get myself to turn invisible, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. It wouldn’t be smart to make my move now. I’m not just doing it for her.
Sure. Right.
Absolutely.
5
Gretchen left the car running, which Keith of course had a problem with.
She balled her hands up inside her coat pockets, listening to her teeth chatter as she shivered herself half to death and tried to keep calm. She tried to be the Marshal Martin would want her to be. It was the kind of thing that would have been a lot easier if slush wasn’t currently soaking through her jeans and getting her socks wet. She only had herself to blame for that one, though. She was the one who had decided to pull over even though the gas tank was still three-quarters full.
She was the one who’d forgotten to wear snow boots, too.
“I know you’re not supposed to leave your car running at the pump, Keith,” she said. “That’s why we’re not at the pump.”
She almost winced at the exaggerated patience in her voice. He was fraying her last nerve, but that was still no reason for her, the more experienced member of the team, to keep showing it to this extent. She shouldn’t be treating him like a child. It was like something else was stressing her out, but she couldn’t put her finger on what that would be.
“Besides,” she went on, “if Dawes can work his way out of the backseat, through the barrier, and into the front to steal the car out from under us, then we have bigger problems. That means he could do it when we’re in the car, which could get us both killed. So the way I see it, temporarily leaving the heat on helps all of us and doesn’t hurt anyone.”
“You mean it helps Dawes,” Keith said, lifting his chin challengingly.
The trouble was, he wasn’t exactly wrong to be a little suspicious of her motives. Gretchen had to admit that while she was easier on their prisoners in general, she wasn’t usually quite this lenient.
She’d never shaken a prisoner’s hand before. She’d never gotten herself tangled up in a conversation about a prisoner’s guilt or innocence.
Gretchen was willing to stand by what she had said about Cooper. It was undeniably true that sometimes innocent people ended up in prison, and that was a horrible thing that it was probably worth keeping in mind as at least a slight chance.
But under normal circumstances, she would have refused to get dragged into that kind of discussion. She wasn’t a lawyer. Her job was to get the prisoner from point A to point B as smoothly as possible, and she did that as well as or better than anyone.
Keith was right. She was treating Cooper differently. And Keith didn’t even know the half of it.
He didn’t know that when Cooper had said he was innocent, Gretchen had believed him.
Only for a second. The length of a heartbeat. Then she had gone right back to uncomfortable ambiguity, unsure whether she could trust him or not, unsure whether Martin had been right about his character or right about the evidence piled up against him.
A heartbeat. That was the problem. She was thinking too much with her heart.
Keith was wrong about a lot of things, sure, but so was she. She couldn’t pretend otherwise, not to herself.
She took a deep breath. She needed to be honest with him. He was a rookie, sure, but for this road trip, he was also her partner. He deserved to know what was going on with her—if she could even figure it out herself.
It feels more like Cooper’s my partner than Keith. That’s part of the problem.
“Okay,” Gretchen said quietly. “I do mean, a little, that it helps Dawes. I’m not going to apologize for not wanting a prisoner to turn into a popsicle. We’re responsible for him, and while we don’t need to baby him, there’s zero harm done by treating him like a human being as much as the situation allows. I feel like sometimes you don’t understand that.”
“But you—”
“I’ve been weird,” she admitted. “Martin liked him enough when they worked together that Coo—Dawes’s conviction really threw him for a loop, apparently. He wants to believe that Dawes is innocent, and he asked me to try to get a read on the situation. You deserve to know that that’s where I’m coming from. I went into this trip knowing that someone I really respect thinks that there’s a chance that