There ain’t much living here inside.
Lately, I don’t know what I’m holding on to.
Wished I could run away to Coeur d’Alene,
Take nothing with me, not even my name.
   —Iris DeMent, “My Life”

IN THE morning, the sheriff’s car was cold. The starter chewed and spit slowly. The weight of the cold oil held it back. It was still dark out. He’d forgotten to shut the garage the night before. The snow had blown inside, drifting and melting in the corners.

He swept a pile of snow out of the kid’s empty bed and off the ’Cuda. He thought of the sheriff’s car he’d drive the kid down to Boise in today. He would keep the shield between the backseat and the front seat down. There was no need to make Kev feel worse.

The spines of frost on the windows were barely shaken when the starter caught. The engine turned over with a concussive thump and the heater began to mutter in the chilly air. Eventually, he came to the road that led to the Bitterroot County Jail.

Matt tapped on the bars of the cell. “Hey you,” he said. “Up an’ at ’em.”

Kev turned sleepily on his bunk. “Fuck, man, I got a cold. Feel like shit.” Then he seemed to see Matt for the first time. “Jesus, it’s you. How’d you get

the transfer, man?”

Matt glanced at the closed cell block door. “I still have connections. And I used ’em, so I could get the job driving you down to Boise. I wanted to do it so I could talk to you. We’re going to get you a good lawyer—these charges won’t stick.”

Kev looked away. “Still, I wish it wasn’t you with me. Wish it wasn’t you, man.”

“What? Kevin, listen, I used a lot of favors so I could get in to talk to you. Last night, I got a witness. Some testimony that will help you, and if you can just tell me—”

“Yeah, whatever. I don’t have anything to say. Don’t feel like talking.” Kev coughed hollowly.

“Listen, we’re going to get you out of here. You can beat this rap, we’ll just—”

But Kev just let out a choking burst of sound, a series of deep, sobbing coughs that left him helpless afterward, wheezing for air.

In the car, the kid didn’t say anything at all. When Matt asked a question, the boy caught his breath, as if he couldn’t hear Matt through the sound of his own lungs. Then, just as Kev started to speak, something rasped. He coughed continuously.

“Son,” Matt said. “Listen, I’ll get you a nurse or someone like that for that cough when we get to the Boise facility. Right now, though, you’ve gotta listen. You listening?”

“Yes,” Kev said hoarsely.

“Look, our psychologist says that she might be making progress with the girl,” Matt said. “If that girl talks, will she tell us that you didn’t do this, you didn’t hurt her dad? I mean, this witness I found, he—”

Kev coughed again. Afterward, the breathing was harder, as thick as a whisper. It had an exhausted quality to it that was hard to take inside the closed space of the car.

Matt tapped his fingers nervously on the wheel. “You’ll be free soon. Believe me.”

Kev coughed again. “Snowball’s chance, man.” His head lolled against the window. “In hell.”

He looked at the kid’s face. In the uneven light of early morning, Matt could see that something had come back to the surface, a morose desperation he’d thought was gone.

The boy closed his eyes, coughing harshly, and Matt was reminded of the other face he’d seen on the videotape. He thought of the eyes, staring out at the viewer, slightly oversized, and the cheekbones, fine high lines traced all the way to the sideburns. That tiny shifting sign around the neck, blurry and red. He imagined the mouth twisting and smiling and speaking to him. He could not understand what was said. It faded as he saw it.

He made the lips on that face in his mind lie still and flat and silent, and when he spoke to the kid again he was not reminded of it at all.

“There’s hope, that’s what I’m saying. There’s always hope.”

Matt turned his head to look back at Kev. The kid had collapsed into himself. His feet and hands were still chained together, but his head was down, buried in his arms. Matt adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see Kev in the backseat.

“Are you all right?”

Kev coughed, and moved, and Matt squinted at the mirror. Then there was a shift in the feel of the wheel in his hands, a wet sharp sound from the tires. The car was sliding over a patch of ice. Matt couldn’t hear the rasping cough any more. He twisted the wheel, and the car moved straight again. But the mirror was still awry.

He straightened the mirror and listened. He couldn’t hear the kid breathing now.

“Hey—are you all right back there? You sure you want to stay back there? Kev?”

There wasn’t a sound from the backseat. The boy seemed to be asleep, his head against the window, his breath against the glass melting a half circle on the frost.

“You’ll be okay,” Matt said. “I know the heater doesn’t work as well back there. But you’re going to be okay. Just give me a minute.” There was the glitter of neon against the snow on the right side of the road, red and yellow, wrapped around with tiny sparkling white lights—holiday lights. A service station. He pulled in beside a half-ton red truck with a Russell White for Sheriff sticker plastered across the chrome bumper.

When Matt opened the car door, the cold came in like a flood. He put his gloves on before he took hold of the frigid metal pump handle and began to fill the car.

The service station speakers broadcast loud Christmas carols and static. Against the predawn gray, the dark woods, and the rutted snow, the sound was tinny and strange.

The man at the other pump tried to talk to him over the music. “Hey, sherriff, that boy gonna be okay?” the man was saying. “You got a problem with the jailbird?”

Kev was moving inside the car, rocking slightly, as if he were being buffeted back and forth by an unseen attacker. A spasm of coughing erupted out of Kev, the sound ripping out of him, high and hard.

The man beside the truck talked on, even as Kev coughed. “What a time a’ year to be in trouble,” said the man. “Sure feel sorry for anyone like that—”

“Kevin?” said Matt.

Kev spoke in the husky murmur of one enfeebled by a long fight. “I’m okay.”

The man was still talking. “You need help on the road, I’m right behind you.”

Dawn was coming. An hour before the gas station, the road ahead had been five feet of grainy black pavement under a veil of airborne snow that danced like rippling surf above the road. The pavement, the slush at the verge of the road, the drifted snowbanks and the near shapes of the trees had all been vague shadows falling away from the headlights, into darkness. Now between the grains of windblown snow, Matt could see an expanse of dark road in front for hundreds of yards. In the distance, the edge of the sky was washed in pink light. The road glimmered with a thousand lines of glare ice.

Matt could see the boy in his rearview mirror, his head lolling against the window, his cheeks flushed with what looked like a high fever. At a wide spot, he pulled over, and let the tires crunch over a patch of frosty gravel until they came to a halt.

“C’mon, Kev,” he said. “Doesn’t seem fair to have you dying of strep throat or whatever in the back of a car. And it’s not the worst I’ve done, having a prisoner in front.”

Matt moved the kid’s backpack and his police computer off the front seat. He put the computer in the trunk and the backpack on the floor. He unlocked Kev’s feet from the leg irons and helped him move out of the car, and back inside, to the front seat.

Kev’s eyes were closed, and he shivered and murmured as Matt moved him.

“No one will mind,” said Matt. “I’ll move the cuffs from back to front too. Keep you comfortable. Who the hell needs to know? At least I can keep an eye on you.”

He seemed to be talking more to himself than to the kid. He looked back over the road behind, where the headlights of the distant truck behind them were approaching.

The sky melted into an ashen gray. The clouds covered part of the mountains around them, they rested close down upon the hillsides. They seemed about to cover the entire road. The trees on either side were wreathed with mist. The road gleamed as the gray light came over it. It steamed with a haze of fog in the sudden warmth, as if it were on fire.

Kev seemed comatose in the passenger seat. He breathed in a strangled way. Every now and then, he took a normal breath. Then his body seemed to remember what he was struggling with, and he pulled air in as if from deep underwater, choking out the air.

Matt put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Kev was warm to the touch, his brow wet.

“Have they been treating you all right in the jail?” Matt said.

Kev opened his eyes halfway. His head moved slowly, as if it caused pain to move his neck. His eyes slid over the seat toward Matt. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”

Matt patted the package on the seat between them. “Hey, I got your personal things—your backpack and your tape player. It’ll be held for you in Boise, for when you get out.”

The kid’s eyes nearly closed again, and he began to cough, starting weak, and growing louder each time. A tiny tattoo on his neck pulsed with each spasm.

“All right,” said Matt. “Just take it easy. Lie back, take it easy. I’ll turn the heat up.”

Kev settled back against the headrest, his eyes slit open to see the morning come.

Matt drove for another twenty minutes. Then he looked at his watch. “Only two more hours,” he said to Kev. The boy didn’t reply. His eyes were open, but he was dead to the world. If things kept up this way, there would be no new evidence, no explanation from Kev. Most of Matt’s hope was gone now too, it had evaporated with the dawn.

Matt looked at the road ahead, and at the sky. The clouds were a sickly dark gray. They were coming into the St. Joe National Forest. Small yearling trees advanced through the snowbanks toward the pavement, making the road narrower. The sky was as bright as it was going to get. The clouds were near now. It had all closed down all around him.

When they hit the ice, Matt felt the car’s momentum shift first, the weight of it moving unnaturally to the left, the thrust of the engine sliding out from under his control as the tires began to spin. He wrestled with the wheel, willing it to the right. Then he could hear the skidding sound of the car turning wholly sideways, sliding in a dizzying circle over the line in the middle of the road. The mass of the car itself seemed to lift off the tires and float sickeningly in the opposite direction before there was the sound of something cracking. Matt’s elbow struck hard against the shotgun in the middle of the seat, and he felt Kev seem to lunge against him, thrown there by the car’s whirling rotation. His temple banged hard into the driver’s window, shattering it.

Suddenly, they were facing back the way they’d come, and then just as quickly, he could see the snowbank on the right rushing toward them as the tires scraped over the frost berm at the verge of the road. He heard a ripping thud before he felt the car collide with a sapling and the hard ice inside the snowbank. He saw the hood of the car crumple, and his shoulder hit harshly against the roof of the car and then back against the empty frame of the driver’s window. The skidding sound stopped, and he could hear the car engine shuddering and rattling, but it didn’t die. He reached up to his temple, and felt a patch of warm, sticky blood begin to spread.

Then, quicker than his hand felt the warmth, there was a sudden cold weight at the point on his throat where his jaw met his ear. His head flicked to the side involuntarily, as if there had been a shot. But the gun did not move when he flinched. The barrel of the gun stayed where it was. Afterward came the knowledge of his holster being jerked open quickly, his belt moving with it in the moment his head had hit the car roof. And also came the sense that his hand had dropped to the seat, trying to catch it before it left the holster. He’d been too slow. Now he could hear his own breathing. Something in his throat fluttered fast against the weight of the cold metal hole on his skin.

Kev’s breathing had changed now too.

“You bought it, man—I knew you would,” said Kev. His voice was hoarse, but all of the labored fluid in his lungs had seemingly disappeared.

“Always been a soft touch,” he said. His hand shook as he held the barrel of the revolver against Matt’s throat. “No one’s gonna take care of me. Make my own way.”

Behind them, the red truck slid to a halt. The cold air carried every sound through the broken window. Footsteps came crunching across the snow toward them as the man approached. He paused for a moment, pulling a green scarf tight around his neck.

“Everything okay? Anyone hurt bad? Should I call the cops?”

Kev’s eyes flickered toward the shape of the man behind the car.

“Don’t do this—” began Matt. He tried to turn his head to look at the boy. Then Kev pushed the barrel back into Matt’s face until Matt was facing the snow-spattered window again. The shivering sound of the engine ran through the car.

“Over here,” said Kev in a panicked voice. “He’s hurt—front seat. Help me out.”

The man came around the corner of the snowbank. Carefully, he leaned down toward the window, peering in. Like a shot, Kev lunged against the door, banging it open against the man’s midriff, knocking him across the ice. The man’s head hit the pavement, a sickening sound. His limbs flailed as he tried to find footing.

“Kevin,” said Matt. He turned his face to the gun, so he could look in the boy’s eyes. “Kev—they’ll track you down, shoot you. Remember when you said that buying that Scotch would kill me? This stuff will kill you too. I’m telling you, as your friend.”

Kev looked at him. His pants were ripped and his skin bleeding from lunging against the door. Sweat stood out on his forehead. “Fuck you.”

He moved the gun again, and pushed the barrel against Matt’s throat. Tears stood out in his eyes. He thrust the gun against Matt, and choked as his cheeks begin to shine with tears. The sight on the front of the gun caught Matt’s skin, scratching him. Kev pushed the gun hard under Matt’s jaw as he took the cuff keys off Matt’s belt. It felt to Matt as if the kid was unhinging the keys to his soul. A moment later, the kid flung the cuffs down onto the snow and took his backpack from the front seat. Then he was gone.

Matt heard the truck start with a roar and move past him. He still felt as if his soul had been cut loose from him, it was floating somewhere up above, in the frigid air.

His neck and head were filled with pain. He put his head down gently against the wheel. Outside the open door, grains of gusting snow swirled into the car, melting on the place where Kevin had been. Every crevice and wrinkle in the twisted car hood was covered with white snow. Before it all went dark again, he saw the man on the pavement lift his head, a new expression on his face now, as if he had just realized there was a gun lying on the ground, where Kev had dropped it after getting the keys.

He couldn’t see for a moment, but Matt reached blindly for the microphone of the police band. He shivered as the car engine died. He pushed the microphone button. It had been only minutes since they came onto the stretch of black ice. He could feel something missing in him, a hollow place inside his head.

“Five-oh-seven calling in,” he said. “Five-oh-seven. I’m calling in a seventy-seven. Escaped prisoner in a Dodge Ram on Route 95, near St. Joe National Forest. No injury to officer.”

A multitude of voices erupted from the handset, the radio crackling with sound. “Seventy-seven,” he said again. “No injury to officer—should not be considered armed.”

He keyed the microphone off, and touched the tender places on his neck and ear where the gun had hit him. He rubbed the spot of blood where the window had collided with his temple. His head throbbed with pain, the snow outside seemed to pulse with light. He closed his eyes for a moment. In a moment he’d have the strength to tell them more.

The sun touched the treetops with light. From above the expanse of the forest, there was only the sputtering smoke from the car concealed in the trees and the form of two men on the frozen ground.

Far below, on the road itself, there was only the shattered snowbank, specks of glass from a broken window, and the scored lines of tires burned into frost.