He didn't answer immediately. He turned the cup on the counter once, twice.
"Because it's not done," he said. "The accounts being frozen, Clay is going to know within the hour."
And a man who knows he's being closed in on is a man who does unpredictable things. "Is Sarah safe?"
"I need to find out." He picked up the phone again and called Marco.
It rang four times before Marco picked up, which was three rings longer than Grim preferred. And the pause before the answer put a cold wire of tension through his chest that he didn't show on his face.
"Everyone's here," Marco said before Grim could speak. "Sarah slept, kids slept.
Millie's sister made pancakes." A pause.
"Rosie ate four."
Grim let out a breath. "Good.
Stay there. Don't move anyone until I call you."
"Understood. Hey, Grim?"
"Yeah?" "She asked about you, Sarah."
"She wanted to know who you were, how you..." Marco paused, choosing his words.
"How you ended up being the one."
Grim was quiet for a moment. "What did you tell her?"
"I told her a kid walked into a diner and made a very smart decision." Another pause.
She cried a little when I said that. He hung up and sat with it for a moment.
The image of Sarah Cole crying over pancakes in a house in Laughlin. Crying not from fear this time, but from something else.
The overwhelming disorienting relief of discovering that the world had against all available evidence sent someone. Danny appeared from the booth where he'd been sleeping, moving with the stiff-shouldered purposefulness of a man who was pretending he slept better than he did.
He poured himself coffee and looked at Grim. "Feds moving?"
"Moving," Grim said. "Clay's cornered."
Danny drank his coffee. "Cornered is when they're most dangerous."
"I know." And then, as if the conversation had been a kind of summoning, Jesse came out of the back room.
He looked better than he had the night before. Not good, but better, the specific improvement of a person who has crossed from one side of a threshold to the other and is now living in the aftermath rather than the anticipation.
He had a mark on his cheek from the folded tablecloth. He looked at Grim and said, "Did they freeze the accounts?"
Grim looked at him.