Arlen said, “You best go get it, then.”
There was another silent pause, all of them realizing this was it, the starting point. The moment that money passed from Tolliver’s palm into Owen’s, the plan was under way, no longer about ideas and possibilities and only about execution. They’d need to do it as they’d planned, and do it right. Most of that burden rested with Arlen and the Smith & Wesson upstairs under his bed.
Owen blew out a breath and started for the door. Arlen called, “Hey,” and brought him up short, his hand on the doorknob.
“You got to look relaxed,” he said. “Same as any other day. You ain’t doing anything but helping. The sheriff up there, he’s your buddy, and so is Wade. Don’t show them anything else.”
Owen nodded.
“The rain’ll help,” Arlen said. “Sheriff will be in a hurry. He doesn’t like driving in the storm.”
Owen gave another nod and then pulled open the door. The wind was blowing hard out of the south, and it caught the door and wrenched it from his grasp and banged it off the wall. A spray of rain showered in and soaked the floorboards before he got his hand on the door again and slammed it, and then both Arlen and Rebecca moved closer to the bar so they could watch him.
He ran across the yard with his shoulders hunched. Watching him go, Arlen had the bad feeling again, dark images flickering through his mind—gunfire opening up from inside the car and dropping Owen out there in the mud and the rain; the window sliding down as Owen approached and a knife blade glinting ever so swiftly as it snaked toward his throat.
I wish I’d checked his eyes closer, Arlen thought. I didn’t see anything, he was looking me full in the face and I didn’t see anything, but maybe I didn’t look hard enough…
Nothing happened, though. The door to the sheriff’s car swung open and then Owen had a black case in his hand, same sort of case that Walter Sorenson had carried. He stood beside the car, head ducked against the rain, and said a few words. Arlen couldn’t see Tolliver from behind the door, but Owen looked relaxed enough. The rain was a help. Made any tension on his part easier to explain, as if he just wanted to get the hell back inside and out of the downpour.
It wasn’t but thirty seconds before Tolliver slammed the door and Owen turned and began running back toward the house. Rebecca let out a breath, and Arlen looked over his shoulder at her and realized she’d been sharing his dark thoughts. He managed to get a grin on his face.
“We’re good,” he said. “All right? Wade thinks your brother is in league with him, and he thinks he’s got you owned by fear. They aren’t waiting on trouble. Not from us.”
She nodded, but her face was pale and she couldn’t match his smile.
The door swung open, and then Owen was back inside and dripping rain all over the place, his blond hair turned dark with water and plastered over his forehead and down into his eyes. He gave them a stare and lifted the case high.
“Here we go,” he said.
Arlen nodded. “Here we go.”
They counted the money back in the kitchen, hidden from windows. Arlen saw the stacks of bills inside and thought of the money he’d worked so hard and saved so long to gather, those 367 stolen dollars. He wondered if they were included in this pile.
Rebecca did the counting. She fingered the bills swiftly and familiarly and didn’t say a word as she riffled through the stacks, kept a silent count in her head until the last bill had touched the edge of her thumb. Then she turned to them and said, “Ten thousand.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” Arlen echoed. He’d been watching her count it, had seen the bills with his own eyes, but he still wasn’t sure he believed the number. The CCC paid thirty dollars a month. There were more than twenty-five years of work sitting in that simple black case.
“Yes,” she said, and then, for the first time, she smiled. “He’s not going to like losing it.”
“Hell,” Arlen said, “he’s going to lose something else he’ll like even less.”
Somehow that got them all to laughing. It wasn’t a healthy kind of laughter. More the sort born out of fear, jangling through nerves strung tight as bowstrings, but it felt good all the same. They had their laugh together, and then a particularly strong racket of thunder struck and shook the walls of the inn and they all fell silent again.
“Paul gets his cut,” Arlen said. “I’ll give it to him, and I’ll take him to a train station and see that he gets on one headed far from here.”
“How much are you intending to give him?” Owen said.