Page 8 of Smoke Season

But now you have a plan,she reminded herself as she took her ration of dinner and settled on the bumper of her rig, watching the fire continue to lick the hill. Maybe physical space from Sam had been required for her to make her way to it, but the plan would work. Ithadto.Someonehad to ensure Annie got the care she needed, and for all his promises, that someone just wasn’t going to be Sam. It still broke Mel’s heart every damn day to admit it, but this summer, her real partnership lay with True. There was no other way.

God bless her best friend, who at this very minute carried out the weekly task that had become standard operating procedure all summer. Working for John Fallows was easy enough, Mel reminded herself, as long as they didn’t overcomplicate it. Step one: pick up the ammo box of cash at the grow site on the river. Step two: float it down to the end of the line. Step three: hand it off. Step four: get paid their cut, earmarked for Annie’s meds that kept her healthy enough for surgery.

Step five,their circumspect employer had growled, his breath hot on the back of Mel’s neck,ask no questions, make no enemies, and make damned sure nothing goes sideways.

Mel swallowed hard at the memory as she washed down the god-awful freeze-dried food with a swig of water from her bottle. Shaking out her sleep kit from her pack, she fought a sudden trepidation. What exactly might breaking step five lead to? Drug traffickers, even small-time backwoods ones, weren’t exactly the reasonable type. Just ask poor Zack Murphy.

His arrest last spring had given Mel the idea in the first place.

“My Zack knew Fallows was trouble,” Kim had insisted between sobs, confiding in Mel outside the Eddy. “But he was no drug mule. It was why he was about to quit. ‘I won’t work for some wannabe cartel boss,’ he said.”

Mel had just nodded in sympathy. Cartels, drug-trafficking operations ... She’d heard the rumors, too. Black-market distributors and investors were always looking for grow sites to leech from. The oneswith property owners who didn’t shy away from the shady side of the law were their favorite partners. Who fit the bill better than Fallows?

Kim looked up, her face still tear-streaked. “The cops, they implied that Zack should have known, should have at least suspected that, going south, over state lines, he was carrying contraband ofsomekind, given who he worked for, but you know Fallows! He never gets his hands dirty enough to leave his own prints. They interrogated Zack for hours, but he simply didn’t know the answers to their questions. Didn’twantto know.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s why Fallows planted the fentanyl, along with the cash Zack was found with. Insurance. No way was Zacknotgoing down for this.”

Mel had sworn under her breath. She knew Fallows was a first-rate asshole, butfentanyl?

Kim wiped her eyes. “At least Fallows can’t make any other Carbon kids his scapegoat. Not with the Feds still watching I-5 so closely.”

Mel had laid a hand on Kim’s shoulder in comfort, thinking of poor Zack. Thinking, too, of young Sam, tormented by this man when he was too small to have any agency.Maybe it’s time Fallows picked on someone his own size.The thought sprang into Mel’s mind from nowhere, but once there, it proved impossible to banish. With the troopers aware of the I-5 distribution route, Fallows would need a new way to transport his monthly tithe to his black-market investors, or whomever he was paying off. And Mel had one.

“Are you crazy?” True had blurted when Mel had cornered her for a clandestine meeting the very next day. “You wantmeto floatproductfor JohnFallowsdown the OutlawRiver?” She’d said each word slowly, like Mel did to Astor when she wanted to be sure Astor had heard her own outlandish suggestions.

“Not product,” Mel had said swiftly. “What he needs moved is money. Payoffs.” And with True’s help, right under the noses of the Feds, without using a single road.

“All you have to do is take the cash, weekly, from Fallows’s place next to your property downriver to Temple Bar,” Mel had said. “Just that one quick stop along the river route. That’s it. And then you hand it off to one of Fallows’s guys at Temple.” She’d spoken in a breathy rush, afraid True would cut her off. “Everyone knows he fishes the bar every Friday with his favorite crew members. Everyone knows about his weekend cabin down there. No one will think a thing of it.”

She wasn’t proud of this idea—it turned her stomach, actually, and she couldn’t allow herself to think about Sam at all as she weighed it in her mind, but Annie’s surgeon’s office had called just the day before to prescribe the latest batch of presurgical meds, the sum of which had exceeded Mel’s monthly car payment. With Mel’s bank account at $97.42 and her savings nonexistent, with Sam heartbroken and both of them close to giving up, what else could she do? She pictured Annie, listless on the couch in Mel’s rented apartment, her heart failing her at age five. Each beat pumping blood throughout her little body was the tick of a clock. Where would Annie be at age six? Seven? Mel knew where ... the doctors told her. In her head, she recited the litany of medications currently monopolizing all their combined income: morphine, beta-blockers, inhalers, oxygen, sodium bicarbonate. And the list went on.

True had narrowed her eyes. “What does Sam say?”

Mel had dropped her gaze. “Sam won’t come within spitting distance of Fallows, and you know it.”

“But you will?” True had sounded incredulous.

Mel had lifted her head. “I’ll do whatever it takes!”

And because they both knew this was true, True had sworn loudly. “Fuck, I hate this.” She’d paced for a moment, wrestling, Mel knew, to justify this against her loyalty to Sam, same as Mel had, coming ultimately to the same conclusion. “Sam can’t know,” she’d whispered.

“No.” On that, True and Mel agreed. She and True were on their own.

Did she have eyes on this blaze from where she camped tonight on the Outlaw? As her team rolled out their own bags and settled into a restless night of semi-sleep around her, Mel decided she had better call True, too, though on the sat phone instead of her cell, and make sure she was still on course.

True lay stretched out on the floor of her oar raft, back braced against her Paco Pad, her long lean legs resting on the front inflated tube that had served as Emmett Wu’s seat all day, after beating his mom to “shotgun” after every dip in the river.

There was a time she’d stare up at the stars in wonder on clear nights like this, after her clients had turned in. This summer she’d mostly just stared blankly, worrying about the damned ammo box and the money inside it. Tonight, however, her gaze remained on the shadowy outline of the Wus’ tent, her mind still abuzz, her body still energized by the electrical storm. Campfire circles lent themselves to deep conversation in short order, and even though they had skipped the ritual tonight, she had learned a lot about Vivian as they’d lounged in their camp chairs after dinner, sipping wine and hot cocoa.

“I bet you’re underestimated all the time,” True had mused after they’d compared professional careers. “When you’re not being hit on by guys,” she’d thrown in as a test of sorts, just to be sure, after Emmett had embarked on a mission to unearth the Hershey’s bars in the cooler. True’s instincts could not always be trusted, and falling for straight women was a cliché she was tired of falling prey to.

But Vivian had shaken her head, gesturing toward Emmett, now carefully building a s’more to roast on the stovetop. “Single mom, remember? It’s the ideal male deterrent. Female, too, for that matter.”

True’s eyes had shot to hers, and Vivian had held her gaze, the confidence in that look saying volumes. Speaking True’s language.

Which left True wrestling with cliché number two: sabotaging potential happiness out of the fear of being burned. Again, as it happened. And so, despite the chance of more rain—Mother Nature willing—she’d left her one-person tent empty tonight, too, needing a bit more space. The storm clouds that had come in hot and heavy this afternoon had all but burned off, leaving the mountain air as thin and brittle as usual for southern Oregon in July, as poor a buffer as always against the heat of the night that absorbed into every pore of her bare arms and legs.

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