Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Upon arriving at work the day after Boyd comes waltzing into the Marshals’ Office stringing wire, blows their private life wide open without so much as a fire in the hole, Raylan feels a definite air of rising tension every time he walks in the room, his steps dogged by whispered conversations that end as soon as he gets too close. He’d like to think they’re all telling tales of his deft handling of the hostage situation, but he’s pretty sure it’s something else got their tongues wagging—that being Raylan’s tongue, and where it’s been. By lunchtime, he’s seriously considering going out and shooting someone just to give them something else to talk about. He wouldn’t mind the gossip if it wasn’t for the looks that come with it. Each time his presence brings an abrupt end to a conversation, all eyes turn his way, and he can’t tell if it’s simple awkwardness at being caught out, or a deeper manner of discomfort. Nothing’s changed much with Art, and Rachel and Tim treat him the same way they always have, but even in Eastern Kentucky four people don’t a bullpen make. For the first time maybe ever, being called into Art’s office is a relief. Obviously still feeling magnanimous after Raylan’s bloodless takedown of one Cal Wallace, Art suggests he take a week, hope it’s long enough for this thing to blow over, and Raylan jumps on it immediately. 

Now that Raylan’s the one who finds himself at loose ends while Boyd’s working, chauffeur duty naturally falls to him—which would be fine, if his kids weren’t intent on giving him a coronary. He picks up Pemberley first, idling in the kiss’n’ride line until she slouches her way through the front doors. Something sinks in his chest as soon as he sets eyes on her: her head low, shoulders high and tight to her ears like she’s trying to hold a pair of fifty dollar bills there. She opens the car door and throws herself into the back, thrusting what’s surely not a hundred bucks wordlessly at Raylan between the two front seats. Feeling a bit like he’s accepting live ordinance, Raylan takes it. “What’s this?”

“A note.”

Raylan groans, his free hand tipping his hat back as he rubs his eyes until colors explode behind them. “Goddammit Pemberley. You been there three days, how you get a note home already?” He unfolds it, skims it over. “You swore at your teacher?“

She slumps back against the seat, crosses her arms and scowls into the footwell, a halfway decent impression of Felicity at her worst. “She asked if my mama worked, and I said, How the hell should I know.”

Raylan puts his hand over his face again, possessed with the kind of little kid logic that feels closer to the surface when talking with children: if he can’t see it, maybe it’ll go away by the time he opens his eyes. It doesn’t work. “Pemberley…”

She cuts her eyes out the window, glares in the general direction of where her classroom must be; Raylan’s never actually been inside. “Well, how the hell should I?”

“You could’a said somethin like, ‘I don’t know Miss Whatever, she don’t live with us.’”

She looks at the floor, arms still tucked up against her chest and braid fraying around the edges, her hair reacting to stress the same way Boyd’s does. Some shorter strands at the front have slipped out of the elastic, and they stand straight up from her head the way Johnny’s did that one time he was up to bat in high school. Raylan remembers Boyd shouting something from the bleachers, though he hadn’t been able to parse it at the time. The coach apparently had, because he nearly tackled Johnny trying to get the bat out of his hands, then bullied everyone into the dugout while Rhett Abernathy’s daddy cleared the stands. They huddled inside, grumbling, just in time for a lightning bolt to hit the backstop, arcing down out of nowhere, the rain not even started yet. For weeks afterward, they’d all had to endure Johnny’s endless swaggering jokes about his lightning rod, which Raylan surely could have done without.

Whatever storm’s brewing now, Raylan doubts he’ll be able to get Pemberley clear of it with such alacrity. Might just have to weather it. “I ain’t used to people not knowin,” she mutters. “No one in Miami would’a ever asked me that.”

Raylan sighs. He seriously considers rolling the note up and sticking it in the cigarette lighter, watching with satisfaction as it blackens and curdles to ash, but in the end decides it’s not worth the mess. He drops it in the cup holder instead, puts the car in gear. “They don’t know us, here. You can’t hold that against them.”

She mutters to her knees, so low he barely catches the words. “Can I hold it against you?”

Raylan’s hands tighten on the steering wheel around a burst of frustration. Figuring it would sting less if she didn’t have a point, he takes a breath and forces his hands to relax: distracts himself taking the car out of park, checking his mirrors. He looks back at her in the rearview as they pull out onto the street. “Why you been fightin me so much, lately? I already got to deal with this shit from Lissy, now I got to deal with you too?”

“Oh, so from Lissy it’s fine, just not from me.” Her voice wavers a little, the faint stuttering trill in the back of her throat like a canary in distress, to warn of trapped air going sour. “She can be pissed off and hollerin every day, but I yell one time and that’s the last straw, huh?”

“Honey…”

“What’s she got to be so angry about, anyway?” She’s blinking rapidly, now, barely eking out a pyrrhic victory against tears, and Raylan wishes he’d never started the car. He wants to reach back for her, offer any meager touch of comfort she’d accept. “Her mama’s worried about missin one holiday trip with her, and my mama hasn’t sent me so much as a birthday card in ten years. And I ain’t even allowed to be mad about it!”

Her voice wobbles until it cracks, and Raylan’s breath feels sucked out of him, as though the air in the car really has gotten thinner, choke damp setting in. “Pemberley. You’re allowed to miss your mama.”

“I don’t miss her.” She sniffs, rubs a rough hand under her nose; she’s not crying, quite, but her nose is starting to run. Raylan hasn’t seen her cry in a year at least—like Boyd, she was never much given to it, even as a baby, solemn and watchful as long as he’s known her. Still, he can’t help seeing in her scrunched-up face the flu-stricken eighteen-month-old whose nose he siphoned snot from; the three-year-old wailing, her stubbed toe clutched in both hands; the five-year-old bent over her skinned knee, watching with fascination how the blood welled up even as tears dripped from her chin. “What’s there to miss? She was never even there.”

“To be pissed, then.” Raylan doesn’t figure quibbling about those first eight months would be particularly welcome, just now. He tries to catch her eye in the mirror, finds she’s staring down at her hands. “I know it’s hard, bein left behind. Not knowin why.”

She looks up at that, startled out of her sniffling, glassy eyes meeting his in the rearview. “I thought you were the one who left.”

“I ain’t talkin about your daddy.”

She goes quiet then, long enough that Raylan makes the last turn and pulls to a stop, parking in an empty space out front of the elementary school. Through the windshield, he looks for Lissy in the mess of children out front, tumbling over each other like puppies in a cardboard box, but she’s one of the smaller kids from one of the younger grades, and she gets lost in the fray. He spots two boys maybe a few years younger than Pemberley roughhousing toward the edge of the parking lot, one locked in a chokehold, nothing visible but a tangle of dark hair sticking straight up from his head. A pang of familiarity hits him then, rooted in his own childish fantasies more than any real memory; he and Boyd had already fallen out by that age. Raylan watches them for a minute, half to make sure they don’t tumble out into the road, half to give Pemberley time to collect herself. When she finally speaks, it’s barely more than a whisper. “You think she ever even thinks’a me at all?”

Raylan twists around in his seat to meet her eyes without a pane of glass between them. “I don’t see how she could not. But your mama had a lot’a problems.”

“I know,” she says, folding her arms again, her habitual annoyance at being talked to like a kid pushing aside the last traces of any real distress. “It’s not like I wanna go live with her or anything.”

“Well, good,” says Raylan. “Because no way in hell would that ever happen.” She rolls her eyes, but her mouth twitches a little at one corner, the reluctant ghost of a smile. When Raylan allows a pocket of silence for her to fill, she elects to leave it be. He reaches back, cups a hand around the back of her head like he’s cradling a robin’s egg: something fragile and precious, that only comes to your hand when someone else leaves it behind. “I love you. You know that?”

She reaches up to hold onto his forearm, and he scritches the ends of his fingers lightly through her hair. “Yeah. I know.”

“Good.” He lets his hand fall, cants his head toward the windshield and the roiling mass of children on the other side. “You stayin in the car or comin with me?”

She sighs and pops her door. Raylan follows suit, and they walk across the lot to the thin strip of lawn where the elementary teachers bring the kids out for pickup. A woman who looks about a decade younger than Raylan disentangles herself from the snarl of children to approach them, smiling. “Hi there! Who’re you here for?”

Before Raylan can respond, Lissy spots them. “Daddy!” she says, running up, and throws her arms around his waist, head digging into that place below his ribs again. He lets a hand come to rest in her hair; it’s nice, having her happy to see him for once.

“Hi, honey. You got your stuff?”

“No,” she says, her arms still around him, not making any particular moves to rectify this. He nudges her with his knee, like guiding a horse. 

“So go get it.”

“Okay.” She runs back off toward the row of backpacks lined up like brightly colored beetles against the brick wall and starts trailing along it, searching for hers.

The woman who approached them smiles again, an embarrassed edge to it now. “Sorry! Felicity’s in my class. I didn’t realize she had two dads—she calls you both the same thing.”

“It’s fine,” says Raylan, smiling awkwardly and glancing after Lissy, wondering what the hell’s taking her so long; surely there aren’t that many bags that look like hers.

The woman turns her smile on Pemberley. “I should’ve known, though. You look just like your other dad.”

“That’s how genetics tend to work,” says Pem: not quite rude, but toeing that line with a tightrope walker’s finesse. “Probably take after my mama some, but then, I guess I wouldn’t know it.”

Having had no way of foreseeing the shark-infested waters she was about to wade into, the poor teacher’s smile freezes on her face. Her eyes dart back and forth between them, clearly hoping Raylan might throw her a rope.

“Don’t mind her,” he says, obliging. “She’s in a mood.” He shoots Pemberley a warning look, and she glares down at her feet, but it does the job; she doesn’t open her mouth again until Lissy comes tromping back up to them, clutching the straps on a backpack nearly big enough to unbalance her. Raylan could swear it wasn’t that full when she left the house. He takes it from her and slings it over his own shoulder so she doesn’t tip over halfway to the car—right in front of some soccer mom’s minivan, knowing his luck. “You ready to go?”

“Mm-hm.”

“All right,” he says, and offers his hand when she reaches for it. She takes it in both of hers and begins to twist his horseshoe ring around and around his finger, like the dial to set a watch by, or the crank on the back of a windup toy. Raylan lets her, never altogether sure what goes on in that head but willing enough to indulge it, and glances back up. “Uh, thanks, Miss…?”

Lissy’s teacher smiles at him, a new spark of interest to it; all the girls’ teachers seem to reserve judgment until they get a read on what kind of daddy he is. “Leighton. Sarah Leighton.”

Raylan tips his hat with his free hand. “Miss Leighton.” She blushes, a little, looking flustered. He turns away, grabbing one of Lissy’s hands in a steadier grip and leading her toward the parking lot while Pemberley trails behind them, slouching into her layered shirts like she could disappear in them. Raylan recognizes the posture with a deep visceral familiarity, and feels torn between sympathy and censure. “Don’t come with me next time if you’re just gonna be rude to everyone,” he tells her when they reach the Town Car. “You do look like him; it’s a natural observation to make.”

She kicks the back tire of the Town Car sullenly, like she’s trying to gauge the pressure, see how far it can carry them before it blows. “I wasn’t tryin’a be rude.”

“Don’t tell me that sounded polite in your head.”

Never very conscious of when she’s interrupting, Lissy tugs on Raylan’s hand to get his attention. “Can we get ice cream?”

Raylan blinks down at her, brain struggling to jump tracks. “What?”

She tugs again, impatient. “Ice cream, Daddy.”

“We’re not getting ice cream,” says Raylan. He fishes his keys from his pocket, unlocks the front door and gropes around to pull the lock pin on the back. He dumps Lissy’s backpack in the passenger seat, glad to be rid of the weight.

“Why?“ She sounds betrayed; it’s possible Raylan takes them for ice cream a touch too often.

“‘Cause I’m in trouble,” says Pem from the other side of the car, a bitter edge to it. Another dull thud of rubber against rubber—still kicking that tire, like she wants to pop the damn thing herself, just to get it over and done with.

“You ain’t in trouble, though you sure do seem to be angling in that direction. We ain’t gettin ice cream because it’ll spoil your supper.”

Pemberley turns a skeptical eye on him over the roof of the car. It’s the first vehicle either he or Boyd ever had that she gets a clear sight across the top of: half because they tend to favor cars they can fit the kids in, and half because she’s growing like a weed. “It’s only three o’clock.”

“We’re havin supper early.”

Her eyes narrow; sometimes Raylan forgets what a quick study she is. “Why?”

“Because your daddy and me are goin out.”

Lissy doesn’t get into the car when Raylan opens the door for her, even when he nudges her in that direction. She frowns hard, crosses her arms. “But I want ice cream!”

Raylan nudges her again. “We have ice cream at home. The sitter can give you some after supper.”

“No!” says Lissy, sounding genuinely distressed now, and Raylan suspects it’s less to do with a sweet treat denied and more to do with the revelation of an imminent visit from the babysitter; she hasn’t responded well to the rotating cast of caregivers sent over by the service. She goes boneless right there in the middle of the parking lot, nearly cracking her head open on the way down, and Raylan has to scoop her up off the ground and deposit her in the booster seat while she lolls around like a ragdoll, arms and legs all akimbo.

In the end, Raylan ends up with two kids near tears in the backseat of his car within twenty minutes. Things don’t improve much upon arriving back at the rental, the house simmering with discontent, both girls nursing their own private hurts, and Raylan struggling to break ground with either of them. Lissy won’t touch the snack he puts together, refusing to accept anything into her belly that sits above freezing, and Pemberley goes to hide out with her own plate in their bedroom. A couple hours later, he makes them chicken nuggets and rice from a packet in the microwave, which only goes down slightly better; they really are getting sick of all this microwave shit. He seriously considers texting Boyd to ask if they can just cut their losses and skip the bar in favor of trading handjobs and then going the fuck to sleep, but they’ve already arranged for a sitter, and Raylan could honestly use the space from his kids right now, much as he loves them. As it is, he struggles just to get through the two and a half hours until she gets there. 

He leaves for the bar still pissed off and on-edge, babysitter secured and Lissy’s ensuing tantrum mollified with a scoop of the ice cream they have at home. It’s not exactly the nicest bar he’s ever posted up at, but it’s hardly a dive: long bartop with the ring of solid wood, exposed brick made handsome under strings of fairy lights hung off an exposed ceiling beam, the wall behind the bar stacked with good liquor. There’s an older fellow tending bar, a wry no-nonsense kind of guy in line with Raylan’s preference, asks a couple questions and then leaves him to his drink. An electronic jukebox in the back plays quiet country, obscure but unobjectionable, though it's ruined by a second source of noise at closer range. The assholes down the bar hooting with laughter at their own obnoxious jokes, insulting the honor of whatever unfortunate woman found herself desperate enough to accept one of them into her bed, continue to fray at nerves already shot to hell. When he invites them to keep it down, they decline less than graciously. Truth is, Raylan could have been more diplomatic about the suggestion himself, but he has a fair amount of frustration to work out: and anyway, Boyd’s late.

In deference to his current status as the number one situation defuser in the US Marshals’ Service, he ends his rant with a peace offering. “So why don’t you stop tryin so hard to impress your friend, drink your drink, and we’ll be just fine.”

The curly-headed guy eyes him from behind his friend. “You seem to be harboring a bit of hostility there, brother.”

Raylan turns back to his drink. “So I been told.”

He looks over again when a cardboard coaster glances off the side of his hat, finds the bigger guy fixing him with a look of bleary-eyed defiance. “Last I checked, it was a free country.”

Frayed patience finally giving way with a snap, Raylan stabs a finger down on the bar top. “I’m meetin someone here.”

The guy squares up, swaggers as well as he can with his ass planted on a bar stool. “I really don’t give a shit.”

“Well, then I guess we’re at an impasse.”

“Then I guess—I suppose we are.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” says the bartender, appearing suddenly across from Raylan, bottle in hand. “There’s no need for this. Now why don’t everybody just take a calm breath? Come on. Let’s all have a round on the house.”

His words fall on deaf ears, plugged up by drink and piss-poor manners. “There’s two of us,” the guy says, holding up two fingers, “and one of you.” He drops his index finger, only the middle left standing. “You like them odds?”

“I might suggest you brush up on your countin skills there, son,” says Boyd from behind them. They both jerk their heads his way. “It may seem elementary, but I believe it would behoove you in your current calculation of risk versus reward.” He steps forward and claps them both on the back, one with each hand, smiles at the curly-haired guy with all his teeth. “Now, I’m wonderin, did I hear you right? You like to mess with kids, that it?”

The man recoils by instinct, Boyd’s veneers still on display like a line of alabaster headstones over an open grave, his hands at their backs poised to push them both in. “What?”

“See, you made a comment to your friend just now about his erstwhile bedmate’s children that I must admit gave me considerable pause.”

The guy pales, backtracks. “No, that’s—that’s not what we meant.”

“Well then what did you mean, son?” Boyd turns that look of affected concern on Raylan, but his hands don’t leave their shoulders. “Raylan, are you aware of any other meanin those words might be ascribed? Because I confess I’m drawin a blank.”

Raylan looks down into his glass, tips it this way and that, as though he might find an answer there. “None that I can think of.”

“No,” says Boyd, voice soft, before it rises again, takes on once more the conversational tone that belies the danger lurking beneath: the soothing shush of the grass as a snake slithers through it. “See, I think some other folks in this bar might take a more than casual interest in what you boys was talkin about. I think, I say it loud enough, more than one’a these boys in here might take it upon themselves to cut you soon as you leave the pryin eyes of their better angels.” He slaps them both on the back one last time. “Now, do we understand each other, or we gonna see what happens when you shout pedo in a crowded room?”

The big guy’s shoulder hunches under his hand. “We’ll keep it down.”

Boyd’s grin is wide and white, catching the low light from behind the bar. “Now that’s exactly what I was hopin you’d say.” Raylan can see his fingers flex as he squeezes them both hard by the shoulder, a final warning from the boa constrictor. His hands finally fall away from their backs, and they try to pretend they’re not eyeballing him as he walks over and slides onto the stool beside Raylan’s. 

He tips his drink. “Hey, Boyd.”

“Hey, Raylan.” Boyd picks up the bourbon Raylan ordered for him, takes a sip.

“You’re late.”

“I hardly think that’s the greatest indiscretion between the two of us right now.” Another sip, and he sets the glass down on the bar. Raylan stares at the kiss of whiskey on his mouth, now famous around the Marshals’ office for a kiss of a different kind, and idly considers just dragging him out back and putting him on his knees, grabbing him by the ears and going to town—but unfortunately, he’s pretty sure this isn’t that kind of bar. Boyd clocks him, smirks as he licks the whiskey from his lips with a single flick of the tongue, like he’s right there inside Raylan’s head, curled up on some sunny rock, neck distended with the shape of the kill. “One day of vacation and already you pickin fights.”

Considering this, Raylan spins his tumbler, light catching its wide facets to leap in prismatic patterns across the bartop. “What was it you said the other day about risk?”

Boyd considers Raylan over his glass. “We can still fight them, you want.”

Shaking his head, Raylan throws back the rest of his whiskey, catches the bartender’s eye and raises two fingers to request a couple more. “The abject terror kinda takes the fun out of it.”

“I dunno, Raylan.” Boyd glances sidelong down the bar, a speculative glint in his eye. “I like to watch ‘em scramble.”

“Well,” says Raylan, “you are a Crowder. That you save your sadism for creepy assholes is all we can hope for, really.”

The guys down the bar start laughing uproariously again, and Boyd slides his eyes sideways. “I think we can put a big red X next to this particular establishment on our list.”

“Don’t know why you got to check out every bar in town anyway,” Raylan mutters into his drink. “Why can’t we just stick to the one with the pool tables?”

“There’s a pool table here.”

“Yeah,” says Raylan, “and that’s about all it’s got goin for it.”

“Well, I don’t think we can fairly judge the character of a whole bar off such a limited sample of its clientele.”

“You can when only two guys account for eighty percent’a the noise.” Boyd snorts, conceding the point, and Raylan eyes him more intently as a sudden thought strikes. “How long were you standin there for, anyway? He said that thing about the kids a good two minutes before you stepped in.”

Boyd doesn’t bother denying it, just sits back on his stool and grins at Raylan, unrepentant. “I like to watch you all het up. Him flickin that coaster at you was a particular highlight.”

Raylan points at him around his drink. “You’re an asshole.”

Boyd raises his glass to Raylan. “I never made no claims to the contrary.” When Raylan aims a kick at him under the table, Boyd seems to have anticipated it, and all he manages to do is stub his toe on the barstool’s lower rung. Boyd smirks at him as he swears under his breath, but it twists into a wince when Raylan manages to clip him on his second try. 

Thus returned to even standing, they ignore the racket best they can and shoot the shit a little, talking about their days; Boyd found termites in the ceiling at one of the other properties, water damage under the floorboards of another. Raylan tells Boyd about Pem’s note home: scowls when he laughs about it, only to have Boyd laugh at him, too. “Oh, Raylan. Like we didn’t say worse shit with less provocation, that age. ‘Member when our English class made that substitute cry?”

“Wouldn’a been caught dead handing a note over to Arlo about it, though.”

“Well,” says Boyd, “that was self-preservation. She knows she ain’t got nothin to fear from you: not really.” Raylan grimaces into his drink, but he has to concede the point; it’s a good thing, he supposes, in the end, even if it’s a pain in the ass he doesn’t need right now.

They put away a few more drinks while they talk, Boyd matching Raylan two for one—he’d had a late start, after all. Raylan doesn’t think they’re any handsier than usual, though they may lean in a little closer than they might have sober; in the end, he’s not sure what gives them away, or if maybe the boys down the bar were listening a little closer than they let on. In any case, they somehow find their way, drunk and stumbling and perhaps by total accident, to the correct conclusion. “Faggots,” the big guy says under his breath as they pass those boys behind.

Boyd turns slowly, his smile stretched wide and toothy as a bear trap. He ambles over to stand beside the man who spoke, and Raylan goes to bookend them on the other side, next to the skinnier one. Boyd throws an arm around the big guy, and Raylan leans up on the bar, not quite touching the man at his side. “Wanna come outside and call me that again?” Boyd asks, congenial.

The man under his arm glowers. He lowers his eyes to his drink. “Nah,” he mutters into the glass. 

Boyd pats his cheek with an open hand. “Good answer.”

The touch of Boyd’s palm is like flint striking steel, throwing sparks that catch on something behind the man’s eyes. He stands abruptly and rounds on Boyd, looming over him by a solid six inches. “Know what? Maybe I will.” Boyd looks up over the man’s shoulder at Raylan, a feral glint in his eye. He smiles wide; the bear trap closes. Raylan’s gonna get his fight after all.

~~~

Now set on his chosen trajectory, Boyd knows Raylan won’t conscion himself diverted from it, and so he gives in to the inevitable. If he thought the fighting might preclude the fuck he’s been angling for, he may’ve had more in the way of reservations, but as it stands he feels no particular aversion to getting his blood up a different way; they’d fucked for the first time fresh off a bar fight, after all. They adjourn to the parking lot, Boyd in the lead, Raylan stopping to shrug out of his flannel, hang his hat up on a nail sticking out from a support beam for the awning. 

“You boys better not call the law after we’re done tunin you up,” says the bigger guy as he begins to circle them.

Raylan twists his horseshoe ring until it’s tucked to the inside of his finger, more to protect his own knuckle, Boyd suspects, than the faces of these boys. He meets Boyd’s eye even as they both turn to keep the big guy in their sights. “That’s not what I’d be worryin about, if I were you.”

Both men are quite a bit bigger, pound for pound, than either Raylan or Boyd, but in the end it doesn’t matter. It’s almost pathetic, how mismatched they are. Though it’s clear they’ve been in back alley scuffles a time or two themselves, these boys fight drunk and uncoordinated, all brute force and no finesse. Raylan and Boyd move in sync, as though guided by one mind, like the twin hands of God. Back to back, they have bar fighting down to an art, a science—muscle memory possessing them, a ghost in the machine left behind by the year and a half they spent on the picket lines, in their free time starting shit just for fun. Even then, something deeper lurked beneath, that first brawl cracking their world down to the bedrock, exposing the trace fossils of fights they didn’t even remember, way back in the first grade. They did this before they did anything else: before dancing, or fucking, or even what they did down in the mine. It’s the oldest manifestation of their love, its first primitive language, developed over decades into a complex web of connection, the way all language does, but still with that seed intact at the center of it. In every punch thrown, those little boys whispering down through the years: I got your back. The message pared down to its simplest form, baser instinct even than sex.

It doesn’t take long before Raylan and Boyd hit their rhythm, frisson humming between their bodies like tuning forks singing at the same frequency. Though hardly the best fighters they ever threw down against, these guys hold their own long enough to unlock a primal satisfaction in putting them down, enough to leave Boyd hard by the end of it. Eventually, they seem to realize their best bet is to get Raylan and Boyd separate, and they split off in opposite directions, forcing each of them to choose a man to follow. When Raylan gets his friend down in the dirt, Boyd notices the curly-haired guy reaching for a two-by-four, and on a dime all the fun blows out of it, Boyd going dead-eyed and blindered, like a shark. He sees it reflected in the other man’s wide eyes; he knows he’s made a wrong move, but he can’t do a thing about it, now—can only watch the devil he’s unleashed bearing down. Boyd gets to the two-by-four first, and though he never played any baseball, he still hits his mark. What would have been nothing but a pop fly into foul territory clips the man under the chin and drops him in one.

When Boyd turns to look for Raylan, he finds the other guy groaning and holding a bleeding nose, using his free hand to try and push himself upright. Boyd watches him for a moment, head tipped like a crow’s, as he wriggles through the hard dust of the near-empty lot: a worm halfway to drying up, desperate for a bit of wet earth. His own man out cold, Boyd crouches to grab the big guy by the hair, pull his head up til his ear meets Boyd’s mouth. “How you like us faggots now?”

“C’mon, Boyd,” says Raylan from his place by the pillar where he hung his hat, which has already found its way back on his head. He’s a simple, goal-oriented man, gets bored with a thing as soon as it stops twitching; Boyd likes to bat them around a little, after, like a cat playing with a mouse—just to prove he could kill them, if he wanted to, and it’s not by God’s grace but his own that he doesn’t.

Boyd shakes the guy a little with the hand still fisted in his hair. “Stay down,” he whispers. He lays the guy’s head down almost gently, pats him on the cheek again, no protest this time, before setting his hands on his thighs and pushing himself up to standing. “All right, Raylan. You wanna get out’a here, let’s get out’a here.”

That they have to leave in separate cars rankles, each minute of the drive adding insult to injury. Even with time and the fight to sober them up, getting behind the wheel is probably less than advisable for either of them, but Boyd’s not so drunk as to really excuse the way he butts up against Raylan as he climbs out of his van to meet him in front of the house. Then again, he’s never needed an excuse; not to himself, or his boy: not the way Raylan does.

They part again on the other side of the door, one last brush of their bruised knuckles before Boyd steps away. With his busted lip still leaking a sluggish stream of blood, he heads for the stairs while Raylan stops to square things with the sitter, their low voices drifting up after him. A few minutes pass before Boyd hears boots on the steps and turns to watch the doorknob twist, the door swinging inward to grant Raylan entry. Pushing it closed behind him, Raylan takes off his hat, and Boyd sees that his eyebrow’s split down the middle, the blood smeared around a little by the brim. He reaches out and presses a thumb to one side of the cut, Raylan hissing under his touch, seeming torn between flinching back and pressing forward into Boyd’s hand. “Ow.”

“Big guy got a couple’a good licks in, huh?”

Raylan cants his chin in the direction of Boyd’s split lip. “You’re one to talk.”

Boyd hums his agreement, still prodding at the cut. “You want a butterfly bandage?”

“Don’t hardly need it.” 

He pushes Boyd back toward the bed, and they nearly take a tumble as Boyd’s feet get tangled up in a discarded pair of jeans. He does a stomp double like he’s clogging, that old muscle memory the only thing keeping him on his feet as the fabric twines around his ankles and pulls taut. Steadying himself on Raylan’s shoulder, he glances pointedly down at the denim now under his heels. “All your time off and you couldn’t take a minute to clean up in here?”

Raylan pushes him back onto the bed, follows after him. “Ain’t your maid.”

“If I’m not mistaken, those are your jeans.”

Raylan pushes up, props himself on his palms above Boyd, the better to fix him with an impatient look. “What, is this some kind’a sex thing? You wanna put the brakes on this so you can sit on the bed and watch me clean?”

“I’m just sayin,” says Boyd, but he relents, lets Raylan lock his lips around Boyd’s bloody one, drawing it up into his mouth. When they pull apart again, he levels Raylan with a look of his own. “You accusing me of bein kinky like you ain’t just licked up my blood.”

Raylan shrugs, kisses him again, his mouth coming away marked with a little slick of red before he tongues it clean. “Licked up worse off’a you.”

Boyd huffs, moves his mouth out of reach. “Well that’s rude.”

Raylan goes back up on his elbows and gazes down at Boyd, mouth creased with fond exasperation. “I was more thinkin coal dust.”

“Oh.” Boyd settles back down. He hooks his ankle around Raylan’s to tug him closer. “That’s all right, then.”

Raylan shakes his head. “Dumbass.” He presses his thumb to the divot above Boyd’s chin, turns his lip out to better examine the cut there. “You think it’d hurt you too much to suck it?”

Boyd pushes Raylan’s finger away with his tongue, and Raylan’s hand retreats obediently. “I recall correctly, you bloodied my lip yourself, first time I tried to get you to put it in your mouth.”

Raylan’s breath sticks in his chest like he’s breathing through a wound. “And then you sucked me just to prove a point.”

“I didn’t hear no complainin at the time,” Boyd says, pushing Raylan onto his back and beginning to make his way down.

Raylan gets a hand around the hair at the back of Boyd’s head, his grip loose but somehow more possessive for it, like he knows Boyd’ll go exactly where he wants him without being led: a horse that knows where the water is, and dying for a drink. “You sure? ‘Cause I remember callin you a cocksucker a good five times while you were down there.”

It had been three times, by Boyd’s count of it, though the first comes clearest to his mind. See, Raylan had said, sounding equal parts scared and aroused, turned on despite himself as Boyd pressed a bloody kiss against his cockhead. You're the cocksucker. Not me.

Boyd had glanced up through his eyelashes. You want I should stop?

Boyd, was all Raylan managed in response; Boyd reckons he was trying to sound steely, uncompromising, but it had come out on a whine, which Boyd interpreted as tacit permission to continue.

Here, a hundred miles north of that woods where Boyd first got on his knees, he shrugs: prods his lip, imagines the sting of the stretch—remembers it singing straight down to his cock, back then. “I took it as a compliment.” He licks blood from the cut, considers Raylan’s dick, then reaches out to give it a little goose, chub it up, like he hasn’t seen it a thousand times before, hard and soft and every which way in between. “I reckon we can work somethin out.”

~~~

The next day goes better, no notes home or ice cream meltdowns, though Raylan does give in and tidy up a little; Boyd’s finally making strides in the kitchen remodel, and Raylan figures it’s only fair. He starts to feel like he’s actually on vacation, a beer in one hand while half-assing a few house chores, followed by a longer shower than he’d normally afford himself, and even a bit of harmless flirting with Lissy’s teacher during pickup, Pemberley electing to remain in the car this time. Boyd calls him mean for it, when he’s around to see, in tones of covert appreciation—he likes when Raylan’s mean—but Boyd isn’t around to see, which kind of takes the fun out of it, so Raylan doesn’t linger long. He’s got the girls ensconced in front of the TV Boyd found on Craigslist while he fixes them a quick snack in the corner that could generously be called a kitchenette when Boyd gets home, and he dumps their plates on the coffee table before dragging Boyd up the stairs to initiate his favorite vacation activity: daytime sex.

The girls have just retreated to their room, Boyd sanding something in the kitchen by the sound of it, when Raylan’s phone rings. It’s a Lexington number, at a glance, and he thumbs the button to accept the call. “Hello?”

“Raylan?”

He resists the urge to take the phone away from his ear and stare at it. “Winona?“

“Yeah,” she says, matter-of-fact, not quite managing to turf out the sheepishness lurking around the edges. “I got your number from Art.”

“Of course you did.” Raylan sighs, leans a hip against the back of the couch. “What can I do for you?”

“Why do you assume I want somethin from you?”

Raylan lets his silence speak for a beat. “Because you got my number off Art?”

Winona blows out a breath, a quick stream of static down the line. “That’s true.” She pauses. “It was a bit odd, actually; when I asked him, he said he figured there were some things we got to hash out. You have any idea what he meant by that?”

“Couldn’t say,” Raylan lies; he sort of figured she was calling on account of the rumors spreading like wildfire through the courthouse, himself. It gives him pause, pinging some old instinct set deep during their six years of marriage. Whatever she’s calling about must be bothering her enough to distract her from the speculative looks, the conversations no doubt stuttering to an abrupt stop when she enters a room, too. She was always attuned to that kind of thing. “What was it you needed?”

“Oh.” She sounds almost startled by the question, like she wasn’t the one who called him in the first place. “It’s just... are you sure none of those names came up hot? From that list I gave you.”

“Yeah I’m sure, Winona. Why?”

She pauses for a moment, and Raylan wishes he could see her face; she never did learn to guard her expression, her complexion eggshell-smooth and just as fragile. “Nothing.”

“So you went to all that trouble gettin my number from Art... for nothing.”

“No.” She blows out a frustrated breath. “I don’t know. That’s what Gary said, that it was nothing.”

“What was nothing?” It always was like pulling teeth, with her, when she thought giving a straight answer might cede even an inch of ground in an argument Raylan didn’t even know they were having, half the time. But they’re not married anymore, and she’s the one who called him. It’s not his job to draw her out gentle, to tease free the problem she won’t admit having—he owes her more than most, maybe, but he doesn’t owe her that.

She’s quiet for a moment, the kind of pregnant pause that preceded a hundred stillborn conversations, each a rest in the funeral dirge that heralded the end of their marriage, and then she sighs. “Wynn Duffy came by the house.”

“Shit,” says Raylan, straightening from his slouch against the back of the sofa. “What he do?”

“Nothin.”

Raylan’s jaw pulls tight. “Winona—“

“Mostly nothing.” She lets out a sound too choked with breathless anger to be called a laugh. “I got home and he was standing there in my livin room.”

Raylan’s hand tightens around his cell phone. “He broke in?”

He can’t see her, but he can tell from the slight pause before her answer that she shrugs. “Well, he got in somehow, though I can’t say as I saw anything broken.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Not directly. He said he was some security consultant, that Gary had hired him.”

“Well, what’d Gary say?”

“He played dumb,” she says, and Raylan hears a rustling in the background, like she’s moving papers around. He glances at the clock on the microwave, still relegated to the living room, and realizes she must be at work. “Accused me of bein a snoop. He also said... you went to see him?”

She says it hesitantly, like she hopes she got it wrong somehow. Raylan refuses to fall into the reflexive apology. “I did.”

She groans, a pained sound that lingers in the back of her throat. It catches somewhere in Raylan’s gut, a remembered ache: that punch thrown long ago, but still felt sometimes when the weather turns. “God, Raylan. Why?”

He ducks his head, avoiding eyes he can feel on him from twenty miles away. He notices then that someone’s plucked a thread loose from the upholstery of the couch, which came furnished with the house; the fabric is odd, knobbly, not really plaid but threaded through with other colors hidden amongst the navy. “You and I were married six years, Winona,” he says, smoothing the thread down flat, “and in that time, your instincts were not often wrong. You tell me there’s a problem, well—I figure there’s a problem.”

“And you just assumed that problem had to do with my new husband?”

The thread pops back up, and Raylan pinches it between his fingers, tugs it til it snaps. He feels around with his fingertips but can’t find the end of it, now flush with the upholstery. “Was I wrong?”

Raylan waits through a moment of grudging silence before Winona finally sucks her teeth, run out of patience with herself. “No.”

He nods to himself, leans on the couch again. “Do you know why Duffy was there?”

“No,” she says, too firm to be trusted, and Raylan waits her out. She hesitates, then relents. “Well, maybe.”

After a good thirty seconds during which she fails to elaborate, Raylan prompts her again. “Yeah?” 

She sighs, and it seems to sweep away the last of her reticence, leaving behind a worn resignation, threadbare as the back of the couch. “Gary has this development deal: some land he bought, a while back. So my guess is, if he’s in trouble, it’s got somethin to do with that.”

Raylan turns to lean more heavily against the couch as he considers this. “Tough time to be developin.”

“Raylan,” she says, and he hears a soft click that must be her wedding ring against the phone; he imagines her switching hands to rub at her temple, way she does when she’s stressed. “Please don’t go talk to him again.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” says Raylan. “Now, Wynn Duffy?” He lifts one shoulder in a shrug, studying the wall behind the sofa, the paper peeling in a few places around the molding. As far as jobs on Boyd’s list, that one’s pretty far down: a minor annoyance, like the loose thread on the couch—no immediate functional need to address it, but it niggles in the back of your head. “Different story.”

“Raylan...”

He holds up a hand, though he knows she can’t see it. Raylan trusts that she can read him in his silences the same way he can read her. “I’ll just stop by the place for a peaceful chat.”

Winona’s snort sends a burst of static over the line, connection crackling with the force of her disbelief.

“What?” says Raylan. “You don’t think I’m capable?”

“I think your definition of peaceful could use some work.” But when she speaks again, her voice comes through softer, more genuine. “Thank you, Raylan.”

He pauses, struck off-balance by her sudden sincerity. “Sure.” Pemberley’s sweater is on the floor, and he sighs, bends to grab it, tosses it over the back of the couch. It’s one of her favorites—maybe, Raylan thinks, because it reminds her of Miami: shades of blue and teal fading into each other like the slow gradation of a coastal shelf, water darkening as it gets deeper; cable knit in alternating patterns like waves. He smooths it out, careful not to let his ring catch on the weave, and picks some lint off the sleeve. “I’ll let you know what I find out.” She thanks him again, says goodbye, and he echoes it. Thumbing the button that ends the call, he pockets his phone and turns toward the empty hallway. “Pemberley, quit leavin your shit all over the floor! We just got into this house and already I can’t walk two feet without trippin.”

A moment, footsteps, and she pops her head in the doorway. Her braid swings into view, long enough now to get caught in the crook of her elbow, hanging down neat and straight without the flyaways. Today had gone better for her, too: the storm passed, ventilation fans turned on to suck the bad air out through the surface raise. “What? ‘Fraid you’ll break a hip?”

“Quit being a smartass and come put this away. I ain’t your maid.” He tosses the sweater to her when she gets close, waits for her to catch it, and grabs his hat off the rack by the door. “Tell your daddy—“

“Tell me what?” asks Boyd from the doorway behind her; Raylan’s not sure when he left the kitchen. Can’t have been too long, his shirtsleeves still rolled up and sawdust on his boots, little pockets of the stuff turning up from the creases in his jeans as his weight shifts. “Where you goin?”

Raylan sets the hat on his head, grabs his keys. “I got to go check up on somethin.”

Boyd steps aside to let Pem by, skimming a hand over the top of her head as she passes, then looks up at Raylan. He crosses his arms—Raylan, momentarily distracted, watches the bands of corded muscle flexing in his forearms. “I was under the impression you was on vacation.”

“Ain’t for work.” Raylan meets his eye, tries to telegraph some measure of regret. He’ll surely miss those arms; the second round that hadn’t made its way past idle thought on Raylan’s part; even just the sounds of him in the next room, unseen but present, accounted for, that disembodied voice muttering to itself, things Raylan couldn’t make out and didn’t need to. “It shouldn’t take long.”

Boyd leans a hip on the door jamb and studies him. “All right.” He stands there a moment, like he’s waiting for something, though Raylan doesn’t know what. Some shutter rattles down behind his eyes, like a storefront closing up shop, as though timed to a clock Raylan didn’t even know was set, and he pushes off the doorframe. “Wanna grab Chinese on the way home?” He sounds normal, but that shutter remains drawn, no light or movement visible behind it.

“Will do.”

Boyd nods, heads for the kitchen without making any move toward Raylan where he’s hovering by the door. “So. What manner of trouble, exactly, is your ex-wife in?”

Raylan winces slightly; he’d been wondering how much of that phone call Boyd overheard, after hitting up against the realization he must have passed through the room when Raylan wasn’t paying attention. “I’ll let you know when I find out.” 

Boyd regards him, his expression opaque. “Apparently, you say that to all the girls.” 

With Winona, he’d wanted to see the look on her face, but Raylan thinks he can read Boyd best when he can’t see him at all, or hear his voice, guided only by that sixth sense for one another they’ve always shared: two magnets, sightless and searching, knowing exactly where the other stands by pull alone. The sight of him’s just interference, now, his hard flat stare crossing the wires of what Raylan knows blind. 

Boyd turns away. “Don’t forget the Chinese,” he calls over his shoulder as he disappears into the kitchen. Raylan pulls his hat down in front of his eyes and swears quietly to himself, then tips it back level and opens the door, stepping out into the afternoon light.

~~~

Boyd’s phone rings on the counter above him while he’s jammed head and shoulders in the cupboard under the sink, checking out the drain pipe. He nearly cracks his head on the underside of the basin struggling out, swearing under his breath as he gropes around up there without getting off the floor. He sees Raylan’s name and huffs, but hits the button to answer the call. “Raylan.”

“Hey.” He sounds distracted. “Come meet me at that bar from last night.”

It’s a good thing Boyd’s not under the sink anymore; he’d have probably knocked himself out cold with how fast he sits up. “Jesus wept,” he says, any lingering coldness in his voice thawed and dried and used as tinder. Boyd should have sent him under there to fix the plumbing; if anyone could do with a knock upside the head, it’s Raylan. At least unconscious he couldn’t borrow trouble. Boyd could have answered his phone, told Winona where to shove it, and then deleted all evidence the call ever came through. “Boy, you got to be just about the single dumbest fuck God ever stuck a dick on. You tryin’a get gay-bashed, goin back there by yourself?”

“Wasn't exactly planned,” says Raylan, each word drawn out into long laconic syllables. “Could use the eyes’a some better angels, just now.”

Boyd hooks his free elbow around his knee, narrows his eyes. Bumblebee wanders over to stick her nose in the open cupboard door at his back, and he shifts to bar her entry, strokes a finger behind her ear in silent conciliation. “Hell’s that mean?”

“I’m bein tailed,” says Raylan, like he’s talking about the weather: it’s sunny and warm with one single cloud, and it’s following Raylan Givens around, raining shit. And Boyd and their babies got front row seats in the splash zone.

“Shit, Raylan.” He scrubs a hand over his eyes, then blinks, put-out, when he remembers too late about the plaster dust coating them, the jagged little particles already digging troughs through his sclera. “What you do?”

Raylan, never easy except in all the ways he is, doesn’t answer the question. “Just—meet me at the bar, okay?”

Boyd pushes himself up off the floor, dusts his knees and the seat of his jeans. Bumblebee’s back to sniffing around the open cupboard, and Boyd nudges her away with his foot as he bumps it closed. The sink’s still gutted, his work interrupted, now sure to be set back half a day at least; Bumblebee scrambles out from underfoot, watching reproachfully from the bottom of the staircase, as he stomps to the laundry room to rinse his hands. “Christ. Fine. I’ll be there in an hour.”

Boyd hears the hollowed-out sound of a glass striking wood over the low, staticky buzz of music threaded through a phone line: Raylan’s drink hitting the bar. “I’ll be here.”

“Fuckin better be.” He kicks the laundry room door open, elbows the light on so as not to track plaster dust all over the wall, then uses the same technique to goose the faucet on the utility sink. “Goddamn, Raylan.”

“Sorry,” says Raylan, and he even almost sounds it.

Boyd hangs up with him and, after a quick scrub up to the elbows and a wet palm drawn over his eyes a few times, dials the sitting service, not holding out much hope that they can get someone over from Lexington in time. His suspicion bears out, the receptionist’s voice apologetic over the line, as though she knows she might be making him a liar, and he spins the phone slowly between thumb and finger as he thinks. That’s when he remembers the neighbor kid, high school girl, who came up the driveway their second day in the house, Lissy and Pem playing out in the yard, and introduced herself with a smile and an outstretched hand, made a point to mention her first-aid certification and all the families in town she’d babysat for. He heads for the newly christened junk drawer, already accumulating the eponymous odds and ends, and digs around for the local phone book the homeowner passed off on him when he handed over the keys.

This phone call goes better, and Boyd hangs up with some hope of actually getting to the bar on time. When the other shoe drops, it’s on the home front: Pemberley, having listened in on his phone call long enough to catch the gist, announces loudly that they’re having a babysitter again, which sets Felicity off, the same deadly kind of chain reaction that leads to laboratory accidents and cave-ins. With the news they’re about to suffer the second stranger in as many days, Lissy spins out like a truck on the highway hitting glare ice, losing what tenuous grip on composure she can claim even on her best days. She skids into the kind of tantrum can’t be touched by either carrot or stick—not whining or stomping her feet, just standing in the middle of the living room, crying fit to break his heart—and Boyd spends the rest of the half hour before the sitter gets there brushing her hair back where it’s clinging to her cheeks, tacky as they are with tears, and trying to talk her through it. When she finally settles, eyes wide and glassy, Boyd thinks it’s less anything he said to her and more a kind of hypnosis triggered by the low, steady hum of his voice. He sets her up on the couch with the TV turned to an audio channel playing old country standards, and she promptly falls asleep, Patsy Cline singing softly in the background as a knock sounds on the door. I’m always walkin, she says, as Boyd steps quietly to answer it, after midnight, searching for you.

~~~

“That Inez Pearlman is a shark,” Boyd says as he slides onto the stool beside Raylan’s, knocking their knees together in silent greeting. It’s the kind of gentle glancing blow others might see as accidental—a continuation of momentum—but Raylan knows better.

Raylan looks over at him, glass paused halfway to his mouth. “Ain’t she fifteen years old?” 

“Yeah, and she’s got a dangerously acute business sense.”

“What she do?” Raylan asks, sipping his drink. Bridge on the River Kwai is over, 3:10 to Yuma playing now on the TV mounted behind the bar, at which the boys from last night have yet to post up. His knee knocks Boyd’s in return. They come to rest like that, knees pressed warm together, the weight of love balanced with the lightness of plausibility deniability: their traditional barroom greeting from the old days, and no need to fix what ain’t broke.

Boyd leans in, and Raylan guards his bourbon a little; the drink Raylan ordered for him’s not ready yet, but Raylan knows better than to think Boyd’ll let that stop him. Instead of trying to steal it, Boyd extends two fingers to drag in the cardboard coaster left over from the beer Raylan started with. He flips it up into his hand and taps its edge on the bar. Raylan eyes him warily. It would be just like Boyd to flick it at him, same way the big guy had last night, trying to be funny. “Upcharged me for last minute sitting.”

Raylan hums and watches Boyd’s hand as he flips the coaster absently between his fingers; looks like he’s holding onto it for now. “‘Cause she knew you wouldn’t be able to find anyone else in time?” Boyd makes a brief, annoyed face in confirmation, and Raylan nods his head. “Smart girl.”

“Won’t say I’m unimpressed,” Boyd allows, lifting his hand to let the coaster fall flat. “Should’a known from the way she honed in on us for her pitch soon as she saw we had young kids.” Having reached the end of his patience, or at least the time he’s willing to wait, Boyd reaches past the protective crook of Raylan’s elbow to steal his glass. He takes some, holds it in his mouth with his eyes closed as to savor it—probably thinks it tastes better stolen, the asshole—then swallows it down. “What you call me here for, anyway? Better be worth breakin the bank to pad Ms. Pearlman’s college fund.”

“Maybe,” says Raylan. “You heard’a Wynn Duffy?”

Boyd looks up from Raylan’s drink. “Can't say as I have.” There’s a smudge of white plaster dust just below his ear, and Raylan reaches out to thumb it away, the bartender’s back turned, the two other guys in the bar too absorbed in a game of pool to pay them any mind. Boyd leans into his touch. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” says Raylan, letting his hand fall back to the bartop—can’t help looking to the bartender, the poolplayers, just to make sure no one saw and took exception, a force of long habit and longer fear. “But I know Gary’s mixed up with him somehow.”

Boyd lowers the glass, eyes narrowing. “In what capacity?”

“Not sure. Nothin good, any rate. I got someone lookin into it.”

Boyd taps a finger against the tumbler, considering. “So one’a them names popped?”

Raylan shakes his head and steals his drink back from Boyd, who lets him, fingers opening easy and dragging slightly over Raylan’s before they fall away: another ostensibly innocent point of contact, held just a touch too long. “No. Winona called me up and said this guy broke into her house, started makin veiled threats.”

“Not many ways to take that, are there?” Boyd murmurs. His eyes darken as Raylan lines his mouth up with the faint print where Boyd’s was and takes a sip, a transitive kiss. “You call me down here to inform me of your darin plan?”

Raylan hums in agreement and lowers the glass. “And I was hopin you’d drive me to see my informant. I got to shake a tail.”

~~~

In the end, it turns out the bartender isn’t just a lazy asshole, instead merely an accessory to assholery of a different sort. He drops some fruity blue monstrosity down in front of Boyd, Raylan snorting back laughter while Boyd sits there blinking at it. Apparently, he’d used his time alone at the bar productively: had managed to work out that Boyd was mad, but not mad enough he couldn’t be shocked out of it a little by a well-timed joke. It works well enough, even if the elaborateness of the drink does knock said timing slightly awry, and Boyd feels himself losing ground. Not quite willing to laugh along just yet, he picks the glass up by the stem and drinks it down like he’d ordered it himself. Raylan watches him as he does it—watches like he’s hoping, looking for a crack big enough to wriggle his fingers into, get a hold on and pull that hard shell of anger away completely. Boyd thinks he could stand to wait a little longer.

He refuses to crack at the bar, or when Raylan butts up against him in the doorway on the way out, or in the parking lot, when Raylan keeps glancing his way like he’s trying to be subtle about it. In his van, Boyd looks over at Raylan only as long as he’s willing, behind the wheel of a vehicle cruising at thirty-five down a street in what he’d seen as a big city, once. “You just love to make things difficult, don’t you. Two babysitters in as many days; how you think that went down?”

Raylan tips his head back til the hat slips down over his eyes. “Not well, I’m guessin, else I wouldn’t be hearin about it.”

“Not well, he says: Raylan Givens, truly a master in the art of litotes.” He signals, checks his mirrors, turns left; Raylan gave him directions, and Boyd’s always been good at keeping things in his head. “Your daughter pitched a fit.”

Raylan huffs from under his hat. “Why’s she my daughter when she’s showin out?”

“Well,” Boyd says slow, like he fears maybe Raylan got punched harder last night than they’d figured, something more busted up than just the eyebrow, “I suppose on account of she’s your daughter all the time, Raylan.”

“Fuck off,” says Raylan. “You know what I meant. As I recall, between the two of us coming up, you were the one given to fits. I’d just cry and punch somebody.”

Boyd snorts, cuts his eyes sideways: sees nothing but the crown of Raylan’s hat and a familiar chin poking out underneath it, hint of scruff escaping the bounds of that artful stubble he keeps. “Yeah. ‘Cause that don’t sound like her at all.”

It’s ten minutes until the restaurant this guy Pinter’s holed up at, and they spend the next five of them quiet, Boyd content to keep his peace. Finally, Raylan asks, low, “She really upset?”

Boyd’s eyes flicker his way again. “Took me more’n twenty minutes to talk her down, way she was goin. Not yellin at me: just wouldn’t stop cryin.”

“Fuck,” says Raylan in his misery voice, the one Boyd can’t help a tug of sympathetic feeling for, catching like a spark; a yawn; a smile. “I just keep fuckin up with her, huh?”

Boyd lets out a breath, finally letting go his tight hold on that anger; it never did come natural to him, where Raylan’s concerned. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think she made it far enough in her figurin to pin any blame on you. I’m the one who made the phone call.”

Raylan’s still hiding under his hat, and a groan sounds quiet from behind it. “I’m supposed to feel better you caught the brunt’a the shit I kicked up?”

Boyd makes his smooth way into a turn, hands crossing over each other instead of spinning the wheel around the one, always more precise in his driving when he’s using it as distraction from something else. “That’s the way it goes, ain’t it? Never the guy kickin up the shit gets splashed with it.”

“I’m gettin hit,” Raylan mutters, looking away out the window. Boyd lets it lie all the way to the restaurant, an unhappy silence, nothing more to be said about it and no productive moves toward a resolution to be made here in this car.

When they arrive at their destination, they find street parking only. At the tail end of rush hour, there aren’t many free spots, but Boyd manages to snake into one as it opens, pulling up neatly against the curb. Raylan gets a leg out of the car before it’s even fully stopped and turns to Boyd across the console. 

“Wait here.”

Boyd hits him with a warning look, Raylan about to walk himself back into the anger he just talked his way out of. “Wait here, nothin. Didn’t bring home no Chinese food; I’m fuckin half starved.”

Raylan, unmoved, nods to the Five Guys across the street. “So go in there, get somethin.”

“I believe that defeats the purpose of it bein your night.”

Raylan huffs, swings his other leg out and unfolds himself from the passenger seat. “It’s that or an egg cream.”

“Fine.” Boyd climbs out of the van and steps sideways to lean his elbows on the hood of it, waits for Raylan to mirror him. “You want somethin? Burger? Fixins?”

Raylan blinks, trying to pretend he’s not thrown by the offer. Boyd’s not feeling quite generous enough to let on that he finds it endearing. “Yeah. And a vanilla shake.”

Boyd smiles despite himself. “Well color me surprised.”

“What,” says Raylan. “You ain’t gonna get it for me?”

“When I ever deny you what you wanted, Raylan Givens?”

Raylan grants him mercy in not bringing up the one time he did, that split still looming large over their shared history like a flat-topped mountain that once leaked poison, long since cauterized, the colliery abandoned, peak replaced and a spoil tip holding the slurry at bay. At the end of a long look, they split apart once more, like one man walking away from a mirror, each entering a restaurant on opposite sides of the street. On closer inspection, small differences distinguish the men—one in a hat, the other losing his hair, an inch of height lost between them, almost all of it in the leg—and the restaurants: one nicer than the other, sedate red awning, the ambient glow through colored glass lampshades. In its seedier twin, long fluorescent lights reflect in greasy pools off a laminate floor made to imitate tile. Boyd looks for Raylan through two sets of windows, but can’t find his hat. 

When the line spits him out in front of the counter, Boyd orders them both burgers, double patties stacked with American cheese, lettuce, tomato, grilled onion, pickles for him and none for Raylan, two cartons of Cajun fries and Raylan’s vanilla shake, a chocolate one with candy thrown in for himself. Boyd’s back in the car by the time Raylan winds his way outside. Boyd tosses the burger on his lap when he climbs up into the passenger side, and Raylan fumbles it slightly, foil wrapper crinkling between his hands. He catches it and frowns at Boyd. “Paid money for this; you want it should end up on the floor?”

Boyd peels the wrapping off his own burger. “Thought you was supposed to be some big baseball star?”

Raylan just holds the sandwich there in his lap, apparently too distracted getting his dander up to think about his stomach. “Wasn’t a fuckin catcher, was I?”

“Naw,” Boyd says, poking a stray pickle back between patty and bun, “but you was first base. I’m given to understand a lot of catchin involved, there.”

Raylan shoots him a narrow-eyed look at the obvious innuendo. “Think we ought’a switch sides,” he says, pointed. “In fact, you should go in the back.”

“A modern Galileo Galilei, sent into exile for speaking the truth.”

Raylan drags his fry carton out of the paper bag and drops it in the cup holder. “You pretty full’a yourself, there,” he says, grabbing the end of a tangled-up fry and trying to extricate it without dumping half the cup in the footwell.

Boyd hefts his burger like raising a glass for a toast. “Show me someone not full of herself, and I’ll show you a hungry person.” He lifts the sandwich to his mouth, takes a big bite, as if in demonstration.

“Oh,” says Raylan, arch, “you a feminist, are you? Ain’t very good at it, leavin Winona stuck in the backseat and all.”

Boyd cuts his eyes over sharply. “Thought we was goin’a see Duffy.”

“He’s a slippery shit, outside’a business hours. Got a line on his man, though, one who tailed me. Billy Mac.” He shakes his head. “Make model license plate, idiot didn’t even realize I’d sighted him.” Boyd steals one of Raylan’s fries, his cup left unguarded between them. “You got your own,” Raylan says, frowning, but Boyd ignores him, uses the limp fry to gesture at the restaurant before biting it cleanly in two. 

“So why’d you need your informant?”

Raylan shrugs, giving up trying to suck his milkshake up through the straw and popping the glove compartment to dig around for a spoon. “Get a read on this guy, how he operates. Apparently, Duffy’s best known for sewin people’s faces onto soccer balls.”

“Well,” says Boyd, feeling his eyebrows trip upward, “he sounds like a real winner.”

“Sure would scare me out’a blockin the ball, I was the goalie on the other team.”

“But then, soccer never was your game of choice.”

Raylan shrugs, grabs another couple fries and polishes them off, licking salt and Cajun spice from his fingers. “Not theirs either, far as I can tell. Word is, Duffy’s deeply invested in women’s tennis. Billy Mac,” he says, opening his burger, “used to be a boxer.”

“That right?” Boyd digs down into the bag to fish the loose fries from the bottom. He stuffs a few into Raylan’s carton, to make up for the ones he pilfered before, and gets a crooked smile for his trouble. “Bit of an odd choice, for a body guard.”

“Well, who needs a gun when you can float like a butterfly, sting like a bee?”

“Maybe you ought’a take that little gem of wisdom to your boss, see how he likes it.”

Raylan takes a bite, chews and swallows. “I reckon he might favor that plan, for me specifically.”

“Well,” says Boyd, eyeing him across the console, “deleterious as you are to the criminal biome, I’d rather you a way to defend yourself ‘gainst the kind’a grizzlies you tend to piss off.”

“I follow national park protocol. Only kill them as already spilt blood.” 

Boyd just hums, noncommittal. 

After a moment, Raylan takes another bite of his burger. He waits until it’s all the way down the hatch before he speaks. He’s always been careful not to talk with his mouth full; Boyd knows he got belted for it more than once, less Arlo’s particular concern for table manners than his weather eye for any hint of an excuse. “Think you can take direction well enough to get us to Billy Mac?”

Boyd finishes the last bite of his burger and wipes his hands best he can on a napkin spotted with grease and dusted with Cajun spices, then reaches for the key already sitting in the ignition. “Raylan Givens. If you don’t know by now I’d let you lead me anywhere, you ain’t been paying attention.”

~~~

Billy Mac’s place isn’t the eyesore Raylan imagined, the paint color ugly in a bland sort of way; big white columns holding up a porch studded with squat potted plants, one of them hanging; a French door, glass painted off-white for privacy; single wrought iron rail flanking the porch stairs on one side. It’s a good sight easier on the eye than the place they’re staying, with its sagging porch and peeling paint, gutted kitchen, the bathroom wallpaper ripped away and no paint or paper put down to replace it. No potted plants, either, both of them born with black thumbs only made blacker by the mine, more suited to digging dead things out of the ground than pressing living things in.

A pocket of quiet opens up when Billy Mac cuts his engine, and Raylan turns to Boyd before he slips out into it. “Stay in the car.”

Boyd contrives to look wounded. “This again? Why Raylan, I am devastated. All these years we been together, just now to find out you only ever intended to use me for my van.”

“Come on, Boyd. We ain’t got time for this.”

His face is all shadow but for the glint of his eyes. He always struck Raylan hardest in full dark, when all he could see were the twin sparks in those eyes, reflection of the fuse; the teeth that near glowed. “What did I just say, ‘bout following you? I ain’t stayin in this van.”

Raylan stares him down a second longer, but Billy Mac’s getting out of the car, now, shoving his gun down the front of his jeans, and their window’s closing fast. He groans, breaks eye contact when he tips his head back, nearly unseating his hat. “Fine. Here.” He shoves his backup into Boyd’s hands. “You can stand in the door and look menacing, okay? Don’t use it.”

Boyd pops the magazine to check his ammo, then snaps it back in place. “Only in the face of extraordinary circumstances.”

“No, no,” Raylan says. “I know you, Boyd. Any circumstance can become extraordinary on the journey between your brain and your mouth.”

“Fine,” says Boyd. “Only in the face of imminent death.”

Raylan tips his head, considering. “Better.”

He exits the car, feels Boyd at his back as he creeps up behind Billy Mac, follows him to his apartment door. He waits for the click of the lock turning over before he grabs him by the wrist, other hand snaking past his hip like a reacharound, tugging the gun free of his waistband. He uses Billy Mac’s weight to push the door open, shoving him through it before following himself. Gun secured, he lets Billy Mac go, pushes him hard away. He steps forward to let Boyd slip in behind him. The whole dance takes no more than a few seconds, all told, and the door’s clicked shut before Billy Mac turns around.

Raylan leans to flick the switch on the wall beside him. In the sudden flood of dirty light—at least one shorted bulb, at Raylan’s count—Billy Mac’s eyes jump behind him onto Boyd, unnerved. “It’s a nice place,” Raylan offers, drawing those eyes back to the gun he has fixed on Billy, center mass. He knows Boyd’s got his backup trained on Billy’s head: knows without looking back, that pull between them only heightened by the presence of iron and shadow, one brought down with them into the dark, the other following behind them as they crawled back into the light.

Billy Mac stands like a street fighter more than a boxer, weight tipped too far forward, hands fisted at his sides. “What’a you want?”

There’s an odd scent in the air, the sour tang of flesh in decay, and Raylan sniffs, wrinkles his nose. “What is that smell?” He hears Boyd snort behind him, barely audible even from Raylan’s distance—a sound just for him, drawing a circle around the joke with only them inside it—and grins. “You got a dead cat in here or somethin?” He looks around, like he might spot it mounted and staring right there on the sofa.

Billy Mac angles his body to try and force Raylan’s eyes back on him, clearly unused to being the least intimidating man in the room; Raylan would almost feel bad for him, if it weren’t for everything else. “You ain’t gonna be smiling when I knock your teeth out.”

“Oh, you gonna bob and weave out’a the path of a bullet?” says Raylan. “‘Cause that I’d like to see.” He gestures to the couch with Billy’s gun. “Sit down.”

Billy Mac starts making his way to the couch, at the end of a gun and no way to go but down, either of his own volition or Raylan’s. He unzips his sweatshirt, pulls it off to bare his arms, trying to scrabble back some measure of control—look casual, like the idea to sit down was his own. “How’d you find out where I live?”

“Well, that was easy,” says Raylan, grabbing a kitchen chair in one hand and setting it on the near side of the coffee table, across from the couch. “I just asked everyone I saw where the dumbest broken down ne’er-was boxer in all of Kentucky lived, and they all told me to come here.” He points down at the floor with Billy’s gun, like sticking a pin in a map. 

Billy Mac laughs tightly and sits. He makes himself comfortable, but ruins it by leaning forward with his elbows braced, showing off his biceps—probably thinks the muscles standing out there look intimidating. “Okay. What the hell you want?”

Raylan sits, splays his legs, leans back into the comfort of the upper hand and Boyd at his six. “I want you to tell me what Duffy has planned for Gary.”

“Well, why don’t you go ask Duffy? I just take orders.”

“If I wanted to ask Duffy,” Raylan says, in tones of strained patience, “I’d have his gun pointed at him.“ He gestures with the gun again, feels Boyd’s eyes on him; Boyd likes to watch him play with his food.

Billy Mac cracks his knuckles, glances away sullenly. “All right. You wanna know what we’re gonna do to Gary? And your ex-wife?“ Raylan feels his eyes go hard, flint in one and steel in the other, but somehow Billy Mac mistakes it for surprise. “Yeah. We’s not so stupid as you thought, huh? I know why you care about that dumb bitch.”

Raylan stares back, lets the flint strike the steel just long enough to spit out a warning spark. “Disrespect her again, I’ll put a hole in your leg.”

Billy Mac blinks, then rallies. “Well, from what I understand, she filed for divorce, which means she left you.” Raylan looks away at that. “Someone said they were gonna whoop on my ex-wife, I’d probably thank ‘em.”

“Well, that’s awfully compassionate of you, Billy Mac.”

“Why’d yours leave you, lawman? Sight of your gun not turn her on anymore?”

“Jesus Christ, son,” says Boyd from the doorway. “Keep runnin your mouth, and if he doesn’t shoot you, I will.”

Billy’s eyes flicker his way, like he’s just now remembered Boyd’s presence: a fool enough to lose track of a man in the shadows with a gun trained dead between his eyes. “Who the hell is he?”

“Oh, you mean you don’t know about him? Well, I thought you knew everything.” Billy Mac looks back and forth between them, like no one’s ever come at him with backup before. Raylan flicks the gun again to focus his attention. “Tell me what Duffy has planned.”

Billy Mac stays quiet still, and just as Raylan’s considering lifting his gun for a warning shot into the couch cushion, he catches Boyd moving out of the corner of his eye. “Look,” he says, stepping forward into the light. “Billy Mac, is it?” Under the same smokescreen of easy affability he wore leading up to their fight at the bar, Boyd seats himself on the sofa next to Billy Mac and casually tips the gun against his temple. “Surely even you can understand the precarious nature of the situation in which you now find yourself. Two men in your house with guns pointed at you? Not many ways to interpret that. But just because the circumstances are dire don’t mean the outcome is set in stone. We could leave here with a little more information and exactly the number of bullets we came in with, or we could depart with no information and leave a few bullets behind. Now I want you to think real carefully about which of those outcomes is more amenable to you. I will say, I don’t expect even you will have to think very hard before the answer comes clear.”

Billy Mac’s eyes, wide and white as an animal’s in the dark, stutter over to Raylan. “I thought you was a lawman?”

Raylan lifts one shoulder in a bare shrug. “I’m on vacation.”

After that, it’s only a matter of waiting for the words to fall out of him, like sand from a punctured heavy bag: their plan to grab Winona right out of her house, use her as a pawn to force Gary’s hand; the trash bags Billy Mac was supposed to pick up on the way. At the end of it, Raylan stands from his chair and dismantles Billy’s gun in front of him—drops the magazine out onto the floor, releases the slide stop and pulls the slide free. He points it at Billy Mac’s chest, dead-center, way he had with the gun when it was loaded. Boyd's shoulder brushes his as he heads around him toward the door, but Raylan doesn’t look over, eyes still locked on Billy.

“You know what, Billy Mac? Just because you can’t box and you're stupid don’t mean you got to end up dead.” He drops the slide on the table, takes the rest of the gun with him as he turns to go.

“Doesn’t matter if I’m dead or alive,” Billy Mac calls after him. “You’re not gonna stop Duffy.”

“I can tell you which one I’d prefer,” Boyd offers from his place by the door, and Raylan rolls his eyes, drags him out by the sleeve of his coat. Boyd takes to his heels easy enough, pulls the door shut behind them, though not without one last snake-eyed stare Billy’s way. He’s only a few steps behind, but when he reaches the van, Raylan’s already climbing in behind the wheel.

“Shit. Come on, we got to get Winona.”

~~~

Boyd climbs in the passenger side and returns Raylan’s pointed look with an eyeroll, clicking his seatbelt into place. “Don’t worry, chivalry ain’t dead just yet. I’ll move to the back when we get there.” 

Raylan huffs but lets it lie, turning the engine over and peeling out of the lot. He shoves his phone at Boyd, not needing to explain; Boyd flips it open, finds Winona’s number, presses call. Does it again when he hits the machine: for miles, the only sound between them that tinny ringing of a failed connection. It’s not until they’re on the highway, his hands so tight around the wheel Boyd can see the bones in his fingers, that Raylan speaks, and when he does it comes out rubber-band tight, snapping back on each word. “I told you to stay in the goddamn doorway.”

Boyd shrugs, unrepentant, seeing not much to be sorry for: no downside he can find in getting them that much closer to Raylan’s ex in that much less time. “I thought expediency was in our best interests, so I goosed the timeline just a touch.”

“Yeah, well—“ he’s interrupted by the line going live. “Winona?” Boyd takes the phone off speaker, hands it over. Raylan tucks it against his far ear: puts himself between Boyd and her voice like he’s borrowing time, trying to keep them separate just a little bit longer, two substrates with known properties that may become volatile, mixed. “I been calling you. You all right?” The line of his jaw relaxes incrementally at her answer. “Where are you? Gary with you?” His mouth pulls sideways, unhappiness like a fishhook caught in the corner. “All right, listen to me, you need to get your gun and get out of that house.” Boyd hears her voice come through, more strident now, and Raylan shakes his head once, sharp. “No, you’re not safe there. Take the gun, and come and meet me, and I’ll explain everything.” A furrow between his eyebrows as they draw down in frustration; Boyd wants to take his thumb and smooth it down, like a mark on wet clay made in error, a slip of the hand. “Why not?” Her response almost inaudible, tone returned to baseline, but whatever she says makes Raylan swear under his breath, repeat himself. “Okay, you’re not safe there. I need you to meet me at that cafe on route twenty-nine, I can be there in about—“ She cuts him off, and he frowns hard out the windshield. “Winona, this is not a joke.”

“Is she refusin to leave?” Boyd finds no particular difficulty in putting it together from what he’s heard, what he knows of Raylan; the expressions flickering over his face like images in a viewfinder, and what they give away. None of Boyd’s puzzles had all the pieces in them, growing up—secondhand to begin with, and Bowman tearing like a whirlwind through the house, leaving chaos in his wake, they scattered to the winds, all four corners of the world: kicked under the couch; skittered away out of sight when he knocked the box to the floor; even ate some of them, when he was real young. Boyd had to learn the hard way how to fill in the gaps. “And she ain’t even got a gun?”

“Shut up,” says Raylan, and then winces into the mouthpiece. “No, not you, just—lock the doors, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He hangs up and throws his phone into the cup holder, drags a hand over his face in such agitation he nearly unseats his hat.

“I can see why you liked her,” says Boyd after a moment. “She’s got Kentucky in her voice, refuses to bow in the face of imminent danger. It’s like home without the baggage.” He tips his head. “Though I suppose there’s baggage now.”

“Yes,” says Raylan, and if anything, his voice is tighter now than before, the sharp twang of a bowstring propelling each syllable. “Thank you for that assessment. Now please shut up.”

Boyd feels the first stirrings of anger flicker to life down in the pit of him: single flame of a fuse lit deep in the black. “I believe I am being remarkably calm about the fact that we’re invitin hell and high water to our doorstep for the sake of your ex. After you just recently kept me up half the night, lyin in our bed, wallowing in angst about why she left you.”

A sucking silence where his words were, like a shaft about to blow—that last deep breath proceeding the malevolent, rumbling laughter of the cave-in—but then Raylan fills it with a sigh, pries his hands up one after the other and flexes them, sets them loose again around the wheel. He flicks his eyes toward Boyd, sitting tense in the passenger seat, his turn to weather that rubber-band sting. “You’re right. Okay?”

Boyd just hums in reply, not quite ready to cut that fuse, but he feels some of the tension bleed out, softening the set of his shoulders. Raylan puts a hand on Boyd’s leg, and after a moment Boyd tangles their fingers together.

They pass a few miles like that, two men who’d sooner cut their tongues out as penance than use them to voice an apology, each recognizing that hollow-mouthed silence in the other. Raylan gives it time to steep before he stirs it with words. “Was kinda hot, actually,” he says, still looking out the windshield. “Way you tipped that gun against his head, easy as you please.”

“Near pissed himself,” says Boyd, with not inconsiderable relish. He grins, drags his thumb hard against the heel of Raylan’s in that massaging way Boyd knows he likes, listens for that low sound of pleasure he can’t help. Place where the pickax left him sore, once: now the gun. “You like that bit about the bullets?” he asks. “You get a little hard for me?” Another sweep of his thumb. “Imagine strippin me down, way you stripped down that gun?”

Raylan swallows, extricates his hand from Boyd’s in a lingering way—like he’d rather not, except that he has to. “We got to focus,” he says. “You ain’t givin me road head, if that’s what you’re after.”

They’re hardly strangers to it, cruising seventy miles an hour down Harlan backroads that saw a hundred cars a year if they saw any, no safer place for all it could have killed them. The necessity of it had worn the shine off real fast, though nostalgia’s since buffed out the worst of the dents. “Why, of course not, Raylan. That would be awfully irresponsible.” He slides his eyes sideways; Raylan’s slide to meet his. Like he knew Boyd would be looking, too. Boyd smiles at him. “I was aimin for a road handie.”

“Like hell,” says Raylan, but there’s a little smile stuck in the corner of his mouth, like he’s remembering too. Boyd settles back into satisfied silence, watching the last of the light leach from the sky, until everything outside the scope of their headlights disappears into a blackness deeper than the black of the asphalt, the road a silken thread unspooling from the darkness in which it might have been built up from scratch: the same void that spat out the whole of the world, or else two boys with their hands clasped, blinking death and sunlight from their eyes.

~~~

When they pull up in front of Winona’s, Raylan honks the horn three times in quick succession, opens the door with one hand while he puts the van in park with the other. He watches Boyd swing himself into the backseat with maybe a little too much interest, very nearly stumbling as he steps up onto the sidewalk. 

“That’s not your car,” says Winona, pausing as she opens the door to that big beautiful house, paid for with someone else’s blood money. 

“What?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder at the van idling against the curb, headlights still on, beaming out from a shadowed profile like a miner in the dark. “No, it’s not.”

She stares at it for a second, unfamiliar to her as the shaft it might have come from, then turns back to him. “What is going on?”

Raylan gives as complete an explanation as he can in fifteen seconds. Halfway through, he feels a sudden itching pain, prickle of new blood pushing up through the cracks in a scab: all this frowning’s opened up the cut across his eyebrow again. 

At the end of his summary, Winona turns away from him, covering her face with her hand. “I can’t believe this is happening.” The careful updo she keeps for work is starting to unravel, a few tendrils of hair trailing down the back of her neck, and the sight of it opens up a little well of tenderness in him, itching like the cut. It’s darker down there at her nape, where the sun and the salon lights don’t touch it. There was a time at the end of their marriage when she stopped letting him see her hair undone, wearing perfection like armor. He finds he misses this Winona, the messy truth of her, more than the neat, composed woman in the courthouse, sitting straight-backed at her typewriter, barely letting her hands brush her hair as she ghosts it away from her face: untouchable even to herself. She puts those little trails of fallen hair out of his sight as she whips around again, throws that hand over her face up into the air. The expression it reveals is as messy as her bun. “He’s a realtor, for Christ’s sake.”

Raylan closes his eyes for a moment, her visible stress setting him on edge. “Is he still not answering his cell phone?”

“No, it’s going straight to voicemail. Can’t you—I don’t know—track the signal or somethin?”

“Not if he doesn’t answer.” She sighs, rubs a hand over her forehead. Raylan glances out the open door toward the van, Boyd sitting watchful in the back, silhouetted against the streetlights, and he reaches up to push his hat back off his hairline. He glances back at Winona, palm covering her eyes like even the dim light through her eyelids is more than she can bear. “Okay, look,” Raylan says, crossing to stand in front of her; she pushes her hair back behind her ear and meets his eyes. “I got to get you out of this house.”

She stares him down, arms crossed, but when his gaze doesn’t waver, her face crumples; seems his leaving and the years since haven't taught her to hide her expression any better than the day they met, leaning into each other at that bar in Salt Lake, when he saw on her face that she’d let him take her home. Maybe if she knew how it would all turn out, her face would have looked like this then, too. “You really think that these men might… might kill him?”

Raylan looks her dead in the eyes. “Not just him.”

Winona drops her chin to her chest, whispers, “Okay,” so soft it just sounds like a sigh. He startles when she tips forward to lay her forehead against his chest, one single point of contact. His hands come up, hovering above her shoulders, not sure what to do; the force of their collision, soft as it was, had rocked him back, angled his face down, and he can’t help pressing his mouth to the top of her head. After a moment, she lifts her head again, brushes the hair away from her eyes. She clasps her hands together between them like she’s praying. “Okay, I am begging you, Raylan. I am begging you. If you care about me at all, just, please, just… go help him.”

He looks at her for a moment before glancing once again out the door to where he knows Boyd’s waiting, though he can’t see the van from this angle—hopes the reciprocal angle means Boyd can’t see them—then looks back to Winona again. “Will you at least let me get you someplace safe first?”

“Raylan—“

Having worn through all the softness he can afford her right now, Raylan cuts Winona off. For all that he owes her still, he owes Boyd too, and he’s not leaving him alone out in the car like a sitting duck even one minute longer, not when Billy Mac—or, if Billy knows what’s good for him, whoever else Duffy can fish out of bed at this hour—could pull up any second with a fresh pack of trash bags in the trunk. “Either we both stay right here, or we both leave. There ain’t no third option.”

Her mouth snaps shut. It’s not something he would have said, back when they were married; he’d have spooled out that softness until his very soul unraveled. She must find it in his face somewhere, that line he’s no longer willing to cross, because she turns away and grabs her sweater off the back of the couch. “Fine.”

“Well, good,” says Raylan, “‘cause I already made you a reservation.” Winona strides out the door ahead of him, and Raylan calls out to her back as he pulls the door shut, the clack of her heels already halfway down the drive. If he can’t offer any more gentleness, at least he can give her the warning she’s owed. “Just so you know, I got someone in there.”

This gives her pause, and she slows, glancing back with her brow knit. “Who?”

Raylan presses his hat more securely to his head, a battening of the hatches. “Backup.”

Still with that tilted confusion around the eyebrows, she opens the passenger door. Boyd inclines his head from the backseat. “Hello.”

She freezes, hand falling from the door as her arms go lax with surprise: might have dropped her sweater, if she hadn’t hooked it around her elbow. “Um. Hi.”

Raylan, ignoring the sudden silence, slides into the driver’s seat. “That’s Boyd,” he offers, hitching a thumb over his shoulder. He twists to get eyes on him. “Where’s your gun?”

Boyd makes a face like he’s about to lie and say he doesn’t have one, but under Raylan’s heavy gaze, he just sighs and sits back. “Strapped underneath your seat.”

Raylan leans down to pull it out and hands it to Winona. He puts the car in gear and takes them away from the curb, the big empty house, the light in an upstairs window someone forgot to turn off. “Now,” he says as she checks the ammo, clears the chamber, “assuming he’s not foolish enough to go see Duffy, I need you to think about where he might be.”

Winona sighs, cradles the gutted gun for a moment in her lap. “That property I was tellin you about.” There’s no question in it, the quiet certainty of a life shared, and Raylan wonders how she can see her husband so clearly in some ways, in others not at all. She slides the clip back into place, frowns down at her hands. “This must make you feel so good. Gary screwin up like this.”

“Oh my god,” Boyd mutters from the backseat, eyes fixed to the ceiling like he’s praying.

“Don’t tell me you on another Jesus kick,” says Raylan, looking at him in the rearview. “I prefer it when you ain’t got no religion.”

He slides his eyes to meet Raylan’s without moving his head, lids hanging heavy above a bare slit of iris, muddy hazel and tar black by turns in the low flickering light of passing streetlamps. “All the religion I got, Raylan, is knowin in my heart that seekin is the goal and the search is the answer.”

“Whatever the hell that means.” Raylan turns to Winona, who’s looking back at Boyd like she’s never in her life seen a balding man in a button up, though Raylan knows that can’t be true; she’s known Art since Glynco. “Hey,” he says, gets her eyes back on him and tries to resurrect the softness he’d stumbled upon in her entryway. “I ain’t here to gloat.”

Winona bites her lip, glances out the window. “Gary...” She laughs wetly, shakes her head. “You know, he’s always been such a dreamer? He’s always had these grand plans.” She flicks her fingers out wide, like a kid imitating fireworks.

“Well,” says Raylan, keeping his gaze well clear of the rearview. “That’s the thing about dreamers, ain’t it? They don’t realize their wings are melting til they hit the water.”

Winona looks put-out. “At least he tries to fly.” When Raylan stays quiet, she sighs, touches her temple in that way she always does when she’s frustrated: the way he imagined her doing on the phone. “You asked me once: Why him? That’s why. It’s not that I, you know, liked him more, or thought he was smarter, or better-lookin. It’s that... he wants things. And he’s—he’s genuinely excited about life, and about its prospects.”

Just talking about him drags out the smile Raylan could swear he’d put there himself, once; she’s not even looking at him anymore, her eyes unfocused, like Gary’s in the car between them. He yanks on the wheel a little too hard as he turns off the main road, pulls into the lot past the lit-up sign for the Days Inn. “Yeah? And how’s that workin out for you?” He rolls to a stop in front of the hotel doors, throws the van into park.

“Oh god, I thought you said you weren’t gonna gloat.”

“And I thought you were a smart, pragmatic woman.”

She stares at him for a moment, lips parted, her straight white teeth behind them: filed down long before Raylan met her, when she was a kid fresh out of braces, by an orthodontist who cared, in the end, more about her smile than her bite. They’d offered to sand down Pemberley’s teeth, apropos of nothing, as the orthodontist handed over the retainer meant to fix her crossbite, one buck tooth in front and the other behind, gaps on both sides and no particular need to conserve space. Boyd had nearly come to blows with the man, for daring to suggest they strip the enamel off their eight-year-old. “You know what, Raylan? Your grind,” says Winona, stress on the word, “is exhausting. I don’t know how you shoulder it, ‘cause I sure couldn’t do it anymore. I needed a little hope in my life.”

“Excuse me,” Boyd pipes up from the backseat, and Raylan rolls his eyes. Winona glances back at him, looking slightly startled, as though she’d forgotten he was there. “But what facet of this situation, exactly, is s’posed to inspire excitement about life? The fact that he’s stuck in a car with his ex? The fact that we could be in bed right now, but instead we’re traversin the whole of creation in the dead’a night to find your sorry, no-account fuckin husband?”

Her eyes widen slightly at the word bed, and Raylan supposes that landed where the stares and whispers of the courthouse glanced off. He doesn’t figure there’s any use denying, no sense walking it back. In the end, it’s probably better she didn’t hear it from some clueless paralegal right before stepping into a courtroom, forced to do her job while the world rewrote itself around her. 

“Ignore him,” says Raylan. He glares into the rearview. “We’re happy to help.”

Boyd lounges back, crosses his arms and cants his eyebrows. In the shadows of the backseat, he could have his hair again, looking like no one so much as that kid in sophomore English, fighting the teacher’s interpretation every step of the way, even when he agreed, no point to it except blowing smoke for the devil. “Is that a fact?”

“You didn’t have to come.”

Boyd blinks at him steadily in the rearview. “If you really think that, Raylan, then I despair that you do not know me at all.”

Her eyes flick back once more towards Boyd, but it seems Winona’s decided to take Raylan’s advice, if only because it saves her having to work out a response—to his words, to his presence, this man whose nuclear shadow she might even now recognize, where it had haunted the walls of their house. She fixes her eyes back on Raylan and, blinking, refuses Boyd the vindication of seeing her cry. “Look. As ridiculous as this might sound to you right now, I love him.” Raylan can practically hear Boyd rolling his eyes from the backseat. “You know, we built a life together, and it’s a really good life that I would like to contin—“

Boyd kicks his feet up on the shoulder of Raylan’s seat-back, perfectly positioned to block Winona’s face from view. 

Raylan shoves them away. “The hell you doin? Get your dirty fuckin shoes off the seat.” He twists, aims, flicks a small clump of dirt clinging to the headrest at Boyd’s face. “Make your poor sainted mama roll over in her grave.”

“This is my van, Raylan. I can put my feet where I please.” Raylan manfully resists the urge to climb back between the seats and put him down proper, leans down instead to grab whatever there is to hand off the floor under the driver’s seat. He closes his fist around something sufficiently hard and pointy and chucks it at him, hitting Boyd square in the chest. Boyd only flinches a little, catches the thing against his sternum like a moth under his hand. It’s not as satisfying as Raylan had hoped. “Oh, hey. You found Barney.” Boyd holds up the projectile, which transpires to be the little plastic McDonald’s toy Lissy carried around in her pocket for eight months straight before his abrupt disappearance two years ago.

Raylan groans and tries to snatch it back. Boyd leans out of his reach. “No I did not. Barney went to go live with a nice family up North.”

Boyd lifts the little purple bastard to eye level. “Maybe he makes his triumphant return.”

“They’ll never find your body.”

Boyd turns the little toy around in his fingers and looks down like he’s talking to it. “Well, that’s a shame. I think I’d make a very haunting corpse.” He looks back at Raylan, smirks a little. “Hardly sportsmanlike conduct from the baseball star-turned-lawman, either—ain’t you at least gonna give me twenty-four hours to get out’a Kentucky?”

“Give you twenty-four seconds to shut the hell up.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Raylan sees Winona staring at something; he follows her gaze, finds it locked on the booster seat tucked into the corner behind the backseat. He winces slightly and leans into her line of sight, trying to break through the blank shock glazing her eyes, thin and brittle as the first shell of ice over a tree high in the mountains. After a moment, she blinks, meets his gaze.

“Send me that address,” he says, gently as he knows how. “We’ll do everything we can to get him back.”

“Okay,” she says, sounding almost hesitant, eyes still darting between the two of them and the car seat. Then she shakes her head, like shaking away the last lingering scraps of fog from a dream, opens the door and steps out under the awning. “Thank you.” She looks between them one more time, a furrow in her smooth brow like water cut through rock. Then she closes the door, turns away.

From the corner of his eye, Raylan sees Boyd peering up at the blank white face of the hotel, the flat cold light shining from every other window reflected in his eyes. “This the same hotel you posted Ava up at?”

“Hmm?” Raylan says, watching Winona’s back closely, as though Wynn Duffy might even now be standing hidden behind a support pillar, waiting to strike. He looks to Boyd as she disappears through the sliding door, blinking as he tries to fish the question from his memory. “Yeah.”

“They gon’ think you a pimp or somethin.”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m just sayin, maybe you ought’a lose the hat.”

Raylan rolls his eyes, then narrows them at the plastic toy still held in Boyd’s hand. “We’re burnin that thing,” he says, throwing the van into drive. He checks the mirrors, then turns to Boyd, hardens his jaw against the discomfort of what he’s about to drive them into. “And I get that you’re... jealous, or whatever, but you can’t talk to her like that.”

“Jealousy got nothin to do with it,” says Boyd. “Don’t go yet, I’m comin up there.” Raylan sighs and puts the van back in park, Boyd’s mouth coming close to his ear as he stands from the seat as best he can; the van’s tall, but not that tall. “Maybe you don’t mind her imposin upon us without a word by way of apology or thanks, but I wasn’t fuckin married to her, so excuse me for findin offense in her presumption.”

“She said thank you.” 

“Yeah, after she chewed you out for twenty minutes,” says Boyd as he clambers into the front seat. Raylan ducks left to avoid a knee to the head. “And where the hell’s she get off callin our life a grind when it’s her damn fool husband got them neck-deep in debt to the sewin-faces-on-soccer balls guy?” Boyd gets himself settled, and Raylan pulls away from the curb as his seatbelt clicks into place. “Though, in fairness, that does sound a little far-fetched. I mean, for one thing, it don’t seem like a soccer ball would hold no air with all them needle holes in it.”

Raylan pulls a face in agreement, signaling into the turn as he brings them back out onto the main road. “I don’t know if Pinter’s what you’d call a reliable source.”

“Well, far be it from me to underestimate criminal ingenuity,” says Boyd. “Let’s go make sure no soccer balls are harmed in the making of this fuckin soap opera you got us embroiled in.”

Raylan huffs, shoots Boyd a pointed look. “Again, you chose to come.”

Turning his head languidly against the headrest, Boyd looks at Raylan through hooded eyes. “Well I couldn’t hardly let you have all the fun, now, could I?”

Raylan switches lanes as they hit the on-ramp for the highway, toward the address Winona texted him. “Guess not,” he says, and accelerates into the gathering dark.

~~~

The lot they pull up to doesn’t look like much, dirt studded liberally with rocks big as apricots, weeds growing scraggly at the lip of a steep gully, like a wound upon the Earth before which Gary stands. He’s kept his own headlights on and their glow cuts sideways across him, all lit up like the fat lady standing at the edge of the stage, warbling out one last note at the end of a tragic opera; a gun hangs limply in his hand. He lifts the other one to shade his eyes as the van pulls up, parks, and when Raylan pops the door open, he calls out to them. “Who’s there?” Boyd rests his gun on his knee while Raylan steps out, his answer cut off by the door as it closes. 

He watches for a time, hearing Raylan’s raised voice, Gary’s mouth moving as he replies. Boyd doesn’t react much when he turns the gun on his own head, except to roll his eyes a little at the sheer idiocy on display. When he sees the gun swing in Raylan’s direction, he pops the door and steps out, steadying Raylan’s backup over the top of it—aims right at Gary, center mass. The gun, in its way, is an equalizing force; even in the hands of a fool like Gary, one lucky shot could lay Raylan out flat, leave him bleeding out into fallow ground, watering all of Gary’s dead dreams: irony’s parting shot.

“Now you gonna shoot me?“ he hears Raylan call across the field. “On my vacation?”

Gary leans to peer past him, squinting hard against the headlights. There’s something of the mole about him, to Boyd’s eye: a lowly creature scrabbling through soil, blind to the bigger picture, guided toward paydirt by scent alone and heedless of the danger. “Who’s that in the car? Is that Winona?”

Boyd can tell by the way Raylan’s head tilts that he’s rolling his eyes. “No, Gary, it’s not.”

They keep talking, Raylan running down Gary’s egregiously stupid idea to flush his life insurance down the toilet. Presently, Gary drops his gun, and Boyd drops back into the car and shuts the door—shuts out the grating strains of Gary’s self-pity. He sticks the pistol in his waistband, snug at the small of his back, and settles against the seat with his hips canted so it stops stabbing him in the spine.

It’s a while before Raylan starts walking back to the car, wading through the hard brightness off the headlights as though it’s a physical thing, eyes narrowed against them, his face illuminated. He’s so bright in their beams he leaves an afterimage behind Boyd’s eyelids when he finally swings himself into the van.

Boyd looks over at Gary, who’s just now getting into his car, then back at Raylan. Does it again, for good measure, like maybe he missed something the first time around, though he knows he didn’t. “Well, this certainly has elucidated things. The reasons as to why you been so hung up on this are beginning to come clear, now.”

The heel of Raylan’s hand thumps the wheel in vindication. “Right?“

Boyd shakes his head in wonder. “That’s like tradin in a Cadillac for a used Volvo.”

Raylan turns the engine over. “These days Caddies don’t sell like they used to.”

Boyd watches him in profile while he checks the mirrors, cranes around to look out the back window as he shifts into reverse. “Well, you know me, Raylan. I got an eye for the classics.” Raylan flashes him a brief smile, hand easy around the gear shift, sure, then braced on the back of Boyd’s seat as he turns them around toward the road: puts their backs to that gully, the tattered dreams dropped like bad pennies to the bottom of it. Twice now, the penny Winona had found face-up got turned upside down somehow, gone grimy with pocket lint and oxidized copper. She’d tossed the first one in the fountain, made a wish to find another, never quite figuring out what Pemberley knew at seven, leaving that first lucky penny for Felicity to find: that the only way to change your luck is to flip fate in your favor. To take it in hand and find the other face. 

Boyd doesn’t remember how she figured it out, but he knows he didn’t have to teach her. Sometimes, her strange prescience seems to stretch backwards, learning from mistakes she never saw made.

Raylan sighs as they pull back onto the highway, rolling his head across the headrest to look at Boyd briefly. It knocks his hat askew, and Boyd plucks it from his head, spins it between his hands like flipping a coin, the pale outside and shadowed inside flickering back and forth until they start to bleed together. Raylan holds a hand out, wordless, and Boyd lets him take it back again, settle it one-handed on his head. “You wanna pay a visit to Wynn Duffy with me tomorrow?”

“Wow,” says Boyd, dry as dust, “you sure do know how to treat a boy, Raylan.”

The eyes flick his way again. “Is that a yes?”

Boyd leans his head back, stares at the pale blank felt that lines the van’s ceiling, not altogether dissimilar to the fabric of Raylan’s hat. He closes his eyes. “What the hell do you think.”

~~~

It’s after midnight when they get back to the house, a good sight later than Boyd said they’d be home, though Raylan supposes he wasn’t to know how long a road this night would lead them down. The girls are in bed, dinner plates rinsed in the utility sink and left to dry on the drainboard they have propped on top of the washing machine, TV on low in the living room. A girl apparently after Boyd’s own heart, Inez Pearlman charges them overtime.

They see her off and then trudge up to bed, tired but still keyed up, both of them too jittery off leftover adrenaline for sleep to come easy. Throwing themselves both at the same problem all night has got their blood up same as the bar fight, and Boyd’s hand finds Raylan’s cock before they even get their clothes off. After that, it’s short work to get them bare-assed and horizontal, Boyd pushing Raylan down on his back to take the wheel this time. He plays with Raylan’s dick like it’s a gearshift, clicking and revving with his mouth, and Raylan nearly shoves him off the bed, Boyd laughing too hard to defend himself.

He climbs back on top of Raylan and gets to it for real this time, whispering in his ear all the while. “Ain’t nobody know how to handle a stick shift anymore, huh baby? They want it—it’s sexy as hell—but they can’t handle it. Don’t got the patience for no classic car. But I watched you built from the ground up. Car I learned to drive stick in. I know every piece’a you, every nut and bolt. Get your engine goin: zero to sixty, three seconds flat.” His palm greased with the bottle from the nightstand drawer, work-calloused, sure grip and a steady hand. He slides his free hand down and reaches for Raylan’s knee, hooks it up over his hip for better leverage. “Legs like a backroad, too,” he says, appreciative.

“What,” says Raylan, breathless. “Bumpy?”

Boyd barks a startled laugh, smacks him lightly on the hip. “Long, asshole. Jesus.” He shakes his head, glances a rough kiss off Raylan’s temple. “Here I am, tryin’a sex you up, and you’re makin fun’a me.”

Raylan grabs a fistful of hair at the back of Boyd’s head and tugs, just enough to bare his throat a little. “Someone’s gotta keep you humble.”

“Boy, I got kicked in the balls by an ornery seven year old last week, just tryin’a save her a bad trip to the dentist. I think we got that covered.”

“Get you covered,” says Raylan, and he shifts his hips so the head of his dick drags across Boyd’s stomach, trailing precum. They don’t find much use in talking, after that.

~~~

Morning finds them stopped out front of the Hawkins house again, big and beautiful in the daylight, though not to Boyd’s taste: slate-gray and suburban, giant door painted dark green to match the neat shrubs and manicured grass that look to Boyd’s eye choked and cloistered, pretty as a magazine picture and just as flat. Looking at it makes Boyd itch behind the eyes, something about it all not quite right, like a carefully embroidered dropcloth draped over the mess of reality beneath. Out of this glossy catalog spread steps Gary, the half-healed cuts on his face like cracks in plaster that let the truth show through, a glimpse of the ugly underbelly, this dream paid for by the devil’s own money. Stepping down off the porch, Gary follows the driveway to Raylan’s car, opens the passenger side door and does a double-take on spotting Boyd in the backseat.

“That’s Boyd,” says Raylan, and Boyd smiles at Gary with all his teeth.

“Um... okay,” Gary says, and sits down. “Are you, ah, also a Marshal?” he asks as he reaches to close the car door.

“He’s not,” says Raylan.

“I’m just a man with a vested interest in no one gettin shot this fine morning.”

Raylan steers them out onto the street, past more big movie-set houses, not a one-story among them and nary a shingle out of place. “If all goes to plan, you won’t even know he’s there.”

On the drive to Duffy’s office, Boyd is quiet, listening as Raylan and Gary run through what he’s going to say. A few minutes’ worth of uncertain glances that Boyd returns with a variety of expressions, to entertain himself more than anything, and then Gary seems to forget Boyd’s presence—a more common occurrence these last two days than Boyd would really prefer, though it may yet prove a boon to them before this thing shakes out. Gary tries to argue a few times for keeping a couple fingers in the cookie jar, and Boyd wonders again how anyone could choose this man over the one behind the wheel, for all that it worked out in his favor; he’d worry more about the bite of that old aphorism if he didn’t already know every inch of Raylan nose to tail hair, less a gift horse than a runaway one as wandered back of its own volition. 

When they pull into the parking lot outside the squat brick office where Duffy conducts his affairs, Raylan hands his sidearm back to Boyd, who tucks it into the small of his back, a speaking look exchanged between them in lieu of words. Boyd hunkers in the backseat until the door closes behind Gary and Raylan, cutting them off from view: waits a little while longer, watching for the face to disappear from the window—the one with the Open sign, in direct conflict with the Closed sign hanging in the window opposite—then gets out of the car and walks to the door, posting himself up just behind it, shoulder pressed against the frame and one hand free to turn the knob. Boyd hears the sounds of muffled conversation, unable to track any voice aside from Raylan’s, close and familiar even through an inch of wood and several feet of dead air.

He tracks that voice—no one seems to be moving much, which makes things easier, though it does speak to the likely presence of enough guns to pin people in place—and if Boyd were a less cautious man, he might have let it lull him. As it stands, he leans on the door jamb loose and easy, but hardly complacent, and clocks it right off when the situation shifts. There’s a sudden uptick in noise, and Boyd tenses, puts his hand on the doorknob. He hears someone shouting, something inscrutable about farmers, and adrenaline sings through him like current through a live wire as he holds himself back from busting in.

“Boyd,” says Raylan, sudden and clear as a bell, tolling out the will of God or Pavlov, its pull just as strong on him. In one smooth motion, Boyd turns the handle and pushes the door in, brings his gun to bear in the direction he can tell, on Raylan’s body language alone, needs it the most.

“Hello, gentlemen.” says Boyd with a smile, his arms thrown out wide and his stance casual, but his pistol locked dead on the blond man’s head: Wynn Duffy, he presumes. He fits Raylan’s description, anyway—blue eyed and bearded, hair parted to one side, bushy eyebrows that wing up in the middle. “It appears I’ve arrived late to the party.” Boyd’s eyes flick from Duffy to Arnett and back again, both of them flanked by anonymous lackies, Billy Mac nowhere to be found; seems he’s heeded Raylan’s advice, after all—or else Boyd’s gun against his temple left an impression. “Looks like pin the tail on the donkey’s gettin a little out of hand.” He fishes Raylan’s gun from the back of his waistband and holds it out to him. “Thought you might find this advantageous.”

Raylan takes it and levels it at Duffy, too.

Boyd smiles with all his teeth. “I believe this is the part where you lower your gun.”

Instead, Duffy moves his gun from Arnett to Boyd. A muscle jumps in Raylan’s jaw, his gaze going flat and hard as coins in a dead man’s eye. “I’ve shot people I like more for less.” Duffy may or may not be some degree of crazy, but he’s smart: takes one look at those eyes and lowers the gun. “Now,” says Raylan, relaxing incrementally, “I don’t give a damn if you all shoot each other, save Uncle Sam the trouble, but you’re gonna wait until we’re well clear before you do it.”

“Oh, I think we can come to an understanding,” says Arnett, though Duffy looks less convinced. A morbidly curious part of Boyd almost wants to wait around and watch how it all shakes out, but Raylan’s already towing Gary to the door. Boyd follows slow, walking backwards with his gun still raised, only lowering it once the door closes behind them. 

Raylan’s shoving Gary into the passenger seat when Boyd finally looks around; only a fool puts his back to a lit fuse, that powder keg liable to blow any second and them still skirting the blast radius. Gun in hand and one eye on Duffy’s office door, Boyd waits for Raylan to start the car before climbing in the back. Raylan peels out of the parking lot like the devil’s on their heels; boy always did know when to cut and run.

Gary sits in shell-shocked silence up front, and after a few attempts fall flat Raylan gives up trying to draw him into conversation. They let him be, Raylan and Boyd batting comments back and forth in a bare-bones postmortem that peters out a few minutes before they pull up in front of the Hawkins house. Raylan brings the Town Car right up to the curb and leaves the engine running. Boyd didn’t expect anything in the way of profuse gratitude, but the silence starts to grate a little, Gary just sort of staring into space while the dashboard clock turns over to the next minute. Pulling his hands out of his jacket pockets, Boyd leans forward to clap Gary on the shoulder, and Raylan turns to stare at him like he’s sprouted a second head. “No offense, Gary, but I sure do hope never to see you again.”

The clap on the shoulder serves to jostle Gary out of his catatonia, and he blinks a few times before he replies. “Oh. Right. Um, likewise,” he says, fumbling to unbuckle his seatbelt, and he climbs out of the car still looking half-concussed.

This time Boyd uses the door, unwilling to fold himself in half trying to climb over the Town Car’s console. He times his transfer back to the front seat to coincide with the moment Winona steps out, barefoot, to meet Gary in the middle of the slab of cement that serves as a patio. Boyd’s almost surprised she doesn’t leave footprints in its smooth surface, like fingerprints pressed into the top of a fondant cake.

He settles back in the front seat under Raylan’s least attractive squint-eyed look, itself still pretty attractive. “You’re a real melodramatic asshole, you know that?”

Boyd squints back. “Oh, like you ain’t?”

“Waltzin in there like a fuckin prima donna, Jesus Christ.” Seeming to lose hold of something he’d kept locked down tight with Gary in the car, Raylan drags his eyes hard over Boyd. When that proves apparently insufficient, he drags his hand down Boyd’s chest, like he’s checking for bullet holes. “Thought he’d shoot you just on principle.”

“I’m fine, Raylan.”

He’s come to rest with his fingers tucked in Boyd’s waistband, not a sexual hold but a staying one, as though worried that, without it, Boyd’ll drift away like a helium balloon, until he’s nothing but a pinprick against the blue September sky. As though Boyd’s the one who cut away his own roots with a jackknife, then turned it back on himself, whittled down to nothing but a hat and a pair of cowboy boots, just to keep from being weighed down when the mine collapse cut that last string. Boyd doesn’t do anything to try and dislodge that hand; he never minded the tethers, learned to use them like marionette strings. Raylan keeping Boyd close means Raylan close to him.

Raylan’s staring now at Boyd’s forehead, where his receding hairline’s excavated the front half of an old scar. 

“‘Member when we struck Fairley Holler?”

Boyd ghosts his fingertips over the crescent-shaped scars on the back of Raylan’s hand, still clenched around his fly, evidence of the mirrored hold Boyd’s always kept on him. “I was fine then, too.”

Raylan makes a noise of disagreement. “I saw it, way that big scab with the snaggle tooth put you down. I didn’t think you were gettin back up.”

And he might not have, if Raylan hadn’t been there; he likes to make much of the way Boyd saved his life, that day in the mine, but the truth is that Raylan got him first when he dragged Boyd off that picket line. He remembers waking up to Raylan’s bloody shirt pressed hard against the cut at his temple, that pale wide-eyed face, the frantic repetition of his name, and for the first time knowing, beyond doubt, that Raylan felt the same way Boyd did. 

Boyd gets lost a little bit in Raylan’s eyes, the depthless black of his pupils, like falling down a mineshaft with no terminus, until Stand by Your Man comes on over the radio, laying it on thick enough to jolt him out of his reverie. He’s hardly about to let a memory, however close to the bone, distract him from the point at hand. “Raylan, that was twenty years ago. You literally got shot two weeks ago.”

“Through a vest!”

Now Boyd does knock Raylan’s hand away. “Boy, start the damn car. You know how many guns I had pointed at me? And without you even around to threaten the assholes who done it into submission.”

“Well, I didn’t have to see it,” Raylan says, frowning, but he does as he’s told, yanking the car into drive. 

Boyd looks out the window toward the Hawkins house, but Winona and Gary are gone, having disappeared inside somewhere along the line, neither Boyd nor Raylan paying any mind. Even still annoyed as he is, he can’t help grinning a little at the closed door.

Raylan shoots him a suspicious look as he takes them away from the curb. “Hell you smirkin like that for?”

Boyd settles back in his seat, looks away from that big perfect house as they leave it behind them. Framed in the side mirror and made glossy with distance, it really could be a picture from a magazine: just as staged, its very existence a lie of omission. “I put Barney in his pocket.”

Raylan looks confused for a moment, then follows the sideways leap in logic, bites his cheek to keep a smile at bay. “Funny. And was this particular message meant for Gary or Winona?”

“Well, you’ll allow as I only had the one stone.”

“Of course,” says Raylan. “And let it never be said Boyd Crowder ain’t resourceful.”

“That’s right.” He rolls his head across the seat, turns that smirk on Raylan. “So, you ready to hit that bar again for a little celebration just the two of us?”

“And risk runnin across Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dickhead?” Raylan snorts. “No offense to Joe, but I’ll pass.”

Boyd nods. “Just as well. I don’t think it’s open yet, anyway.” He fixes his eyes on Raylan, drags them down the whole lean length of him, letting them spark and catch on all those flinty edges. “Guess we’ll have to go for a different kind’a victory lap.”

Raylan’s eyes flick his way, then return to the road ahead. “Guess so,” he says, trying to sound casual, but Boyd doesn’t miss the way he steps a little harder on the gas; he lays a hand on Raylan’s thigh and gives a quick squeeze of approval, watches the speedometer tick up as his hand inches its way north, and waits for one of them to break.

~~~

They’re back at the rental before the kids even get out of school, still an hour yet before they have to roll the dice on who drives to pick them up, and they head to the bedroom soon as they step foot inside. Raylan’s hand finds its way back around Boyd’s belt buckle as he pulls him through the bedroom door, leading him by the hips, only letting go once he’s kicked the door closed behind them.

“I’ve decided to forgive you for your incessant rumination on Gary,” Boyd announces as he flops down on the bed.

“Hmm,” says Raylan, shrugging out of his suit jacket while he watches Boyd shift around to get comfortable. “I think I’m over it.”

Boyd flashes a grin his way. “Finally realized there’s no rhyme or reason in matters of the heart?”

Raylan tugs the knot of his tie loose, black on black—Boyd had accused him before they drove out that morning of cribbing off Johnny Cash, for all that the jeans are dark blue and the boots his usual brown. “I don’t know. Maybe I just understand it a little bit more now.” He looks over at Boyd where he’s spread out on top of the bedcovers, propped up on one elbow. “He’s kind’a like you.”

“What,” says Boyd, his eyes alight with that familiar spark, the powder man’s glee, “he turn you on a little?”

“No.”

Boyd sits up with a manic grin. “You got a hard-on for Gary, boy?” He shoves Raylan’s shoulder hard, nearly tipping off the bed himself in pursuit of unbalancing Raylan.

“Shut the hell up,” Raylan growls, pushing him back, and then they’re rolling around, wrestling on the bed, yanking and twisting and bucking, until Boyd ends up on top. His hair’s sticking up every which way, like it’s giving him a standing ovation, limned by the overhead bulb, light catching in the ends of it. Raylan grabs him by the hips and grinds up.

“Christ.” Boyd laughs breathlessly, bearing down to meet him. “Maybe you should call them up, ask for a threesome.”

“Maybe I will,” says Raylan, even as they continue to rock against each other. “You ain’t invited.”

“Well, of course. You can’t invite a fourth person to a threesome, Raylan. Forget manners—it’s just not mathematically sound.”

“I hate you,” Raylan says, and Boyd presses their mouths together, the slow messy slide of it enough to prove Raylan a liar, the quickness of his breath when Boyd pulls away not helping his case any.

Boyd, of course, knew it for a falsehood before it came out of his mouth. “Really? ‘Cause last night you were singin a different tune.”

“Pretty sure that was the Stockholm Syndrome talkin.”

Boyd rolls his eyes and tips sideways off his lap, falling to the bed beside Raylan, who frowns as his dick protests. He thought they’d been flirting; separating Boyd’s ass from his cock by anything more than a few layers of cloth and a couple zippers had hardly been his intent. It doesn't bother him as much as it might have, since Boyd doesn’t seem pissed: just thoughtful. Propping himself on one elbow, he lifts his other hand, runs his fingertips across Raylan’s stubble and stares at the side of his face, like he’s looking for the answer to some unasked question in the hollows of Raylan's profile.

Raylan allows it for a little while, until he starts to squirm under the scrutiny. “What you starin for?” he asks. “Thought you’d be sick’a my face by now.”

Boyd shakes his head, flicks Raylan’s temple in playful rebuke. “You know, she’s wrong about you,” he says, hand still on Raylan’s face. His fingertips press little points of warmth into his cheek.

Raylan tips his head into the touch, trying not to feel like the cat requesting pets. “‘Bout what?”

Boyd’s hand in his hair now, his voice comes soft, almost reverent. “You got more hope in you than anyone else I ever met.”

Raylan scoffs and tries to move his head away, so he can direct his skeptical look at Boyd head-on, but Boyd won’t let him, that steady hand holding him in place.

“No,” says Boyd, ducking a little to meet his eye. “I mean it. You saw yourself out of Harlan. All my myriad elaborate plans, I never did manage that.”

The words cutting through his resistance to hearing them, Raylan closes his eyes. It feels good, Boyd’s fingers through his hair, the soft repetitive motion of it near-hypnotic. Makes talking a little bit easier. “It wasn’t hope. It was… desperation.” His mouth twists, eyes still closed, a pink wash of light coming through them, the red fractals of veins. “I wouldn’t have survived any other way. Stayin’ there would’a killed me, one way or the other.”

Boyd’s fingertips leave his hair, ghosting over his eyelids feather-light, like he’s trying to pass along the image of Raylan as Boyd sees him. “What about the day you told me to get on that train to Miami, me run off with nothing but a one-year-old child and the clothes on my back? You tellin me that wasn’t hope?”

Raylan opens his eyes. He’s quiet for a moment, looking up at the ceiling, wide field of white, the vein-like cracks following those same fractal patterns. He breathes in, breathes out, Boyd’s hand on his chest now, drifting up and down with his ribs as they rise and fall like a bellows. “I suppose it must have been,” he murmurs, and Boyd leans down to kiss him on the mouth. They don’t talk any more about Gary, or Winona, no names on their lips but each other’s and God’s. It makes sense now, what Boyd said in the car: Boyd’s mouth seeking his mouth, his hand searching, Raylan answering in kind. It’s the only religion they ever really knew.