Page 42 of Forbidden Protector

This. This is what I've been smelling since the airport.

I put the bottle down. I put it back exactly where it was, because I am a federal agent and I know how to leave a scene undisturbed, and that is the most pathetic sentence I have ever thought.

"I am so in trouble."

I say it to his mirror. His mirror has no opinion.

I need to put my hands on something that is not him before I lose what's left of this.

I find the barn in the quiet with Gus at my heel. The Chinook blew itself out sometime before dawn and left the valley still. The kind of still that makes every sound carry.

The mare is in the third stall, a bay with a blaze and a calm eye. She turns her head and watches me pull the tack down like she's been expecting somebody with better posture than the last man who saddled her.

I check the girth twice because I haven't done this in four years and the muscle memory runs about half a second behind my hands. Stirrups adjusted without looking, because that part you don't lose, any more than you lose the sound of your mother's voice or the smell of hay in July, even after the family that owns every acre of hay in the county has made it so you never stand in it again.

He finds me at the gate.

He's been there long enough to watch me bridle her, mount, and collect the reins. His face has the expression of a man who opened a drawer expecting a file and found a loaded weapon.

"You ride?"

"I'm from here, Blackwater." I turn the mare toward the north pasture and the trail that runs up behind it into the timber. "Your family just made it impossible to stay."

I don't wait for him to answer.

I put the mare into a trot and I'm half a mile up the trail before the sound of hooves behind me says he's caught up.

Gus is already ahead of both of us, working the trail like a dog who remembers what his job is. The black stallion comes alongside, big and easy, matching the mare's pace without being asked.

I keep my eyes on the trail because looking at Holt Blackwater on horseback right now is more than I can afford.

The lead is a name Roy mentioned while we stood in the calving barn: an old hand on the BLM allotment north of the Blackwater fence who winters up on the bench alone. Earl Gunderson. Lives in a line camp you can't reach by road from November to May, and in March with the snow half-eaten by the Chinook and the roads turned to grease, you can't reach it by truck either.

But a man up on that bench has a sightline to every road between Rimrock and the reservation, and nobody has asked him what he saw the night Jacob died.

So we ride.

The trail climbs through timber still holding snow on the north faces, and the melt is everywhere, running in sheets across the path, pooling in every low spot. The mare picks her way through it. The air smells like pine, wet earth, and a winter finally letting go.

I grew up in Choteau. Thirty miles south on the same highway, same mountains, same light. I learned to ride on a bay mare not unlike this one, on BLM land that backs up against the same national forest, and I was good at it, and it was mine, and the Blackwaters made it so I never stood in it again.

Gunderson's camp sits on a bench at the edge of the tree line with nothing around it but sky and a view that runs sixty miles east to the plains.

I was right about the sightline. A man up here with a set of binoculars could watch every vehicle on every road in this valley, and from the wear on the chair outside his door, this man does.

He's in his sixties, lean as a fence rail, hands stained brown and cracked at the knuckles, and a beard he stopped maintaining since the Berlin Wall came down.

He looks at my badge, at Holt, and back at my badge like it's the less dangerous of the two.

"Evening of the eighteenth," he says, when I ask. "Moon was full that night, bright enough to throw shadows. Between seven and nine I heard an engine come up the timber road from the south, running no headlights. Not a diesel. Gas motor, and quiet, like somebody'd paid for quiet." He shifts in his chair. "Got my glass on it from up here. Half a mile, maybe less. Moon put enough light on it to tell me it was light-colored. White, maybe silver. Crew cab, newer model. Sat for a while in the flat below the switchback. Then it left the same way it came."

"You get a plate?"

"In moonlight, through binoculars, at that angle?" He spits. "I got a shape, a color, and an engine I didn't recognize. Running dark on a road nobody runs dark on unless they're poaching or worse. I figured poaching."

"Did you report it?"

"To who? Aldridge?" He drinks his coffee. "I've lived on this mountain thirty years. I've reported elk poachers, trespassers, and a man I watched set a fire in the Flathead in '09. Nothing's ever come back with a badge on it." He looks at mine again. "Until today."