Smoke Season

CHAPTER 16

Little more than twenty-four hours since standing with Emmett on the shore of the Outlaw to bear witness to the ignition of the Flatiron Fire, True glimpsed Temple Bar emerging from the gloom of late twilight and smoke. The ramp was usually a hub of activity as shuttle vans came and went, boat trailers maneuvering for position and clients and crew hauling piles of gear and coolers, but right now, Temple’s single boat ramp and small parking lot sat empty. No contact from Fallows’s operation loitered in the usual place by the concrete maintenance building. No surprise, given the lack of traffic at the ramp that served as their cover, but True felt a lurch of disappointment all the same. Now that she’d already cut her time short with the Wus, she’d hoped to just get this over with. She could at least get back to Carbon, help Sam with the kids. Worry her pretty head about Mel again for a change.

She stifled another bitter laugh and navigated to the ramp in an eerie silence, the slap of her oars on the still water loud in her ears. A single light shone over the pit-toilet bathroom, orange in the smoky air, and True flipped on her headlamp to guide their nose up onto the sloping concrete of the ramp.

“As soon as we’re grounded, you both can hop out,” she told the Wus, who clambered out the sides of the raft clumsily, their sudden splashing jarring in the gathering dark.

She followed suit—more gracefully, she’d like to think—water to her knees at the back of the boat, pushing the stern up the ramp with a grunt of breath. Her biceps were so spent, the damned thing barely moved. Vivian turned immediately to help, and Emmett gamely grabbed the tie-off rope at the bow, tugging. Together, they got the loaded-down raft out of the water, True leaning forward, hands on her knees, to catch her breath in the thick air.

“Thanks,” she told them. “You all can grab your dry bags and change out of your wet clothes, if you like.” She pointed toward the bathroom. “There’s space to change behind it, too,” she added. “Benefit of having this place to ourselves ... total privacy.”

“When will the van be here?” Emmett asked, eyeing the darkening sky.

True consulted her watch. “About ten minutes, I’d guess.” She’d been promised a shuttle driven by one of the old-timers least likely to be spooked by the smoke.

Emmett set out with his gear, but Vivian hung back, offering to help with the Yeti cooler, which was a two-person job even mostly empty. True took her up on it, heaving her end out of the boat while thinking ruefully of the steaks still thawing inside, ready for tonight’s dinner. They’d skipped it, opting for trail mix and granola bars as True continued to row, and row, and row.

“I really am sorry to be ending early,” Vivian said once they’d set the Yeti down on the concrete.

And she sounded it, too, but True was tired and miserable and feeling a bit too sorry for herself, so instead of “Me, too,” what came out of her mouth was “I’ll give you a refund, so don’t worry about that.”

She felt the backlash of Vivian’s hurt even before she registered it on her face. It reverberated from her very being. “No, thank you,” she said tightly. But then she seemed to recover herself. “You know, True, I have a sense that you wish this trip had gone very differently, and so do I. I know we’re rookies when it comes to this rafting stuff, Emmett and me, but this was an act of nature, and—”

True couldn’t do it. She couldn’t let Vivian think she, or Emmett, had done anything wrong. “It’s my fault.” She took a step toward Vivian, noted her crossed arms and braced stance, and thought better of it. “I did want things to go differently,” she told her. “But you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Obviously,” Vivian shot back. “What I was going to say,” she continued, “is that I understand we’re not exactly assets, but we’re not liabilities, either.”

At True’s baffled expression, Vivian blurted, “Why were you so quick to pawn us off?”

Wait. Was Vivian hurt because True had told her to go with the Martins? She just barely managed to mask a very small, very cautious smile. She did risk a cautious step forward. “I didn’t want you to go with the Martins,” she said, relishing every word for how true each one was. “But I couldn’t in good conscience advise you not to. This is getting real,” she said, indicating the smoke around them. “As much as I want to spend more time with you”—she deliberately emphasized the single word, even feeling a pang of betrayal to Emmett as she did so—“I had to think of your safety.”

Vivian made a face of frustration. “But you wouldn’t come, too. Why?”

Why. True just looked at her, feeling once again caught in that distributary, as good as a million miles away from where she wanted to be. I can’t tell you why. She just shook her head, the weariness and misery from moments before coming back to claim her.

How to fix this? How to explain? True was still wrestling with this, and Vivian was still waiting, when Emmett returned, emerging back through the gloom to startle them both.

“Mom, there’s a moth in the bathroom this big ,” he told her, hands spanned at least six inches apart. “So, you know, be careful.”

As far as dismissals went, it sufficed. Vivian picked up her gear bag and turned heel, leaving Emmett to help True with the rest of the gear. They hauled out the table and tents, then the dry bags containing the sleeping bags and pillows, the tarp, the stove, and the fuel canisters. True set them all in orderly file on the ramp by the boat, a creature of habit even though tonight she certainly had ample space available to spread out. Her thoughts were racing the whole while, everything she should have said to Vivian instead of what she had said running in a loop in her head.

I got into something over my head.

My problems tonight do not define me, I promise.

I am a woman you can trust, and trust me, I want to see you again.

Emmett helped more than his share, hauling out the awkward, bulky Paco Pads they slept on despite the fact that they were taller than he was, then the chairs, and finally the ammo boxes ... one, two, three ... and four.

True grabbed the last one from him, the ammo box, the smallest one that meant everything and that had ruined everything. She clutched it tight against her sweat- and river-water-soaked tank top, ignoring Emmett’s protests that it wasn’t too much for him, that he could carry it. As he set back out toward the bathrooms to check on his mom, she flicked a glance toward the road where she expected the shuttle to emerge soon in a flash of headlight beams; daylight faded fast here in the river canyon. She couldn’t quite let go of a lingering hope that a truck with the ridiculous Fallows, Inc. wrap around the door would suddenly show first. Imagine actually wishing those guys anywhere. No, True was on her own, for better or worse, that concept of aloneness stirring something restless and discontented in her again.

Though she was normally in a hurry to part ways with this ammo box by this point in her weekly river journey, tonight, her first instinct was to not let it out of her sight. But that meant bringing it back in the shuttle with them, and Fallows’s words echoed in her head: Never, ever let me catch you with my cash off the river. She decided she should stick to Plan A, as best she could, glancing around her at a loss. Stash it somewhere here? Usually, it was so easy. Fallows’s contacts rotated between the lanky young guy with long hair—usually up in a sloppy man bun—and the wiry old guy always wearing a sweat-stained Mariners ball cap and carrying his tackle box and rod. Both blended in with every rafting dude and loner fisherman True had ever met, fixtures of the dock every Friday. The shuttle drivers all knew them. The guides all tolerated them, apart from when they tried to bum a beer. The clients were oblivious, unless they had teenage girls, in which case they found themselves tugging their daughters away in a hurry from unwanted attention.

Old Dude never failed to hit on all the other female river guides, too, and when True warned Fallows that every single one of her river sisters was well and over it, he’d only smirked.

“You’re a solid nine yourself, you know. With a little effort, you probably don’t even have to date chicks, honey.” She’d caught sight of Fallows’s hand snaking around to the hollow of her lower back and pivoted away with an angry curse.

“Put your hand on me and you’ll lose it,” she’d hissed.

“Chill, neighbor.” His eyes on her were small and mean. She’d felt naked in her tank top and river shorts. “Just thought we could break the ice with a little foreplay. But we can be strictly business. Fine by me.”

True had spent her entire adult life avoiding guys like this, and now look at her. Cowering here as twilight descended, trying her damnedest to do his bidding. She looked at the bright side: at least she didn’t have to interact with either of his sleazy friends tonight. Young Dude’s meth rot wasn’t on display as he slid her a smile from the parking lot. Old Dude wasn’t here trying to hit on a fifteen-year-old in a bikini top. But that meant it was up to True to decide what to do now with her contraband. And time was wasting.

Should she stash it in the bathroom? Such a high-traffic area seemed like a bad hiding place. The boat ramp offered a few ledges and shelves of concrete where it had crumbled over the years at the edges; maybe she could leave the box to one side, hidden from view from the water.

To potentially be swept into the Outlaw? No. But on the other side of the ramp, at the end of the parking lot, stood a big spruce. It was the bane of the shuttle drivers’ existence; they had to navigate around it as they made their three-point turns pulling their flatbed trailers stacked with rafts. True knew a couple drivers who hadn’t lasted a season they’d hit it so many times, knocking off side mirrors and nicking rafts. Anyone would know that spruce, should someone ask about it, like where precisely it was, perhaps because they needed to find it.

She crossed the parking lot to it in quick steps, casting a glance to her left as she passed the bathroom. The Wus would be out soon. Right before the tree, she paused midstride, feeling the crunch of glass and plastic under her sandals. Taillight shards from last week; someone had probably been fired for that one. Flipping her headlamp on, she surveyed the tree. It had a gargantuan trunk, but it was visible from all sides, of course, plus people poked around it regularly to survey damage. But about three feet up, she saw her salvation: a little burrow in the tree trunk, almost two feet wide, dark and crumbling on the inside. The result of some sort of bug or beetle infestation? A parasitic fungus? Either way, it would suffice. She slid the small ammo box inside, shoving it to fit. Once pushed in as far as it would go, what was left of the thin layer of paint covering the lid was only visible if you were looking for it.

She took a step back, circling the spruce, second-guessing herself. It’s like I’m Gollum with the goddamned ring. Maybe she should just keep the cash with her. The idea made her squirm, but so did walking away from it here, unattended and exposed at Temple Bar. She needed a second opinion. She had no way of contacting Fallows or his henchmen, a deliberate move on both his part and hers, but she could dial up Mel. She turned back toward their pile of gear to unearth her sat phone, only to bump headlong into Vivian, who let out a startled “Oof.”

“Shit! You scared me,” True told her. She peered at her more carefully in the dark. How long had she been standing there? Uncertainty sat tight in her gut, a rubber band stretched taut.

“What were you doing just now? With that box?”

Snap. Shit, shit, shit. “Nothing, it’s ...” True felt herself unraveling. “I—”

Headlights cut through the trunks of the trees, making her jump again.

“I came down here to tell you the shuttle’s here,” Vivian said, but her eyes were still on the tree. “Does whatever that is have something to do with why you wouldn’t accept the ride with the Martins?”

True tried to study her face in the dark, her eyes now blinded by the headlights. She couldn’t see much: only any hope of earning this woman’s faith in her draining away. God, Vivian probably thought she had a stash of something here. Needed a hit or something. “It’s not what you think—”

A honk sounded; then True heard the backup sensors of the shuttle, easing down to the ramp to where their gear lay in wait.

Vivian turned. “We have to go.” She spun back. “You know, True, I also came down here because I felt I owed you an apology. And I guess I still do. It was none of my business why you turned down the Martins, just like it’s none of my business what you’re up to now. Let me be clear: if we were still on the river, and you still had my child’s life in your care, it damned well would be, but now? I guess I’m just glad it’s all over.”

She turned and strode toward the pile of gear, hefting a duffel far too heavy for her and flinging it toward where the shuttle van had come to a stop in the loading zone. True stood in place a moment longer, alone by the tree and the ammo box, fighting a harsh onslaught of tears, Vivian’s words still ringing in her ears. Glad it’s all over. She swallowed the hard lump in her throat, blinking hard in the smoke to stem the flood. Vivian and Emmett would be gone from her life in a matter of hours. And Vivian was right. They’d be better off for it.