Luske folded his hands again over the file. The boy met and held his gaze.

“Sean.”

“Yes.”

“You’re eighteen, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you do understand your rights?”

“I think so.”

“You understand that the State will appoint a lawyer to you if you ask for one.”

“Yes.”

“Why haven’t you asked for one?”

“Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The detective’s face darkened. “The State will decide that, not you. Do you understand? The State will not give one cartwheeling fuck about you. When it decides to prosecute you, all the innocence in the world won’t help you. At that point you are a piece of dumb meat in the jurisprudence system and the jurisprudence system, Sean, will take away your life.”

The boy smoked and the detective watched him.

“What about your folks?” Luske said.

“What about them.”

“Don’t you want to talk to them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not to me,” said the detective.

He was returned to the cell. He sat on the hard bunk and stared into space while a man in the adjacent cell who had not been there before snored and muttered. He lay down on the bunk, staring at the pocked and gray concrete ceiling and as he stared he saw in the edges of his vision other men moving restlessly about the cell, and he could smell them and he could hear them, yet when he moved his head to look there was nothing but the concrete and the bars and the buzzing yellow light throwing more bars across the floor.

36

The snow swarms about her, thick and white as in a snow globe, a white dust that dazzles the eye and promises a painless fall but that holds for the girl trying to keep on top of it nothing but the terror of the fall and the suffocating struggle of climbing out of it, of getting upright again while the Monkey comes on, sure-footed, step by step.

Childhood days of snow angels and snowmen were wasted. Days on the lake with Dudley were squandered opportunities—the two of them out on the frozen lake in very old snowshoes, clumsy wooden things with cane-bottom decking and tired leather bindings.

But these! Th ese are like a sprinter’s trackshoes; they move as she moves, their tails snapping up smartly with her heels. Th ey do not wobble or stray and they are narrow enough that she doesn’t have to hold her legs apart uncomfortably yet broad enough that they keep a good float on the snow, as the Monkey promised they would.

She’s been watching him, listening to his breathing, and she knows that with a good lead she can outrun him. Outlast him. Not running, exactly, but moving fast enough in her careful striding to keep her lead and even to improve it. Th is snow is his snow too and he will not want to make a mistake either, will not want to risk a fall, the time and energy to climb out of it, but will count on her panic, on her inexperience and the weakness of her body, all her time of doing nothing in the shack, to bring her down. He was counting on it when he decided to buy the snowshoes and take her out. When he allowed her to go behind the spruce without him.

And now he would find out if he counted correctly.

HER BREATHS BURST WHITE before her and when she passes through them she hears No fall, no fall, and each successful footfall is rejoiced and praised, and the landing leg dares the trailing leg to do it even more cleanly, even more impressively, and she does not look back but only listens, the way she listens on the cinder track, and for a long time there’s nothing but the no fall, no fall of her breaths and the quieter cadence of the snowshoes meeting the powder, and she knows that even if he sees her up ahead in the distance, a glimpse of her in her snowy globe, he will be too far away and there are too many trees between them.

For what?

For the pistol.

Sweat has come to her chest, her back, wetting her shirt under the jacket. When the temperature drops and she stops to rest as she knows she must, she’ll be cold. Th ere are stick matches in her pocket, with the headlamp—but no, what you need is darkness, and distance, and stamina, and no fall, no fall, no fall . . .

She attempts to unzip her jacket on the fly, trying to collect the metal pull in her gloved fingers, glancing down to locate it, and in that distracted instant the snowshoes collide with a sharp clack, her right foot fails to come forward, and she pitches downhill in the onset of a head dive. Yet even as her hands reach out for the snow, her legs react to keep her from it, pushing against the forward crampons so that she leaps altogether from the snow and draws the snowshoes forward in a kind of leapfrog, separating the frames in time to land downslope again with a deep whump. But in landing she pitches too far back and is falling again, backward now, all her weight on the tails of the shoes, arms pinwheeling, momentarily skiing down the slope before the tails begin to sink, and she slows, and her body swings forward and she takes a stumbling step, thighs howling, and is stable once more on the shoes and You did not fall, you did not fall.

She stands on the snow, sucking the cold into her lungs, her heart pounding. Reflexively she raises her wrist but the training watch is gone. It lies at the bottom of some gorge along with her phone.

She unzips her jacket and sweeps the cap from her head. Behind her, upslope, nothing but trees, falling snow, her tracks. Enormous repeating tracks unbroken, unmissable. Foxes, and maybe other hunted things, know somehow to backtrack. But she does not understand how the instinct to backtrack can override the instinct to go forward, always forward, to keep as much distance as possible between you and the thing that wants you.

Water. You need to drink, Courtland. She takes a fast swallow and returns the bottle. Glances upslope once more and then lifts the left snowshoe against the dumb reluctance of her muscles, against a punishing gravity, and then the right, and she is moving again, going down again.

37

He awoke to a man’s loud hacking and sat up in the buzzing yellow light. He put his fingers to an itch on his chest and was confused by the buttons on his T-shirt until he looked down and saw the denim jacket.

He stood before the bowl, then bent over the basin and splashed the cold water on his face and ran it through his hair and scooped it into his mouth and scooped more of it despite its taste of old pennies. When he stood again the man in the adjacent cell was watching him. The man lay on his bunk propped against the concrete wall, his white-stockinged feet crossed at the ankles and his arms crossed over his stomach. He was a skinny dark-skinned man with a skullcap of wiry silver hair. He stared at the boy and said with a graveled throat: “Is there something I can help you with?”

“What?”

“What?” said the man.

The boy held his gaze, the glassy, red-stained eyes.

“I said,” said the man, “is there something I can help you with.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why are you eyeballing me?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Hell you wasn’t, motherfucker.”

The boy went to stand by the bars of the door, as if doing so would compel the door to open and release him. You saw it in the movies and on TV but none of that gave you any idea of what it was like to be caged, to be kept against your will and against reason and against the truth for even one hour of your life.

The man in the other cell got to his feet and stepped to the bars separating the two cells and stood watching the boy, his wrists draped over the crossbar, his hands hung into the boy’s space.