The PowWow

Jacob stopped walking.

Not gradually. Just — stopped. The way he did when something internal took precedence over something external and the external was simply going to have to wait.

I kept moving for three steps before I realized he wasn't beside me anymore. I turned.

His head was bowed. Hands loose at his sides. The rally noise continued behind us, cheerful and completely unaware that a man was praying at the edge of a treeline in the afternoon sun.

I turned back around and watched the park.

Scanned the crowd. The stage. The edges where the light was less deliberate. Nothing. Whatever had been in those kids had taken them somewhere we couldn't follow on foot and wasn't advertising where.

I waited.

Jacob lifted his head. His eyes opened and he looked at the treeline for a moment with the quiet expression of a man who had asked something and received something and was now simply grateful for both.

"Thank you, Lord," he said. Just above a whisper.

Then he turned to me.

"The group is gone," he said. "But Mara knows what Cross looks like." A pause. "Bring her here. Maybe we find him."

I looked at him. Then at the park. Then back at him.

It was a good idea. It was a genuinely good idea and it had arrived through prayer at the edge of a treeline, which was exactly the kind of thing I had stopped being surprised by and had not stopped being grateful for. It didn’t even matter to me all the words he’d used.

I put my hand on his shoulder once. Brief. Then turned and headed for the Highlander.

Behind me Jacob turned back toward the park, still looking, still present, giving the search what it was owed.

I reached the Highlander and pulled the door open. Stood there for a second in the afternoon light with one hand on the roof.

Thank you, I said quietly. To nobody in the parking lot. To Someone considerably further up the chain.

Then I got in and called Mara.

She was ready before I pulled up to Jeremiah's, which told me she'd been waiting — not impatiently, but with the particular alertness of someone who had decided something and was ready to act on it before the decision could reconsider itself.

She came down the front walk and got in before I'd fully stopped.

"How are you doing?" I asked, pulling back out.

"Better," she said. Then, more honestly, "Okay."

I nodded. Let it sit for a moment.

"I need to be clear with you about something," I said. "Before we get there."

She looked at me.

"The man we're looking for — Cross — he's dangerous. Not in a way that's easy to explain. Not in a way that fits neatly into — " I paused, choosing the words. "What he's doing to your friends isn't something that has a simple name. And if he sees you, he'll know you're the one who didn't take the card."

Mara was quiet for a moment. Looking out the windshield at the afternoon passing by.

"I know," she said.

"That's not a small thing."

"I know that too." She turned to look at me. Something in her face had changed since the morgue — not hardened exactly. Clarified. Like the dye washing out had been more than cosmetic. "I've spent a long time making things up to have a life. Performing something. Trying to be seen." She shook her head slightly. "I'm tired of it. I want to do the right thing." A pause. "So I can actually live the life I already have."

I looked at her for a second longer than the road strictly allowed.

Then I looked back at the road.

"Okay," I said.

She nodded once. Settled back in the seat.

We drove the rest of the way without needing to fill the quiet.

Jacob was where I'd left him — at the edge of the park's main entrance, barefoot on the concrete, watching the crowd with the patient focus of a man who had nowhere else to be and understood exactly why he was here.

He looked at Mara when we approached. Then at me.

"Any sign?" I asked.

"No," he said. "But the rally isn't finished."

Mara looked around the park — the crowd, the signage, the portable stage being readied for what looked like a closing address. Taking it in with the eyes of someone who had been here before in a different version of herself.

"We should let your father know you're here," Jacob said. Not a suggestion exactly. Just the right thing stated plainly.

Mara made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. Wry and a little sad underneath it. "He won't know who I am," she said. "Dressed like this."

She said it lightly. But it landed with the specific weight of something that had been true for longer than just today.

Jacob looked at her. Whatever he was thinking he kept where he kept things. But something in his expression acknowledged what she'd said in the way he acknowledged things — without commentary, without deflection, just receipt.

We moved into the crowd.

The three of us walked the park — Jacob taking the long angles, the edges, the places where things positioned themselves to watch without being watched. Me reading the crowd, the movement patterns, the small irregularities. Mara between us, quieter than either, eyes moving carefully across faces.

The rally was building toward its close. Harrison's advance team was repositioning near the stage, the particular choreography of a campaign event heading into its final sequence. Supporters clustering forward. Signs raised.

We worked our way toward the stage from the left side.

Mara stopped.

Not dramatically. Just the way people stop when something their eyes have found takes a second to reach the rest of them.

"There," she said. Quietly. Certain.

I followed her line of sight.

The aide. Tan slacks replaced with dark trousers now, different shirt, same headset, same clipboard, same phone. Standing at the side of the stage with the relaxed authority of someone who belonged exactly where he was.

Devin Cross was the campaign aide?

Suddenly, the puzzle pieces began slamming together for me. Access, invisibility was the tools he could use to do what he was doing.

The wrongness arrived the same instant Mara said his name. Not gradually. All at once, like a door opening onto something cold.

Beside me Jacob had gone still. I felt it more than saw it — the particular quality of his attention sharpening into something that wasn't quite physical and wasn't quite spiritual and was entirely both.

"That's Cross," Mara said.

We were already moving.

Not running. Running announces itself, clears space in front of you, gives a target time to orient. We moved the way we moved when it mattered — with purpose and without urgency, closing the distance through the crowd the way water finds the low path.

Cross was forty feet away. Then thirty.

His head turned.

Not toward us. Not yet. Just a general scan of the space around the stage, the kind an efficient aide made automatically every few minutes.

Twenty feet.

Then his eyes found us.

Or found something. The same calculation I'd seen in his face at the rally last time — focused, still, the phone at his ear becoming secondary to whatever was happening behind his eyes.

For one second he looked directly at us.

Then at Mara.

Something moved across his face that I didn't have a clean word for. Recognition. Reassessment. The specific expression of someone updating a calculation they thought was already complete.

Then he turned and stepped behind the stage curtain.

We covered the remaining distance in seconds. I went through the curtain first, Jacob a half step behind.

Backstage was narrow and cluttered — equipment cases, folding chairs, a generator running in the corner, two campaign staffers with their backs to us talking into headsets.

No Cross.

I turned a full circle. Jacob did the same. The staffers looked at us with the expression people wore when two large men appeared unexpectedly in a restricted area.

"The man with the clipboard," I said to the nearer one. "Where did he go?"

She frowned. "What man?"

I looked at Jacob.

He was looking at the back exit — a simple door, propped open with a equipment case, leading out to the service road behind the park.

We went through it.

The service road was empty. A van at the far end pulling away, too distant to read the plates. A few park maintenance vehicles. Nothing else.

Jacob stood in the middle of the road and looked at the van until it turned the corner and was gone.

I stood beside him. The wrongness was still in the air back there, fading now, the residue of something that had been present and decided to be elsewhere.

"He knew we were coming," I said.

"Yes."

"He saw Mara."

Jacob's jaw tightened. "Yes."

I looked back at the park. At the curtain. At the space where Cross had been standing thirty seconds ago like he owned the ground he was on.

"He didn't run because he was afraid of us," I said.

Jacob looked at me.

"He ran because he was done," I said. "Because he got what he needed."

Jacob shook his head. “No, because he knows what he will receive from us. Truth.”

I grimaced. “Or both.”

The van was long gone. The service road was quiet.

"Mara," he said.

We went back through the curtain.