Hank had spent the three weeks since Leo disappeared getting angrier rather than more concerned. The loss of the state payment offended him, but the possibility that Leo might tell someone about the house frightened him even more. He had questioned Jonah and Molly until both children learned to say they knew nothing. He had called Leo a thief in front of a visiting worker and insisted the boy was prone to reckless fantasies about his father.
Deputy Higgins had been willing to help for reasons unrelated to public safety. He knew Hank through a small circle of men who gambled together and exchanged favors too casually to keep track of which ones were lawful. A few years earlier, Higgins had assisted Hank with a questionable property dispute, and the gratitude that followed had never been entirely financial. Their relationship rested on the understanding that neither would look too carefully at the other's conduct.
When Mae's call reached the youth advocate, the advocate made a preliminary inquiry with the county. That inquiry moved through a chain of administrative messages, one of which reached a dispatcher who remembered Hank's missing-juvenile bulletin. Higgins heard about it before the advocate could arrange a safe meeting. He phoned Hank that evening and said they had a possible location outside Kingman.
Hank came down from Flagstaff in his old silver Dodge Ram, bringing a wooden bat he claimed was there for protection. Higgins followed in a county SUV equipped with a light bar, telling his supervisor only that he was checking a lead on a missing juvenile. Neither man had a plan for what to do if Leo refused to return. That was precisely why Leo was in danger.
At the abandoned station, Leo noticed the first sign of them before he saw a vehicle. A distant plume of dust lifted where the service road left the highway, and the direction of the wind carried the uneven noise of a diesel engine. He rose from the workbench, feeling his ribs protest, and went to the front window. When the silver truck came into view, his mind identified the dents in the rear panel before his heart accepted what his eyes were seeing.
Hank's truck. Leo dropped below the window at once, the lighter pressing against his thigh through his pocket. He could hear Daniel's voice telling him to think before moving, but the quiet, orderly world of a garage vanished under the force of a memory: Hank leaning over him on the kitchen floor and demanding to know where the twenty dollars had gone. Leo crawled toward the rear door, opened it without letting the hinge squeal, and stepped into the scrub beyond the station.
He was almost to the shallow creek bed when a voice rang out from the front apron. "Leo! I know you're here! Don't make this worse than it already is!" Hank's voice had exactly the same confidence it carried inside the Flagstaff house. The sound drove Leo forward faster than his injured body could manage.