Gina walked the perimeter of the room once, and when she looked up the driver was watching her. He swung the dregs in his coffee cup in small circles, then put down the cup and stood to go. The people around him looked up. At Gina’s shoulder he brushed against her and paused, again as if to say something, then pushed open the fogged glass door and walked out into the snow. She felt the cold air on her throat. The bell tied to the hydraulic arm jingled as the door swung shut, and the room was close and warm again. The people who had watched the driver stand returned to their low conversations or their naps.

Gina went to the door and rubbed a clear spot in the pane. The driver had no truck, and there was nothing but the one-pump gas station out there. The blue denim jacket headed neither toward the gas station nor toward the police roadblock, but straight for the empty road. A cigarette burned in his hand. He would be invisible in the snow in a minute. She put up her hood and stepped outside, the air cold and bright in her lungs, the snow blowing against her face, and she could smell the smoke he left behind. On the other side of the highway were mountains, invisible now but leading, she knew, straight up into the white sky. She watched the dark jacket disappear into white, and then the legs that carried it, until the figure had vanished in the storm.

She shoved her hands in her pockets to keep them warm. She could find the frostbitten policeman and tell him the driver had wandered off. She could follow and see if she could find the man, though it was cold, and he was far away, and what would she say to him? She could tell Chase he was gone; Chase would have an idea about what to do. Or she could just let the driver go, and walk where he wanted. He might be accountable in some way, but no one could say the accident was his fault. Her face was wet and tingling with snow, and the smell of his smoke was gone. She wanted, with an unexpected force, for him to come back. But she imagined feeling what she’d seen in his eye, and what it might be like to walk away, and she went back inside, and let him go.

RED

THERE WERE LINES for everything. Lines for the movies, for telephones, for the bus, lines to piss, lines to eat. The movies were all war glory and girls you couldn’t have, the telephones never worked, the buses were crowded, the toilets were filthy, food was scarce and often spoiled, and for all of it people stood to wait. But now Red’s troop, holed up in south London, was waiting to be sent to France, where waiting was the least of anyone’s problems.