The flatbed had a winch, a chain box, gloves and the smell of its own hot brakes. Leah had used those things to take Earl's Buick from one address to another on Friday. Now she stood at the side compartment with her right hand swollen inside its covering, unable to lift the catch.
She tried once. Pain went through the base of her thumb. The compartment stayed shut.
“Kit.”
Her daughter came back from the cab. The big bag was on the floor inside; the small one still hung across her body. She reached for the compartment latch with both hands.
“The latch,” Leah said.
Kit lifted the edge and opened it. The folded cover slipped forward. She caught it against her knees.
“Put that clear. Not by the ramp.”
Kit carried it to the shed wall. Leah got her gloves out. The left went on easily. She had to open the right wrist with her teeth and let Kit help draw it over the dressing. Kit stopped each time Leah's breath caught. Neither said there was no time; they could hear Walt from the pickup.
“Lee. Where are you?”
She looked toward the broken window. His face appeared and vanished as he tried to turn. The boat bumped below him, and the pickup made a dry scraping noise against the ground.
“Stop moving,” she called.
“My leg—”
“I know. I'm coming.”
She turned to Kit. “You can go.”
Kit watched her.
“On foot. Through the gate. Before they get here.”
Her daughter looked toward the public walk. A man had stopped outside with his bicycle. Beyond him the road was still moving, a blue car, a van, two motorcycles too loud for the afternoon. Kit could join the people who had nothing to do with this.
“You can too,” she said.
Leah put her left hand on the cab step. “Not if I do this.”
She climbed in and brought the flatbed back onto firm ground. She had stopped at the mouth of the entrance before turning back; now she had to give that opening up a second time, carefully, with people watching her mirrors instead of helping. The marina woman waved an approaching car away. Its driver held up both hands, irritated at an afternoon he did not understand, then reversed beyond the gate.
Leah set the truck on the level apron with its working end turned toward the pickup's upper end. She set the parking brake. Kit brought the wheel chocks from the compartment and set them snug against the rear tires on the concrete where Leah pointed. The shed was at Leah's back when she got down. Ahead of her, the pickup was still coupled to the loaded trailer, the boat's stern down in the water. The whole combination was pulling downhill. Her winch could not make it a vehicle she could simply tow away. She needed the next slide to stop.
Gordon was beside the broken window, pulling at the door handle.
“Get away from that.”
He turned. “He's caught.”
“I know. You're moving the thing he's caught in.”
Gordon let go, offended for a moment before he looked down and saw the door tremble against the post. He stepped back.
“Where do you want me?”
“With her.” Leah pointed to the marina woman. “Keep people from walking down here.”
He looked at his boat, then at Walt. He went.
Leah took the winch control in her left hand. The cable came off the drum with a sound she knew, steel rubbing where it always rubbed. She stopped when the hook reached the apron. Bending to lift it made her right hand try to brace against her knee. The pain stopped her halfway down.
Kit caught her elbow. Leah shook her head, not at the help but at the direction she was moving.
“Don't come around me. Stay this side.”
Kit stayed on the level ground by the shed. She looked at the hook.
“I can carry that.”
Leah had already begun the sentence that would send her to stand somewhere useless. She closed her mouth. The hook lay on dry concrete. The truck was still, the cable slack. This was the part Kit could actually do.
“Up to there,” she said, showing her. “Then stop.”
Kit bent and lifted. It was heavier than she'd expected; she changed hands and held it low, keeping it clear of her legs. Leah took a short chain from the compartment with her left hand. It pulled her shoulder down. She let it rest against the open box until she had a better grip.
The links were warm. A spot of grease came away on the glove. She could feel every small edge through the leather with her injured hand and almost nothing useful about pressure. She tucked that hand against herself and went to look at the pickup.
The bumper was bent away from the body. She didn't touch it. Beneath the upper end a piece of the frame was visible above the broken lip, reachable from the level side. She crouched far enough to see, then stopped. There was flaking dirt, a strip of dark metal, the bracket that had folded without tearing away. She looked back at her own truck, then at the angle the pickup wanted to move.
The wheel crept against a white scrape in the concrete.
She stood. “Walt, stop trying.”
He looked at her through the window. Sweat and blood ran together at his temple.
“I can't sit here.”
“Then look at me.”
“I am looking at you.”
“Keep doing it.”
She didn't promise more. She went back to Kit, took the hook with her left hand and let her daughter carry the loose chain until she was ready for it. At the final reach Kit stayed behind her on the upper apron. Leah had to turn the work so her good hand could finish it. Her right glove brushed the body of the pickup; she gasped and pulled it away. Walt looked toward the sound.
“You hurt?”
She looked at him once. He remembered. His mouth closed.
The short chain went around the exposed frame rail behind the bent bumper, clear of the folded bracket. Leah joined it to the winch hook and checked the contact again from the level side. The links lay against solid metal, not the torn skin of the cab. This was not a car parked squarely on a road. The boat kept drawing at it below the ramp, and the post that had stopped the cab was also holding some part of it up. She could give the upper end a restraint. She could not tell the ground to remain where it was.
She came back along the same clear side, bringing Kit with her. At the controls she took in the slack slowly. The cable lifted off the concrete. A twist came out of it; the hook turned, the chain seated and the sound changed. The straightening line made the space between the vehicles feel smaller.
Leah released the control.
The winch held. Walt had stopped moving. The pickup's upper wheel had stopped too, against the white scrape, close enough that Leah could see the sliver of untouched concrete beside its tread.
Kit drew a breath. Leah heard how long she had been holding it.
“Stay here,” Leah said, and this time she had a job to put after it. “Watch the back of my truck. If it moves, tell me. Don't try to stop anything.”
Kit nodded. She moved nearer the shed, outside the working space, and looked from the rear tire to a cracked patch of concrete beside it. Leah could see her choosing a mark the way she had.
“I have to call,” Kit said.
“Yes.”
Leah watched her take the phone out. Her daughter gave the place, then her name. She stopped when the person at the other end asked her to repeat it.
“Kit Mercer. Katherine. I was here when it happened. There's a man trapped in a pickup by the service ramp.”
She listened. Leah watched the upper wheel. Behind it the trailer shifted with a small slap of water, but the tread remained against the scrape.
“He had a gun,” Kit said. “It's in there. I don't know where. He had it before he drove.”
Walt lifted his head. “Kitty.”
She looked toward him but kept listening to the phone.
“They want us back,” she told Leah.
“We're back.”
“They mean from him.”
Leah looked at the gap between herself and the window. She was on the shed side of the loaded cable. He could not reach her. She could reach his window only by walking the upper apron and leaving the controls where the winch would hold without her. She had to trust the machine to do that and her eyes to know when it stopped.
“Tell them I've put a line on the upper end. It's held for a minute. The ground isn't good below it.”
Kit repeated the words. Her voice shook on ground. The voice on the phone stayed steady enough to carry through the speaker.
“Walt,” Leah said. “Where's the gun?”
“My leg's caught.”
“I know. Where is it?”
He looked down. The movement wrung a cry out of him. The pickup shifted against the chain, and Leah felt her whole body prepare to catch a weight she could not possibly touch.
“Floor,” he said. “Down there. I can't get it.”
“Then don't.”
Kit passed that on. Walt kept one hand on the seat and one visible at the window. The marina woman came toward them, stopped by the shed and asked Leah the same question the dispatcher was asking Kit.
“Tell them what it is,” Leah said. “A winch line holding the upper end. I haven't got him free.”
The woman repeated it. She looked at Kit's phone and then at her own, realizing they were telling two versions of the same afternoon. She stepped aside to listen.
A man with a bicycle had come through the gate. Gordon went toward him, pointing him back. The man began to explain that he was only looking. Gordon put his hand on the gate and said something Leah could not hear. The bicycle went back onto the public path.
Time had begun to move differently. A minute was long enough for the water to rise and fall, for the cable to give a dry metallic tick, for Leah to notice the glove was getting tighter around her right hand. Not long enough for an engine she could hear in the distance to become the one she needed.
Walt watched her.
“You can reach me from here.”
“Not yet.”
“I can get my shoulder through. If you pull.”
She looked at the wheel, then at Kit.
“Same mark?”
“Same.”
Leah went along the upper apron to the broken window. She kept to the clear side of the cable, watching the pickup as she moved. The post stood against the damaged door below her. It had torn the skin of the cab inward. Walt had twisted around the old injured leg and trapped it beneath a fold of metal she could see but could not move.
“No,” she said.
He stared at her.
“Pulling you won't get that clear.”
“You can't just stand there.”
She took off the left glove. Her bare hand looked pale after the leather. She held it where he could see it, beyond the broken window, and waited for him to stop trying to turn.
“I'm staying.”
For a moment he looked at the hand instead of her face. His own fingers moved along the window edge, finding glass, retreating. He didn't say he believed her. She didn't ask.
Behind her Kit called, “Mom.”
Leah turned. Her daughter was pointing at the flatbed's rear tire. The concrete mark was no longer exactly beside it. The truck had settled, a small movement, enough to change the pitch of the loaded line.
Leah put the glove back on as she walked. Walt called her name again. This time she let him see her going toward the truck without stopping to explain why.