Page 60 of Into the Fire

“I hope you pleased him.”

“Well, I figured he’d get bored. He didn’t. Every post I dug all summer, he watched. He never made a sound. Just stood there, arms crossed, with silent opinions.”

Dante picked the plate back up. “At the end of July, I finished a quarter-mile stretch, with wire strung and gates hung. It was the best work I’d done all year. Dennis walked down the whole length of it like an inspector. He picked a post and leaned on it.”

“How much of it did he take down?”

“Three posts and forty feet of wire. The rancher was standing right there and didn’t blink. He said, ‘Better to find out now.’” Dante shook his head. “I reset those posts deeper than the frost line out of spite. Dennis came back the next day, leaned on the new ones, and they held. I swear to God he was disappointed about that. He spent his Februarys in Boca.”

“He was thorough,” I said.

“Best supervisor I’ve ever had. Never said a word or helped, but he tested everything I built to failure.” He looked at me over the mug. “You’d have gotten along with him.”

He rinsed his plate and put it in the rack. “Your turn. Shep. Was he issued to you like that, or did Silvertip do it to him?”

“He came that way.”

“There has to be a Shep origin story.”

Dante was right. “He was due on a Monday,” I said. “Check-in at eight. Sunday night about nine, I was driving back from Kessler and there’s a lemon-yellow truck parked at the gate with the engine off and a man asleep inside it. I knocked on the glass. He rolled the window down, looked me dead in the eye, and the first thing Cal Shepherd ever said to me was, ‘I’m early.’”

Dante’s laugh started low. “He slept at the gate.”

“He’d driven from Redding, California, and didn’t want to risk being late, so he arrived the night before.” I shook my head. “I told him there was a bunkhouse with an empty bed sixty yards away. He said he was fine. He had a sleeping bag.”

“You left him there?”

“This is Shep. He was happy there. Marty took a call at six the next morning from the county about a suspicious vehicle at our gate. Shep walked into Operations at seven-forty, twenty minutes before check-in, carrying a tin his mother had baked. He said, ‘Shepherd, reporting,’ and handed the tin to Marty. It had masking tape on the lid, and in his mother’s handwriting it said FOR THE SILVERTIP CREW.”

“No.”

“Snickerdoodles. Marty took custody and rationed them out of Operations for a week. Nash ate four in one sitting and told Shep the loft wasn’t a bakery. Shep has been trying to make Nash like him ever since.”

“Nash likes him.”

“Don’t hold Nash to that. Shep’s mother still sends a tin every Christmas. It’s addressed to the base. Marty writes a thank-you note.”

Dante wandered off toward the living room. The speakers I kept in the window clicked, and “Bizarre Love Triangle” came on.

“That’s mine,” I said.

He came back to the kitchen doorway with his coffee. “I have questions.”

“No. We’re already almost late.”

“The man has a funeral image on his wall and dance music queued up for his speakers. The jury’s confused.”

“The jury can mind its own business.”

“You realize your entire record collection is people warning you about love.”

“And your entire library is people lying to you about it.” I set the skillet in the rack. “You voluntarily watch movies where the whole problem can be solved with one conversation.”

“You own ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ as wall art.”

“That’s different.”

“You’re right. My obsessions end happily. Here’s my finding,” he said. “New Order happened when Joy Division found out dancing was allowed.”