Chapter 17: Dead Twice

I stepped into the doorway between them and the room.

"Look at him," I said. "Everybody look."

Rhett was still on one knee at the open safe with his hands empty.

"An hour ago he gave up the chair and the keys," I said. "If he wanted that receipt gone, he could have taken it before he told you."

Nobody answered.

"He told me to open it," Rhett said quietly.

"No," I said. "I told you."

A rider in the front row scratched his beard.

"She's got a point," he said.

"She does," Morton said. His voice was warm and level. "I'd never think it of him."

He looked around the room.

"I'm only saying the combination is a short list, and we all need to remember that."

"Then change it," I said. "Tonight."

"We will."

Morton looked at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something else.

He only nodded, and the crowd began to break up and mutter.

Rhett got to his feet.

He gripped the back of my neck, once, hard, in front of two hundred people.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me yet."

"I'll thank you every day if I'm allowed."

"Go home," I said. "Lock your doors. I'm driving to Pia's."

"Tonight?"

"I need a night where nobody is watching my face."

He looked like he wanted to argue.

Then he took the president's patch off the table, folded it into his vest beside my ring, and let me go.

Pia's yard sat at the end of a gravel road outside Spokane Valley, with a floodlight on a pole.

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