Behind the Rusty Anchor, delivery crates were stacked against corrugated metal walls, and a black Chevrolet Silverado waited beside two motorcycles. Silas opened the truck's passenger door and pointed to the seat. "You ride in here with me," he said. "Bones and Mickey can follow, and nobody is going to take you anywhere without your mother knowing where you are."
Toby climbed in, holding the pouch close, while Bones approached with the careful uncertainty of a man who had been asked to protect something fragile. "Reaper, you sure about this?" he murmured, keeping his voice low enough that the child would not hear. Silas looked at him for a moment. "I'm sure that lighter belonged to Elias," he said. "Everything else, we're going to find out without frightening the boy more than we already have."
The truck rolled out slowly, with two Harleys following at a respectful distance rather than roaring around the neighborhood like a parade. They stopped at a service station a few minutes later so Toby could call home from the pay phone. Sarah answered on the fourth ring, breathless from crossing the living room, and Toby blurted out that he was safe before she had finished saying hello. Her relief turned quickly to alarm when he confessed where he had been and who was bringing him home.
"Toby Richard Harris, you listen to me," she said. The use of his middle name was more frightening than Bones's tattoos had been. "You come straight home, and you do not go anywhere else with those men. Put one of them on the phone." Toby handed the receiver to Silas, whose face tightened when he heard Sarah speak for the first time in fifteen years.
"Sarah," he said. There was silence on the other end, followed by a breath that seemed to catch halfway through her chest. "My name is Silas Cole. I'm bringing your son home, and he's not hurt. We have to talk about Richard, but I won't do it over a pay phone."
Sarah's answer was little more than a whisper. "I know who you are." Then she coughed, long and painfully enough that Toby reached for the telephone with both hands. Silas waited until she could breathe again and promised they would arrive within twenty minutes. When he hung up, he stayed beside the phone longer than necessary, staring at the black receiver as if it might explain how a dead man had become the father of a boy.
In the truck, Toby watched Silas reach toward the lighter and then withdraw his hand. For several miles, neither spoke. The road passed packing sheds and tired storefronts, then narrowed into residential streets where children rode bicycles through patches of shade. Silas drove past those children with the expression of a man remembering a different summer and a brother who had once been impossible to keep indoors.