He was 38 years old, had three daughters back in Billings, and a day job managing a logistics warehouse that most of his employees knew nothing about because the leather vest he wore on weekends told a story that complicated the one in his employment file. He had sandy hair matted with sweat and dried blood along his right temple from where someone had hit him during the attack. And when Evelyn got his hands free, he looked at her with an expression so raw it made her chest hurt. "How long have you been here?" she asked working on his ankle restraints.
"Two days," he said, "maybe a little more. We lost track of time." "Two days in this heat." She said it flatly, not as a question because the math wasn't complicated. Montana summer, no shade worth speaking of, no water.
Four men chained to the back wall of an abandoned building on a highway that saw maybe a dozen cars a day. "You should be in a hospital." "We're okay." "You're dehydrated and you've got heat exhaustion at minimum." She cut through the ankle chain with considerably less trouble than the wrist restraints.
The links were thinner there like the big man had suggested. "There's water in the cab of my truck. I want all of you drinking as soon as I get these off." Ryan Whitman looked at her for a long moment. "Why are you doing this?"
he asked. It wasn't an accusatory question. It was genuine, almost childlike in its directness, the way exhausted people sometimes drop all the social armor and just ask the thing they actually mean. Evelyn sat back on her heels, thought about it honestly the way she always thought about questions people deserve a real answer to. "Because you're here," she said, "and you needed somebody."