Cole counted six trucks and one very clean Impala before he’d even parked.
The roadhouse sat two miles outside Sioux Falls, on a gravel lot that had seen better decades, and the Impala didn’t belong to anyone he wanted to meet yet.
He pulled in at the far end and checked the notebook.
Ellen Harvelle.
Roadhouse.
Called the number Rufus had.
This is the network deciding whether I live.
He closed the notebook and went in.
The bar was darker than it needed to be and smelled like sawdust and spilled beer that had dried into the floorboards twenty years ago.
A woman behind the taps looked up when the door shut.
Mid-fifties, sharp eyes, the kind of posture that came from running a room full of armed men who thought they could drink for free.
“Brenner,” she said.
Cole stopped three feet from the bar.
“Ma’am.”
“Don’t ma’am me.
Rufus says you work the cases nobody else’ll touch and you’re still breathing.
Sit.”
Cole sat.
A girl came out of the back room with a crate of empties.
Twenty-two, maybe, blonde, moving like she had places to be and this wasn’t one of them.
She set the crate down and looked at Cole the way you’d look at a stain somebody tracked in.
“This him?”
“This is him,” Ellen said.
The girl leaned against the bar.
“You don’t look like much.”
“Jo,” Ellen said.
“What?
He doesn’t.”
Cole kept his hands flat on the bar and waited.
In the corner booth a man in a cap and flannel was pretending to read a book and doing a bad job of it.
Older.
Graying beard.
Eyes that had clocked Cole the second he walked in and were still watching.
Ellen poured two fingers of something amber into a glass and slid it across.
“Rufus says you’ve been running the Plains for three months and you haven’t gotten anyone killed yet.
That true?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah he says it, or yeah it’s true?”
“Both.”
Ellen looked at him a long time.
Jo was still leaning, arms crossed, sizing him up like he was a bet she hadn’t decided to take yet.
“You work alone,” Ellen said.
“Mostly.”
“Mostly’s a word people use when they’re about to lie.”
Cole drank.
The whiskey was better than it had any right to be in a place like this.
“I work alone.
Sometimes I call Rufus.
Once I worked a case near a sheriff who didn’t run when she saw the thing that wasn’t a dog.”
“Donna Hanscum,” Ellen said.
Cole set the glass down.
“You already know everything you’re asking me.”
“I’m not asking to learn, Brenner.
I’m asking to see if you’ll lie.”
Jo laughed.
It was a short sound, not mean, just surprised.
“I like him.”
“You like everyone who isn’t me telling you no,” Ellen said.
“That’s also true.”
Ellen refilled the glass without being asked.
The man in the corner turned a page he hadn’t read.
He didn’t need to say anything to take up that much of the room.
“You hunt what, exactly?” Jo said.
“Whatever’s there.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Skinwalkers.
Revenants.
Ghosts.
A lamia outside Worthington.
Something in a church basement in Hibbing that wore a golden retriever and ate a deacon.”
Jo went still, glass halfway to her mouth.
“That was you?”
“Yeah.”
“Donna called it in as an animal attack.
“She’s good at her job.”
“She covering for you?”
“She’s covering for the town,” Cole said.
“I just happened to be there.”
Ellen was watching him the way a mechanic watches an engine that’s running but shouldn’t be.
“You got people, Brenner?”
“No.”
“Family?”
“Not anymore.”
“Then why?”
Cole looked at the glass.
The whiskey caught the low light and turned it into something warmer than it was.
“Somebody’s gotta work the ones nobody else will.”
“That’s not a reason,” Ellen said.
“That’s an excuse.”
“Maybe.”
Jo pushed off the bar.
“You’re boring.
I’m gonna make this interesting.”
She pulled two shot glasses from the rack and set them on the bar with the kind of deliberate care that meant trouble.
Ellen sighed.
“Jo.”
“What?
He’s sitting here being all tragic and mysterious.
I want to see if he’s got anything under it.”
“He’s a guest.”
“Then he can drink like one.” Jo looked at Cole.
“You ever been in a drinking contest, Brenner?”
“No.”
“Good.
You’re about to lose one.” She pulled a bottle of tequila from the well and filled both glasses to the brim.
“House rules.
You stop, you lose.
You puke, you lose.
You fall off that stool, you lose.
I win, you tell me one true thing about yourself you haven’t told anyone here yet.”
“And if I win?”
Jo grinned.
It was the kind of grin that had probably gotten her into more trouble than it had gotten her out of.
“You won’t.”
Ellen closed her eyes briefly, like she’d had this argument before and lost it every time.
The man in the corner set his book down and leaned back to watch.
Cole picked up the first shot.
“Okay.”
They drank.
Four shots in, Cole’s mouth tasted like lime and salt and a decision he was going to regret.
Jo was grinning at him across the bar, her cheeks flushed but her hands steady.
Ellen had stopped pouring and started watching with the air of someone conducting an experiment she already knew the results of.
Six shots in, Cole’s vision had acquired a pleasant blur at the edges and Jo was telling a story about a ghoul in Duluth that had eaten half a morgue before anyone noticed.
Eight shots in, the man in the corner had come over to the bar and was sitting two stools down, nursing something dark and watching Cole with the kind of attention that suggested he was being filed away for later.
Ten shots in, Cole set the glass down and it rang against the wood a little harder than he’d meant it to.
“You good, Brenner?” Jo said.
She wasn’t slurring.
Her eyes were bright and her grin had teeth in it.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.
You look like you’re about to see God.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
Jo laughed and poured eleven.
Cole looked at the glass.
It sat there like a small amber verdict.
He picked it up.
Twelve.
The room tilted slightly to the left and then corrected itself.
Jo was still grinning.
Ellen had her arms crossed and was shaking her head in a way that might have been fondness or might have been disappointment.
The man in the corner had his chin in his hand and was watching Cole the way you’d watch a tire that was about to blow.
“Thirteen,” Jo said, and poured.
Cole reached for it.
His hand did not quite land where he thought it would.
The glass tipped, caught, steadied.
He drank.
Jo matched him without blinking.
The room was now definitely tilted and Cole was no longer sure it was going to correct.
He could taste copper at the back of his throat and the bar was doing something geometrically interesting that bars were not supposed to do.
Jo slid the glass across.
“Go on.”
Cole looked at it.
Then he looked at Jo.
Then he looked at the glass again and set both hands flat on the bar to keep the world from deciding which way was down.
“I’m good,” he said.
“You’re stopping?”
“Yeah.”
Jo’s grin went wide and triumphant.
“You lose.”
“Yeah.”
“So.” She leaned in, elbows on the bar, eyes bright.
“One true thing, Brenner.
Something you haven’t told anyone here.”
Cole sat very still and let the tequila settle somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go.
Ellen was watching.
The man in the corner was watching.
Jo was waiting.
“I can see when people are about to die,” Cole said.
Jo blinked.
Her grin flickered but didn’t fade.
“Like a reaper?”
“No.
Just the prints.
The appointments.
I can see them coming.”
“Can you stop them?”
Cole didn’t answer.
Jo looked at him for a long time.
The grin had gone but something else had replaced it, something sharper and more interested.
“That’s a bad gift, Brenner.”
“Yeah.”
“You use it anyway.”
“Yeah.”
Jo straightened and refilled his water glass from the tap.
She set it in front of him without a word.
Ellen had gone very quiet.
The man in the corner had picked up his book again but he wasn’t reading it.
“You come around again,” Jo said.
“I mean it.
You work a case anywhere near here, you call.”
“Why?”
“Because you just told me the worst true thing you could’ve told me and you didn’t flinch.” She tapped the bar twice.
“That’s either very brave or very stupid, and I want to know which.”
Cole drank the water.
It tasted clean and cold and nothing like the last hour.
Jo was already walking toward the back room, the crate of empties in her arms, moving like the conversation had ended exactly the way she wanted it to.
Ellen leaned across the bar.
“Bobby Singer.
Corner booth.
He’s been listening the whole time and he’s gonna keep listening whether you like it or not.
You burned your quiet tonight, Brenner.
The network knows your face now.”
“I know.”
“Good.” She picked up the empty glasses and turned toward the taps.
“Drink the water.
Then get out of my bar before Jo decides she likes you.”
Cole drank the water.
The man in the corner Bobby Singer was still watching, still saying nothing, still taking up more space than a man in a flannel shirt had any right to.
Cole stood.
The floor was solid under him but it took more attention than it should have.
He walked to the door, pushed it open, and stepped out into the gravel lot.
The air was cold and clean and tasted like nothing at all.
He made it to the truck, got in, and sat with both hands on the wheel.
The network had his face.
Jo Harvelle had a standing invitation.
Bobby Singer knew he existed.
The quiet was gone.
He started the truck.
Bobby Singer knew he existed now, Jo Harvelle had a standing invitation, and Ellen had told him exactly what that cost him.
Cole pointed the truck south toward Davenport, where a banker was four days from a stroke and the notebook was going to need another page.