Page 20 of Kid Gloves

"Pay him," I say quietly.

Ochoa looks at me. "It's a blank."

"He worked honest odor to an honest source. The source had legs. If he only gets paid for miracles, he'll start manufacturing them. False alerts are made right here, in this exact minute, by sad handlers." I crouch, wreck Gus's ears myself, tell him he's a scholar and a gentleman and the deer was clearly cheating. "Reset him happy or don't reset him at all."

Ochoa pays his dog. Gus shakes off nose to tail, deleting the file, and goes back to work like the morning's brand new, and behind me I hear Wade on the flank say something low into the radio that I don't catch, and later, much later, Grady will tell me it was write that down.

Gus works. Gus works like the ground owes him money, checks his wind, checks me, pulls left at a drainage mouth where the cool air slides down like a slow river and⁠—

— stops. Head up. Whole body goes to a point like a drawn bow.

"He's in odor," I breathe, and Ochoa's already moving, and Gus takes us two hundred yards up the drainage at a speed that has no respect for shins, under a limestone shelf hung with cedar roots, to a wash of shade where the temperature drops ten degrees⁠—

— and sits. Hard. Certain. His bark rolls up the canyon like church bells.

Tucker is asleep.

Fifty-one pounds of red T-shirt, curled in the cool sand under the ledge with his arrowheads — four of them, lined up by size, and his whistle still around his neck, and when the noise wakes him he blinks up at the enormous dog and the strangers and says, in the smallest, most disgusted voice in Texas:

"I wasn't lost. The creek moved."

I sit down in the sand. My legs make the decision independently. Gus is doing his victory lean against Ochoa, getting his ears wrecked, being told he's a good boy in the tone that word was invented for, and Wade's on the radio—"subject located, conscious, ambulatory, tell Mom he's asking about lunch," and through the canyon you can hear it arrive at the staging area, a sound the whole county makes at once, half cheer and half sob.

Wade crouches by Tucker with a canteen. "Four arrowheads?"

"Five. I gave one to the dog."

"Reasonable," Wade says gravely, and Tucker nods, professionals agreeing on terms, and I have to look very hard at a cedar root, because my eyes are doing the thing, and my chest is doing the thing, and eleven years of raising dogs in a barn nobody believed in just walked up a drainage and sat down hard and certain, and I don't have anywhere to put it.

The trailhead, after, is joy with the lid off — Tucker under his mother's chin getting his hair cried into while informing everyone the creek moved, deputies laughing too loud, the ranger handing out water like communion. Gus gets his tug, then swaggers the staging area collecting tribute like a mayor at a ribbon cutting, and Tucker's mother breaks off mid-sob to grab my hand in both of hers, and I get to say the truest sentence I own—"the dog did it, ma'am, I just knew him when he was little," and she looks at me like that's not less of a thing but more of one, which does something structural to my sternum.

Ochoa finds me at the water cooler. "Whatever you did at the deer bed," he says, "I need it in writing. And the baby thing — how'd you know it was the baby?"

"Working dogs don't have problems. They have people with problems, and mirrors for hearts." I nudge his shoulder, and Gus leans into both of us at once, generous in victory. "You're doing fine. Sleep when the baby sleeps, run the dog when the dog needs run, and stop apologizing to him — he thinks he did something wrong every time you do."

I drift to the far side of Wade's truck to put my back against something, because the adrenaline bill is coming due and I pay mine in private.

He finds me there. Of course he finds me there. The man could locate a dropped protocol in a hurricane. He's got dust to the knee and his sleeves shoved up and the radio finally, finally silent on his shoulder, and he stops a yard off and looks at me the way he looked over the map table.

"What you did with that dog," he says.

"He did it. I just reminded him where his spine was."

"Delaney." My name in full. He does that when it matters. I've started keeping count. "Sixty seconds. You took a washed-out search and rebuilt it with your voice in sixty seconds. That kid is at that table eating a sandwich because—" and the sentence hits something in him and stops, and Wade Mercer, fluent in fact, stands in front of me at a trailhead having run out of them.

"Because your ranch has a phone tree and a truck that starts," I say, wobbly, going for the joke the way I go for the joke, and his eyes drop to my mouth and the joke dies of natural causes.

"Don't," he says quietly. "Don't hand it away. Not this one."

And I don't know which of us moves. That's the true answer, for the record, whoever's keeping it now: the distance was there and then it wasn't, and I'm kissing Wade Mercer against his dusty truck in the ninety-four-degree shade, or he's kissing me, his hand coming up to my jaw like I'm certified fragile, and he tastes like canteen water and salt and the word noted, and it is not calm, whatever the hand thinks. It's laughing into it, it's his fist gathering the back of my shirt like paper he's decided to keep, it's me on my toes with adrenaline singing straight down my wiring, and somewhere in the middle of it I hear myself say, against his mouth, because God forbid I experience one moment un-narrated:

"We're doing this."

"Apparently."

"In a parking lot."

"Trailhead," he says, not stopping, a man correcting the record with his mouth against mine, and I laugh into him and feel it land in his chest like something he's been sent that he doesn't have a form for, and his arm changes its mind about the space between us entirely.