's careful." Max looked at the dead phone in his hand, the SIM pinched between his fingers. He dropped both into the mug on the counter — the cold mug she'd been holding that first night on the kitchen floor, half full of cold tea. A small, stupid funeral. "We don't run."
She blinked. "What?"
"We don't run." He said it again, because he needed her to hear it twice. "Running is what he expects. Running is what he'd chase, and he's better at chasing than you are at running — no offense, that's just math." He met her eyes and held them. "So we don't run. We get ready."
"For what."
Outside, the gravel road lay empty in the dark. Somewhere down it, a truck engine was probably turning over right now.
Max looked at the road, and the hunter in him — the part that had waited on porches and in parked cars, the part that knew a man's shape — that part had already started laying it out, cool and clean, like lines on a map.
"For him," Max said, "to walk into the wrong story."