Cole hadn’t slept, and the coffee at The Pioneer wasn’t helping.
He’d counted nine cars in the lot on his way in, under a sky the color of old dishwater the diner sat at the edge of Kearney, Nebraska, where the highway split north toward the Sandhills and south toward nothing in particular.
The banker in Davenport had gone down two days early a stroke at his desk, right on schedule, no deferral needed and Cole had driven west instead of east because the Writ had shown him four prints stacked in a single Nebraska town, and that wasn’t weather.
That was a pattern.
The coffee was bad.
He drank it anyway.
The man in the charcoal suit sat down at the counter three stools over and ordered nothing.
Cole kept his eyes on the coffee.
Counted the cars in the lot again through the window.
Still nine.
A semi pulled in.
Ten.
“You have moved six,” the man said.
Cole set the cup down.
The man in the charcoal suit was older than Cole and younger than Bobby forgettable face, suit out of a catalog twenty years old and kept in good repair ever since.
His hands were on the counter, empty.
“Six deferred.” A pause, precise as a ruled line.
“None rerouted.
You understand that this pools.”
Cole looked at him.
The man’s eyes were gray and level and carried no threat at all.
“I am not here to stop you.
I am here to inform you of the terms.”
“You’re a reaper.”
“Yes.”
Cole counted the booths.
Four occupied.
The waitress was refilling a trucker’s mug at the far end.
The semi driver hadn’t come in yet.
“You’re not on the list.” The man’s voice carried no inflection, no warmth.
“You are adjacent to it.
That makes you my concern.”
“Okay.”
“The six you deferred are pooled.
The pool redistributes.
Four of the redistributions landed in this town.
That is why you are here.”
Cole said nothing.
The man adjusted his cuffs.
They were already straight.
“You will ask me a question now.
I will answer one for free.”
“Who holds the pool.”
“You do.”
Cole went still.
“Until it passes.” The man folded his hands on the counter.
“The pool is yours.
You moved the appointments.
They are held against your own until collected or rerouted by a party with standing.”
“That was two questions.” The man stood.
He left exact change on the counter for a coffee he hadn’t ordered.
“You are not in trouble.
You are in arrears.
They are different.”
The man walked toward the door and stopped with his hand on the frame.
“I will tell you how it works,” he said, not turning.
“I will not tell you how to cheat it.
There is no cheating it.”
The door swung shut.
Cole sat at the counter and did not move.
The grill hissed behind the pass-through and somewhere a radio murmured crop futures.
The waitress came by and refilled his cup without asking.
Still bad.
He drank it.
The pool was his.
Six deaths, deferred.
A grandmother in Marshalltown, a logger in Bemidji, four others he couldn’t name off the top of his head but the notebook could.
Six appointments moved.
Six debts held against his own.
Until it passes.
The gray-eyed reaper had said collected the way a clerk stamps a file flat, final, no malice in it.
Four prints stacked in Kearney.
They’d shown up three days after he’d worked a case sixty miles north and moved a schedule that bent farther than he’d guessed it could.
The notebook was in the truck.
No need to check it.
The count sat in his chest like a swallowed stone.
Six pooled.
Four redistributed to Kearney.
Two still waiting somewhere he couldn’t see.
Or the pool had grown and the count was wrong.
Or the pool was feeding something and Kearney wasn’t random at all.
No way to know.
The reaper had answered one question and Cole had wasted it on who instead of what happens when.
He finished the coffee.
Left a five on the counter and walked out to the truck.
The four Kearney prints were waiting.
A bar fight that would tip wrong in sixteen hours.
A diabetic seizure in forty.
A widow’s fall in three days.
A boy on a bike in five.
Defer all four.
Ten pooled.
Defer none.
Six pooled, four dead.
Or walk away.
Stop moving the schedule entirely.
The truck door groaned when he pulled it open.
Engine turned over on the first try.
Both hands on the wheel, he watched the sun come up dirty orange over the Kearney water tower.
Whatever came for the pool if it existed, if the reaper’s phrasing meant what it sounded like wasn’t going to announce itself.
No letter.
No warning.
It would come the way a winter wind came off the plains: quiet, steady, indifferent to what stood in the way.
Cole had no idea when.
The grandmother in Marshalltown had woken up and asked for toast.
The logger in Bemidji had walked away from a tree that should have killed him, sawdust still caught in his beard, and never knew Cole had been standing forty yards downwind with his hands shaking.
The banker in Davenport had died on time wife, mortgage, desk drawer full of unopened mail that Cole could smell through the cracked window, stale paper and dust.
And the boy on the bike.
Five days out.
A car was going to run the light at Columbus and Seventh, and the boy would never hear the engine until it was too late.
Cole put the truck in gear.
He drove into Kearney and found the bar where the fight was going to start and he sat in the parking lot with the notebook open on his lap and he made the choice.
Keep deferring.
That was the choice.
Save the boy on the bike and the widow and the diabetic and the bar fight.
Let the pool swell to ten.
And when whatever was coming finally arrived, meet it the only way he knew how.
With the kit.
With years he might not have.
With whatever the Writ let him spend that wasn’t someone else’s life.
Pen on paper, cramped block letters.
Choice: keep deferring.
The pool will grow.
Something will come.
Pay when it arrives.
Notebook shut.
The bar wasn’t open yet.
The sun was higher now and the parking lot was empty except for a dishwasher’s truck near the back door.
Cole got out.
Counted the windows.
Checked the address against the print.
Sixteen hours.
He was going to be here when it mattered.
Back in the truck.
Six blocks south to a motel where the carpet smelled like cigarettes and bleach.
Paid for a room with a window that faced the bar.
Set an alarm.
Lay down on the bed with his boots still on, the springs pressing cold through the thin mattress, and did not sleep.
The pool was his.
Until it passed to whatever was coming.
He’d made the choice.
He wasn’t going to unmake it.
Fourteen hours later the alarm went off and he got up and went to work.