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Chapter Two of seven.

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Dawn came on slow, the road turning the same pale color as Cutter’s knuckles on the two-spoke wheel. The Oldsmobile ate the miles the way it did everything—without hurry, without apology. The Rocket under the hood rumbled its steady hymn, and the coffin in back gave a dull, occasional thud over the seams in the asphalt, like someone tapping a watch to make sure time still worked.

Topher had been quiet for a while, which Cutter suspected meant his mind was busy looking for exits. He finally flicked ash into the wind wing and said, “For the record, I wasn’t the one tied to the bed in Galveston.”

Cutter didn’t glance over. “That so.”

“Woman had a husband ‘deployed in Southwest Asia,’ or so she said. Turns out she collected lies like matchbooks. I wasn’t tied to anything; I left of my own accord.” He smiled, remembering. “Fast, but voluntary.”

“Congratulations,” Cutter said. “Moral victory.”

They topped a rise and coasted into a low basin where a lonely gas station crouched beside the highway like a lizard soaking up first light. Cutter swung the Custom Cruiser in under the canopy and let the pump lever thunk into place. The smell of old gasoline and desert chill came in through the window. Topher slid out to stretch. Cutter watched him in the glass, watched the coffin’s faint reflection beside him, and told himself he should have left the man in Fort Stockton. Then he remembered why he hadn’t: the town had started to smell like a trap.

A shape rolled into the lot that wasn’t subtle in the least. Yellow, black-banded, and licked in hand-painted flames that curled across the hood, a ’75 Dodge Sportsman B200 swung to a flamboyant stop by the ice chest. The side wore a long mural window with a horizon stenciled in orange. Twin portholes punctured the rear quarter like ship’s ports. A thin whip antenna bent off the passenger fender, and white-letter tires hugged black wheels deep enough to lose your hand in.

Topher let out a low appreciative whistle. “Now that’s a van with opinions.”

The driver’s door scissored open and Parker McHale climbed down like she owned the place—and very likely, the narrative. Denim jacket, boots, a cotton dress that looked innocent until she moved. Her hair was pinned up as if working, but a few strands had staged a mutiny at the nape of her neck, which somehow made it worse. Parker had been Fort Stockton’s first woman reporter at the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch, then author of true-crime that made sheriffs cranky and booksellers happy. This was before her paperback rights started whispering to Hollywood, but not very far before.

“Morning, boys,” she said, as if she’d been expecting exactly this pump, this sky, this awkward pairing of mortician and drifter. Her voice had the dry humor of a judge’s aside. She looked past Cutter to the Olds’ clamshell glass, where the pine lid drew a plain rectangle against the blue. “Still carrying the past around, Bridges?”

Topher grinned, already leaning on the Dodge’s fender. “You two acquainted?”

Parker didn’t look at him. “I’ve written Cutter’s name enough times to know how he spells it when he’s tired.” Then she did turn, slow, reading Topher like an open deck of cards. “Topher Thompson. I once described you as ‘an argument in boots.’ You didn’t write to complain.”

“I framed it,” he said.

She offered a hand. Topher glanced at Cutter, then shook it. Her grip was dry, firm, and unapologetic. She carried the faintest whiff of typewriter ribbon and something floral that wouldn’t tell the truth if you asked it to.

Cutter replaced the nozzle, clicked the cap, and kept his voice neutral. “You following me, McHale?”

“Please,” she said. “If I follow you, you’ll notice in about five minutes, get mad in ten, and turn off your headlights in twelve. Easier to arrive before you.” She gestured with her chin to the wagon. “That a private shipment or community theater?”

“Paid delivery,” Cutter said.

“Paid by who?” she asked, too brightly.

Topher stepped into the space between them as if he were a mediator in a border dispute. “We’re headed toward San Angelo for a look-see. If you’re running a story, Parker, maybe it wants to run in the same direction.”

Parker smiled without warmth. “I’m not ‘running a story,’ Topher. A story runs me until I figure out how to get ahead of it.” She looked back at the van. “And this morning, it told me to bring the Sportsman.”

Cutter gave it a longer look now that he wasn’t pretending not to. The paint was the color of faded lemons and cigarette smoke. The black band down the side was interrupted by a rectangle of tinted plexi airbrushed with a desert skyline. The chrome grille had seen a polishing rag, but the lower valance wore the scrape of curbs and bad ideas. On the inside, through the open slider, he could see a deep cave of shag carpeting, a pair of swiveling captain’s chairs with chrome pedestals, and—God help him—bead curtains. A CB microphone dangled from a metal bracket, its coiled cord springing like a phone in a cheap motel. An eight-track sat crooked in a wood-paneled dash with extra toggles that did not bear factory fonts.

Topher peered in. “You redecorated a teenager’s dream.”

“I bought it exactly as the dreamer left it,” Parker said. “He joined the Navy and discovered there’s only so much flame paint a person can justify on shore leave. The van was lonely without him.”

“LA small-block?” Topher asked, glancing at the doghouse.

Parker shrugged. “V8 enough to leave you behind if you start to bore me. Three-speed auto. Brakes that prefer a conversation to a command. You’ll like the mattress; it used to be white.”

Cutter looked back to the wagon, to the coffin’s shadow like a long, square bruise. “We’re not sightseeing in that.”

“You’re right,” Parker said. “You’re switching to it.”

Topher clucked his tongue, delighted. “You hear that, Bridges? We’re switching rides like a band between soundchecks.”

Cutter shook his head once. “No.”

Parker stepped closer, voice lowering to something that might have been a dare. “You think the Custom Cruiser is discreet? It’s a parade float with a loading dock. Every deputy from here to Tom Green County is going to remember the color of your paint and the way your rear springs sag. In this era, a mural van is practically invisible. Every other man on the road has one just like it—flames, portholes, and poor judgment included.”

Topher snorted. “She’s not wrong.”

Cutter studied Parker the way a jeweler studies a diamond he knows is counterfeit but can’t prove. She’d written about him after the worst of the winter deaths—kindly, for Parker—describing his hands as “capable and calm around the inconvenient truths of the body.” He hadn’t thanked her. He’d learned that words like that made people expect miracles, and the dead were stubborn about resisting those.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Your discretion,” she said. “And your wagon’s cargo, if we’re being honest. It’s attached to a name I’m following, and that name leads to a motel off the loop where a man with a large belt buckle and a short future plans on telling me something unwise. My van has a bed, a CB, and the kind of interior that forgives stains.” She let the sentence hang a second too long. “And before you ask—no, Topher. I don’t tie everyone to it.”

Topher half-smiled, hands up. “I never said you did.”

Cutter didn’t rise to it. “If we switch, we leave the Olds where?”

“In the shade behind the ice machine,” Parker said. “If anyone asks, it belongs to the assistant manager, who is a man I once caused to rethink his habit of rounding up gas by fifty cents for out-of-towners. He owes me a favor.”

“You keep a lot of favors,” Cutter said.

“I keep receipts,” she corrected, bright again. “Topher, grab the back of the coffin. Bridges—vault door open.”

Cutter stared at her, then at the van, then at Topher, whose grin had become the kind that gets a man slapped or kissed. The morning had tilted on its axis, and the sensible thing would have been to tell Parker McHale to get back in her painted cave and hunt her story somewhere else.

He lowered the clamshell glass instead.

The drawer-slide of the Oldsmobile’s tailgate sighed down. The pine box sat there impassive, brass catching a little sun. Topher took the rear handles with the casual ease of a man who had moved heavier things under worse circumstances. Parker stepped inside the van and cleared a space between a cooler, a stack of maps scarred with coffee rings, and a toolbox with “PRESS” stenciled across the lid. The shag underfoot compressed with a tired hiss.

“Watch the hinge,” Cutter said, and then, because muscle memory was stronger than judgment, he counted them through the lift—one, two, three. The coffin crossed the short gulf between blue vinyl and yellow shag and settled into the Sportsman’s belly like it had been ordered from a catalog.

Parker leaned out the slider, hair catching sun. “There. Your sins are mobile.”

Topher thumped the lid twice, affectionate. “Every band needs a road case.”

Cutter closed the clamshell, the glass sliding up with its bank-vault whirr, and had the absurd thought that his wagon looked suddenly lighter, as if it were relieved to be just a car again.

Parker tossed him the van’s keys. The fob was a brass motel room tag stamped “17.” “You drive first, Bridges,” she said. “I want to hear you argue with my steering.”

Topher opened the passenger door and paused, his grin changing shape when he saw the installation on the ceiling—a row of leather cuffs riveted to a crossbar above the fold-down bed.

He looked at Parker. “Souvenir from a previous interview?”

She smiled the way a cat might smile if it bothered to. “A tool. Some subjects need help staying in one place while the truth arrives. Don’t look so nervous. Like I said—Galveston wasn’t you.”

Cutter slid behind the wheel and felt the van’s different pulse—shorter wheelbase, lighter nose, brakes that promised negotiations, not compliance. He reached for the column shifter and found an aftermarket T-handle that hadn’t been screwed on quite straight. The CB crackled to life without being asked. “Breaker nineteen,” a man’s voice rasped, “anyone got their ears on?”

Parker hopped into the slider’s step and banged the door shut with her hip. “Let’s go hear stupid,” she said. “I’ve got a date with a belt buckle and a confession.”

Topher climbed in beside Cutter, flicked an unlit cigarette in his teeth, and winked at the rearview where the coffin made a small, neat rectangle behind bead curtains. “See, Bridges? Safety in numbers.”

“Nothing about this is safe,” Cutter said, and eased the Dodge into gear. The flames on the hood caught a little sunlight and seemed to move.

They pulled back onto the highway—Oldsmobile hidden behind the ice machine, West Texas brightening by degrees—and the van hummed at its preferred speed, a touch under sixty, where the wind noise and the CB became the same soft argument. Parker twisted around in the seat to look at the cargo and scribbled a line in her pocket notebook.

“What are you writing?” Topher asked.

“A reminder,” she said without looking up. “That today is the day the story got in, shut the door behind it, and told me to drive.”

The motel Parker chose sat at the edge of San Angelo, a tired horseshoe of stucco and peeling paint. The kind of place where neon letters blinked VAC NCY and the ice machine rattled like it was trying to cough itself apart.

She told them to park the Dodge two spots down from Room 6. The coffin in back gave one last dull thump as Cutter braked. Topher smirked. “Our friend in the box is gonna think we’re running a shuttle service.”

Parker ignored him. She’d already spotted her man: a thick-belted local leaning against the railing, cigarette burning fast. He had that jittery look Cutter recognized from half the county’s drunks just before they picked a fight.

The conversation was short. Too short. Parker pressed, the man hedged, and then he made the mistake of pulling a knife when Topher laughed at him. Cutter never did know whether it was nerves, liquor, or sheer stupidity—but the blade flashed, Parker jerked back, and Topher swung before anyone could think. The belt-buckle man went down hard, skull striking the concrete step with a crack like splitting firewood.

Silence. Then Parker’s voice, calm as if she were dictating copy. “Get him in the van.”

They dragged the body past the Coke machine and shoved it through the slider. The shag carpet drank deep and dark, the van suddenly smelling of copper and heat. Topher stood back, pale, joking too fast. “Guess the mattress wasn’t lonely after all.”

Cutter knelt beside the man, checked for a pulse he knew wasn’t there, then did what Cutter Bridges always did—he went to work. He pulled the man straighter, folded the arms, closed the eyes. “He’ll leak,” Cutter said flatly. “Get towels.”

Parker was already scribbling in her notebook. Topher found the towels. The three of them worked without speaking, the van creaking under their weight, the coffin looming in the corner like an audience.

When it was done, Cutter wiped his hands on a rag that would never be clean again. Parker snapped her notebook shut. “Now it’s a story,” she said.

Cutter slid behind the wheel. Topher climbed in slow, eyes avoiding the body. Parker settled back in the captain’s chair like she’d claimed the throne. The Dodge rumbled to life, flames on the hood flickering in the motel’s bad neon.

The Olds was gone. The van was theirs now. And the road ahead was already stained.

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