About halfway through, he’d realized that no argument would sway Jenn to his cause. He’d kept on arguing but only for show. At the appropriate point, he’d stormed out and gone back to his motel room to pack. In the morning, Jenn had tried to make peace, but he’d shrugged her off angrily. She wouldn’t have bought it otherwise, and he’d needed her to believe he was going home.

He glanced in the rearview mirror again. Had he fooled them? If he had, then it was on them for believing a few kind words would get him to quit. Gibson cranked the steering wheel around, pulled a U-turn, and swung the car back toward Somerset.

Toward Bear.

Hendricks was right. Hope was a cancer.

Gibson watched Hendricks finish loading all the gear into the back of the Cherokee. The ex-cop slammed shut the hatch and lit a cigarette. After a minute, Jenn emerged from the motel manager’s office, gestured at Hendricks to get a move on, and got in the passenger side. Hendricks crushed out his half-finished cigarette and got behind the wheel.

The Cherokee pulled out into traffic, and Gibson slouched low behind the wheel as it passed him on the way out of town. He’d parked a couple blocks away and watched them through a pair of binoculars that he’d found in the glove compartment. He still felt exposed. It was a car they knew, and Hendricks didn’t miss much. He half expected them to pull over and drag him out. But Hendricks and Jenn cruised by without so much as a glance in his direction. He wanted to follow them, but he knew nothing about how to tail a car. Hendricks would make him in a half mile.

Gibson sat up, feeling foolish. But was he? Being foolish, that is? Something felt wrong to him. Supposedly, Jenn and Hendricks were to sit tight until Abe flew in so they could coordinate with the feds. So where were they going in such a hurry?

But that wasn’t even it. It was more the way Hendricks was going about it. Not hurrying exactly, but moving with a purpose. It was the way he strode, economically, back and forth between the room and the vehicle. Not on a clock, but with no time to waste either. It reminded Gibson of marines packing for an imminent deployment—checking and double-checking the gear, taking a mental inventory. It was the latent intensity that settled on people before they stepped off into something heavy.

So where were they going? He’d been gone for what, an hour and a half, tops? And in that time Jenn and Hendricks had pulled up stakes. Their plans hadn’t changed since he’d left; no, this had been the plan all along. Of that, he had no doubt.