Page 72 of Into the Fire

“Put him on the list.”

“He’s on it.”

Dante turned the paperback over in his hands. “You know what got me when we read that summary in the records room?” He spoke evenly. “Somebody sat at a desk and typed it. I always pictured Carson Ridge as something that happened up there. The whole time, the part that wrecked me happened at a desk somewhere.”

I looked at the yard. The tower stood inside its cones, rising against the sky. I always thought the answers about Carson Ridge lived forty miles away.

Nash didn’t fall forty miles away. Somebody sabotaged the equipment. Whoever had done it hadn’t come through the gate.

They were already here.

Chapter eighteen

Dante

Boone read the statements again at seven a.m., all eleven of them, laid out on his desk in a grid. I sat across from him with my caramel coffee and watched him work down the rows. He read them against each other, looking for a seam.

He hadn’t gone after Shep yet. He’d asked his questions, taken the lie, and filed it, but I saw something lingering. Shep had the whole front end of lunch unaccounted for. Boone saw him come around the gear shed carrying something, and Shep denied it to his face.

“We don’t know what Shep’s lie is covering,” I said.

“Not yet.”

I glanced out the window. Shep was crossing the yard. He said something to Hollis at the racks, got nothing back, and kept moving. Halfway across the gravel, he glanced at Boone’s office window. Then he angled toward the lemon-yellow truck.

“I’m going to get more coffee,” I said.

“You’re not finished with what’s in your hand.”

“It’s almost empty.”

I was out the door before he could say more.

Boone would’ve stopped me if he knew what I was doing. Shep drove his truck out the gate and headed down the county road. I gave him a head start and followed, hanging back at what I considered an unnoticeable distance.

I understood my problem within the first mile. In the movies, the tail has traffic to hide in. I had a yellow truck a quarter mile ahead, my truck, and a massive hay meadow on either side. A cattle guard rattled under my tires. If Shep looked in his mirror, he couldn’t miss me.

A rancher’s flatbed pulled out of a gravel drive between us, and I settled in behind it, grateful, doing forty behind a load of irrigation pipe. Then the flatbed turned off at a mailbox leaning toward the ditch, and it was the two of us again.

Shep slowed.

I did the same.

He turned off the county road onto gravel, dust kicking up behind him. There was nothing down that road but a stock pond and two houses. I turned anyway.

He came back out of it a half-mile later, having visited nobody, and rejoined the county road headed the same direction as before.

I sat at the junction and considered my options.

Shep knew.

I’d been following him for twelve minutes and had learned two things. I was bad at surveillance, and Shep was annoyingly good at being surveilled.

After that, he stopped pretending he hadn’t seen me. He took the long way around the grain elevator coming into Kessler. It was a loop with no purpose except to make me commit to it.

Then he pulled into the Sinclair station and straight back out without stopping. I quit hanging back and just followed him. He drove the last mile with one hand on the wheel and, I was fairly sure, watching me more than the road. Somewhere in there I started enjoying myself.

He parked in the gravel lot beside the diner, in full view of the street. I parked across the street from him at the grocery store and waited for him to get out.