The light is starting to condense, lying golden as honey across the fields. Cal needs to get this done.

“I talked to Donie,” he says, hearing the words start something splitting like wood.

Trey’s shoulders set. She puts down the shelf and the sandpaper, carefully, and turns to look at him. “Yeah,” she says.

Cal can see the white around her eyes, and the flare of her nostrils when she breathes. He knows her heart is going like a runaway horse.

“It’s not bad news, kid. OK?”

A hard breath comes out of her. She swipes the back of her wrist across her mouth. “OK,” she says.

She’s the same bad white as she was when she winged the rabbit. “You wanna sit down for this, get comfortable?” Cal asks. “It’s a long story.”

“Nah.”

“Suit yourself,” Cal says. He brushes paint dust off the desk and leans his forearms on the top of it, keeping his movements slow and easy, the way he would around a spooked animal; the way he did the first couple of times the kid came around, just a few weeks ago. “To start with: you wanted to know why I was aiming to talk to Donie. My thinking went like this. Brendan was planning to use that cottage to generate a good income. He had something shady in mind, or he’d’ve told you about it. Which means he would’ve needed to talk to people who have shady connections. The only people like that round here are the boys who come down from Dublin selling drugs. And I’d seen Donie hanging out with them in the pub.”

Trey nods, one tight jerk. She’s following him. She’s still white, but the wildness has gone out of her eyes.

“So I went to call on Donie. I knew, like you said, he wouldn’t be too eager to tell the story to a stranger—specially since, if you heard I was a cop, he had to have heard the same thing. But we came to an understanding in the end.”

“Didja beat him up?”

“Nah. No need. You only have to meet Donie once to know he’s not a big player. He’s just some two-bit hanger-on, kissing the real guys’ asses and scared shitless of them the whole time. So all I had to do was make it sound like I knew a lot more than I did, and then tell Donie if he didn’t fill in the gaps for me, I was gonna make sure his city friends heard he’d been talking to a cop.”

Trey clearly approves of this. “And he talked?”

“Sang like a little birdie,” Cal says. “Donie isn’t exactly a mastermind, so he mighta had some details wrong, but I think he got all the bones of the matter in place. Here’s what he says, anyway. You know all that crap up in Brendan’s hideout?”

Trey nods sharply.

“Sometimes people get hold of stuff they shouldn’t have. Then they sell it on.”

“Brendan’s not a thief.”

“Shut up and listen, kid. I’m not saying he is. What I’m saying is, sometimes it might take these people a while to find buyers. While they’re looking, they need somewhere to store the stuff. Somewhere secure and out of the way, so no one’s gonna stumble on it by mistake, and the cops won’t find it unless they know exactly where to look. If these guys find the right place, run by someone reliable who’s gonna keep their stuff safe, they’ll pay decent rent.”

“Like a warehouse.”

“Yeah. Exactly like. And a place like here, not too far from the border, this is prime territory. Brendan saw a gap in the market, and he realized his hideout was the perfect place to fill it. All he needed to do was fix it up some, and get in touch with people who’d use it.”

Trey evaluates this. Apparently she can fit this level of shadiness into her idea of Brendan. She nods.

“So Brendan started fixing the place up. Maybe he even got a couple of local guys using it, here and there, but they’d be too small-time to be much use to him. He needed to land some bigger fish.”

“The lads from Dublin,” Trey says.

“This part’s where Donie got a little hazy on the details,” Cal says. “No one’s gonna tell a dumbass like him more than they need to; he just got given the general gist of what went down. Best he can tell, Brendan waited till the Dublin boys were in town and asked them to put him in touch with people who might want his services. They were interested, but there was a little bit of disagreement among them about Brendan’s operation. Some of them thought he’d be an asset, but some of them thought he’d be more of a liability. From what I can gather, they’re planning on running something of their own up those mountains, and they didn’t want Brendan and his clients drawing police attention in that direction.”

“Guys like that,” Trey says. She doesn’t finish.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “You don’t want to piss them off. Brendan probably shoulda taken that possibility into account, but from what I’ve been told, he had a tendency to get carried away and forget to factor in other people’s reactions. That sound right to you?”

Trey nods. Cal spent half the night smoothing the edges on this story and looking it over from different angles, making sure it holds together and incorporates all the pieces Trey has possession of. There are little holes here and there, but nothing that would make it fall apart under pressure. It has enough truth in it to act as glue. There’s even a chance, and what a trip that would be, that with a few minor substitutions this hinky story is accidentally true.

“So,” he says, “Brendan set up a meeting with them, thinking he was gonna pay them for a bunch of phone numbers and everyone would go away happy. By the time the meeting came around, though, the ones that thought he was a liability had shouted down the rest. They told him to get out of town and stay gone.”

“Just told him to leave,” Trey says. Her breath is coming fast and shallow. “They didn’t take him? For definite?”

“Nah. What would they want him for? All they wanted from him was to get out of their hair, and he did that himself, right quick. He had more sense than to hang around till he got told again.”

“So that’s why he went. Not ’cause he wanted to.”

“That’s right,” Cal says. “He didn’t have a choice.”

A hard breath comes out of Trey and her eyes skid away, one place and then another. The thought of Brendan walking out without a word, because he wanted to, has been eating her raw and bloody for months. Now that it’s gone, she can’t take in the clear space where it used to be.

Cal lets her be. After a minute she asks, “Where’d he go?”

“Donie’s not sure. He thinks Scotland, for whatever that’s worth. He says the boys didn’t take any cash off Brendan, so he shoulda had enough to get him somewhere and get him set up. And if he’s got sense, he won’t be back for a while.”