The mechanic walked hunched from under the raised car. He stopped and stood straight in front of Kalani and removed his hat, a black baseball cap made floppy with sweat. He waved it several times at a buzzing fly and said, “Might take a minute.”

She looked at him, the shine on his bald head, and then at the black underside of her car. “How long is a minute?”

“Before too long,” he said.

The “new” old car had been shifting rougher than usual—at least, rougher than the first few weeks she’d known it. Definitely rougher than that first test drive. It drove beautifully, then. It drove just fine now. Fine enough. But the change had worried her. A suddenly mushy clutch, a missed gear or two. One big “pop out” when she tried to gear up for the highway, and any confidence she’d had in it was shattered.

“It’s just a little adjustment,” the mechanic said, flopping the hat back onto his head.

“You mean it won’t cost much.”

“Did I say that?” He smiled.

No. He absolutely did not say that.

The man’s smile broadened. “I’m just messing with ya.”

“I’m broke,” Kalani said, straight-faced.

“I know. We’re damn well all broke.”

Kalani nodded with that sad fact, thinking of the last good wad of bills tucked in her wallet—an empty cigarette pack holding roughly eighty dollars. “Think we can keep it below sixty? If it’s just an adjustment?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Kalani thanked him for that, and he replied with, “Won’t be a minute.”

She was still trying to decipher the meanings of his odd units of time. What would or wouldn’t be “a minute,” or before or after “too long?” How long was a minute exactly in Claxtonburg, West Virginia?

Looking around at her surroundings, the hundred-year-old mechanic’s shop, and the single-block crumbling brick “downtown” beyond it, Kalani quickly came to the conclusion that a minute in Claxtonburg might definitely be after too long.

She opted out of the TV-less, single-chair waiting room, and instead clanged the hanging doorbell of the front entrance on her way out to downtown Claxtonburg. The town had once been a bustling industrial center. A rich history, even richer architecture for some of the last un-bulldozed original structures—if you could see them through the weeds that grew between the sidewalk cracks. Tiny signs from the historical society dotted the sidewalk. Kalani looked over the photographs and then read their descriptions. The place looked more vibrant through the black and white of old scratchy photographs than the all-too-real Technicolor of the current de-industrialized malaise.

Claxtonburg was a town for waiting. That was perhaps its largest industry. Waiting for a car to be repaired. Waiting for the single traffic light to change. Waiting for the coal mine jobs to come back. But perhaps the most realistic and sad was the Claxtonburg residents waiting to die. Kalani hoped that she wouldn’t be one of them.

She’d almost forgotten about being followed.

She stopped dead in her tracks when the subtlest hint of dread flushed through her body. She spun around in place to take a good 360 of her surroundings—who was approaching, or watching, or who was trying to look like they hadn’t been doing either. The latter group seemed to include an elderly woman walking slowly behind a stroller, pushing it over a lumpy sidewalk. Her grandchild, perhaps. Whatever their relationship was, they weren’t spy associates. Following several feet behind them: a man who looked like he belonged underneath a car at the mechanic’s shop. What about him? Walking to work?

What about Kalani, herself? She imagined that she probably looked the most suspicious out of everyone, out of place, looking around. Looking lost. She was lost.

She’d gone into Claxtonburg now and then for groceries, but the foreignness of the place had never lifted since that first visit. She supposed it was good to be on guard.

Should she have been more careful with the car mechanic? Maybe she could have even stayed close to the car to keep watch. At that moment, they could very well be installing a tracking device in her car so she’d never be alone. Or tampering with the brake line somehow so that it would cut at the most inopportune moment. That way, she wouldn’t be alive to talk about anything regarding the Blackwoods case. Certainly not to help the case with Lea. The best the bad guys could do would be to silence one if not both of them with some nondescript tragedy.

A car bomb would offer a similar effect.

Joe Car Mechanic back at the shop didn’t look like a munitions expert, or an expert in anything aside from grease and grifting. But what about that gentleman she’d caught staring into the car bay though his office window? Her skin had crawled when he peered through the blinds at her, his little fingers splitting the blinds open further, his little beady eyes darting away when they’d made eye contact with hers. Then the blinds snapped shut again. She tried not to think about things like that too much, but now that she felt the fear, it came rushing back along with it. All the horrible possibilities. They crawled along her spine up into her brain stem, sizzling there.

“Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am?”

The voice pulled her from an increasingly darkened cloud of thoughts. She turned around to see a skinny young man in a stained white T-shirt. It was more of an undershirt, almost see-through with wear. “Ma’am?”

“Yeah?”

“Door’s broke.”

“Huh?”

“Door’s broke right there,” he said, pointing to the entrance of the General Store. “You’ll have to try the other one.”

Kalani just realized that she’d been trying to push open an immovable door for the last ten seconds. Drunk with paranoia, she said, dumbly, “Yeah?”

The man reached past her and with his fingertips pushed open the other door to the right side. It swung open slightly and then closed again. “Go ahead and try that one there,” he said.

It was a little disappointing that she’d forgotten about the trick door, despite having gone to that store more than once since arriving at the farmhouse. One door for in, one for out. Not that complicated. But she was used to modern strip malls—and air-conditioning—and properly working doors with clearly indicated directions, not the quaint haphazardness of Claxtonburg.

She opened the correct door and held it open for her helpful local, and in he walked, smiling at her one last time before making his way to the beer cooler. Kalani walked to the front of the store to the newspaper stand, remembering exactly where she was, and exactly what she was looking for. That part was a well-worn plan.

Kalani could almost find it without looking, without reading through the publication titles. The West Virginian Post stood out with its extra-sized paper and cheap print quality. She reached behind the stack to grab a fresh copy and then moved back to the beer section where the T-shirt guy was still weighing his options. She moved to the cooler next to him and opened its door for a soda before making her way back to the front to casually check out her items.

That was all she’d needed. Her paper and her cold drink. She was interested in local news, just like your average West Virginian. She might not have the drinking habit of a local, but a Coke with its sugar and caffeine rush and a paper with its latest release of news would be more than drug enough for her. She couldn’t wait to be alone with it, to discover what secret the latest edition held for her.

The young girl at the cash register hardly looked at Kalani, hardly looking at anything but her phone as she scanned the items through and worked the keypad of the register.

No one would suspect a thing.

Outside, Kalani held the paper, wondering if she would check it right away.

No.

She would wait.

Good things are worth waiting for.

* * *

She couldn’t wait.

She especially couldn’t wait in the car shop waiting room, where she could either stare at the work being done to her Honda, or open the pages of her paper and discover what she’d been waiting for.

Her fingers felt foreign and slow, having trouble flipping through the thin sheets of newspaper. It was funny how the excitement had gotten to her, the jitters coming on more strongly in that waiting room than they had all day the previous day at the training ground. Her hands and her consciousness were steady and strong around firearms and explosives. But as she sat there, checking back to the classifieds section of the paper, she felt limp and slightly melty. She felt like a little girl, which was odd for bold and brave Kalani. Physically, with her diminutive frame, she was indeed a little girl. But her mind resembled the bristled landscape of one of DARC’s hired mercenaries. What she didn’t have in muscle she made up for in stealth and courage. What she didn’t have in stealth and courage she made up for with a dogged determination to win. Or at least not fail. Perhaps that was the whole reason for going along with the training. Her competitive nature showing its ugly head.

Her immaturity, too, perhaps. As was her immature reaction to the paper, still flipping and finally scanning across the tiny boxes of text that made up classified section. A place for West Virginians to advertise any manner of goods and services—or simple messages.

She knew it was a dangerous game, to keep it up. She knew it was endangering the mission, and endangering her and Lea. Yes, immature and selfish, Kalani bowing to her increasing need for more of Ethan—in any form he could give. For the time being, she’d settled for semi-cryptic messages imbedded in text. In one of the boxes of the classifieds. In an ad titled Waterfalls, Kalani read: Looking forward to seeing the heavens out west one day again.