Though I realize we're fast approaching Labor Day, it is technically still summer for 3.5 more weeks. So the promise is not empty yet. My excuse is it's been a very, very hectic year with family stuff and work and whatnot. And travel, of course. There's always travel.

I think there will be two more chapters after this, and I will get them done soon. Like I said on the other story, my goal is to have both stories finished before Season 5, and that means I have 27 days.

Chapter 10

Then came the fires, three of them three days apart, all arson, all with the same makeshift combustibles. After each one, the City Council and the Mayor received emails claiming responsibility. Apparently there was an active jihadist cell in Absaroka County, and they were constructing incendiary devices out of plastic milk jugs and strips of bedsheet soaked in gasoline.

For ten days the Sheriff's Department was consumed.

She might have thought he was still doing whatever it was she thought he was doing that night in the parking lot. Playing hard-to-get? Taunting her? He wasn't sure what exactly, but he'd given her no reason since then to suspect anything different, if she suspected anything at all. The truth was she didn't appear to be thinking about it.

She was obsessed with the case.

Following the first fire at the Del Lago Arms and the subsequent email blast, they brought Clayton Baker in. Aside from his vague association with the Santa Fe jihadists and a tip from a basement-dwelling World of Warcraft fanatic, they had nothing on him.

Baker rambled into the office in front of Vic, black hair in his eyes. He was rangy and intense and not at all the dweeb Vic had made him out to be. He didn't even seem particularly angry.

"Where were you last night, Clayton?" Walt asked him.

"It's Clay," he said with a mellow undercurrent of 'bite me.' "I was with a friend."

"This friend have a name?"

"Joey Takushi."

Vic scribbled on her pad.

He sat at the end of the couch closest to Walt's desk, looking back over his shoulder most of the time, out the window.

"Are we boring you?" Vic said.

"Most things bore me."

"You haven't asked why we brought you in," Walt said.

"I know why you brought me in."

Walt waited.

Vic slipped the notebook in her back pocket and the pencil behind her ear then made a performance of crossing her arms and cocking her hip. When this had no discernable effect on Baker, she flared her eyes at Walt, giving him a little nudge.

"Why's that?" Walt said.

"You asking me to do your job for you, Sheriff?"

Walt bristled.

"Look," Walt said, "the last thing you need is to be suspected of allegiance to the Islamic State."

Baker laughed an actual laugh, as though he truly found this not simply amusing, but funny.

"You know what I need, do you?" Baker said.

Walt stood up and walked over to the couch.

Baker was unfazed. He looked up at Walt towering over him and said, "If I'm not under arrest I really need to take a shit."

"Charming," Vic said.

"That's me."

He flipped his hair out of his eyes and floated her a smooth, broody-eyed wink.

Apparently that actually was him. He was one of those skinny, fashionably unshowered guys they plastered half-dressed on the sides of tall buildings in big cities.

Walt showed him out. When he came back into the office, Vic said, "He's not a dork."

"Nope."

"He's kind of hot in a minimal-hygiene kind of way."

Walt walked over to the window and watched Baker cross the street to the square. He needed a second.

"I guess you'd know," he said.

He didn't want to want to hurt her, but he did. She didn't take the bait, though. In fact, it was possible she hadn't even been trying to get under his skin. But she had. She always did.

"If you hear the sound of hooves, Walt, don't assume it's a zebra."

He hadn't been alone with her in days. He turned around. She pissed him off, but he still wanted to look at her.

"Maybe Baker's the zebra," he said.

"Baker's the horse."

He should have said he didn't hear any hooves, but he went with, "How 'bout I make you dinner. That salmon."

"What salmon?"

"The seven-pounder. The one in my freezer."

She seemed to be trying to remember.

He gave her way longer than he should have before he said, "Another time."

She nodded. It could have meant anything.

His error had been in not just coming out with it on the way back up to Hardin that night. Instead he'd yammered on like Ferg. Probably the mistake was going back up for the credit card in the first place. He should've just used his own credit card and had Ruby fill out the paperwork for a reimbursement. If he'd gotten in the truck right then, while there was still such promise, everything would be different now.

He was destined to keep repeating the same mistakes, to keep expecting these things to resolve themselves, which they never did.

He should have found the time and the opportunity to bring it up, if not on the trip back to Hardin then at some point soon after, despite the upheaval.

No, not found, he thought. That was too passive. Made.

The problem was he had gone back up, and Ruby had handed him the Post-it that changed everything.

Sheriff Wayne Quinlan

Dryer County, NE

Re: Vic

He couldn't unknow what he knew. Even before making the call, he knew.

He'd expected to kiss her when he got in the truck, or to wait until they were out of the town center, and he'd thought maybe she'd ask him to stop at her place on the way back. Maybe he'd end up staying. But with the Post-it in his head, throbbing and blinding him, he was paralyzed. So he talked. He nattered on about Henry and Cady and that stupid fish.

And after all that, she'd still wanted to kiss him because she didn't know what he knew, which broke his heart a little.

The next morning he'd called and talked to Quinlan about her and how capable she was, and the available undersheriff position in Dryer, and the low ceiling here in Absaroka, and how ready she was. After that, the fact that she'd come to him across that snowy parking lot didn't seem like it meant a whole lot.

Of course, the longer it went without him saying anything, the longer it went. Then he figured she'd bring it up, but she didn't. They were busy.

When it became clear it was no longer their case, Vic put in for two days off midweek. They were the two days he'd been dreading. She didn't give a reason, but she didn't need to. They all knew.

So she went and she came back, and she still said nothing about it.

He was tensed for everything to blow, but there was nothing, so he tried again. He was driving, and she was looking out the window at the dormant, slushy fields in the golden late-afternoon light. They'd just questioned Baker for the third time. Baker couldn't account for his whereabouts on the nights of the Del Lago Arms and Oakridge Commons fires. They hadn't been able to locate a Joey Takushi, and he wasn't helping. Still, his mother insisted he was home when Northfield Crossing went up.

They turned out of Conestoga Acres onto the highway.

"How about that salmon?"

She was tapping her hand on her thigh and biting her lip.

"Maybe he is the zebra," she said.

"I can pick you up."

"But who the hell else would be claiming allegiance to a jihadist cell?"

"McClanahan and Gill have some leads."

"They told you that?" she said.

"It's their case, Vic."

"What happened to you, Walt?" She shook her head, disgusted. "Why are you just bending over for those assholes?"

"Bending over?" He didn't like the sound of that, the implication.

"Whatever," she said.

He squeezed the steering wheel. "Never mind."

The next day, the weasel McClanahan said they needed to "keep some eyes on Baker," and what he meant by that was he wanted Walt to set up surveillance using his people.

"We have a community to serve, Agent," Walt said.

"Unfortunately, Gill and I'll be down in Cheyenne for a couple of days."

Walt hadn't exactly agreed, but once they were gone, he put Ferg on Baker during the day, and the first night Vic and Eamonn. He needed to not be disturbed by that. Then the next day Ferg, and there was still nothing. Then Eamonn was off, so it was Walt and Vic left. She said she could do it alone, but he ignored her.

They were waiting outside Anderson's Hardware in Ferg's Trans Am when, at 7:03, Baker came out. He jaywalked across the street to Durant Western Wear in a T-shirt and jeans. It was a balmy night for late winter.

"Hipster dude buys his clothes in the Wrangler store?"

She reached in her bag and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. "Here."

He took it, confused.

"Half of that's mine."

He'd brought a thermos of coffee. He poured her a cup.

She took a sip.

He handed her half the sandwich. She took a bite and shook her head.

"What?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Come on, Vic."

"It's just . . . ." She took another sip of her coffee. "What the fuck are we doing, Walt?"

He was unsure what to do with that.

Minute after minute after minute passed. All the while, the question hung there in the car between them.