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CHAPTER 1

SAVANNAH

Somebody had been opening my back gate, and the son of a bitch had started closing it behind him.

Kids left gates swinging. Drunks drove straight through them. Whoever this was had unhooked my chain, let himself onto McGuire land and hooked it back up on his way out, one link tighter than I’d left it. Tidy. Polite, almost. The way a man shuts a door when he plans on using it again and doesn’t want anybody asking why it was open in the first place.

I sat Whiskey at the fence line with the reins loose on her neck and stared at that chain trying to figure out what was happening here until she got bored.

The tracks told me more. Narrow tires with a knobby tread, two sets in off the old mine road and two sets out. Smaller than a pickup and built for rough country. They cut across the corner of my back section, where nothing much grew, then dropped into the wash and vanished where the sand gave out to rock.

My bay mare swung her head around and bumped my boot. She had no opinion on tire tracks. She had opinions on breakfast, which she’d eaten, and second breakfast, which wasn’t coming.

“I know,” I told her. “We’re going.”

I took pictures of the chain, the tread and the stretch of wire somebody had pried off the bottom rail and pressed back down. Then I rode home along the wash and listed every reason I had for keeping my mouth shut. But something wasn’t right here.

The barn was up and hollering by the time I got back. Mia had the feed cart halfway down the aisle and nine heads hung over nine stall doors, all of them certain they’d been left to die and would never see food again.

Nine horses. Two of them mine.

The other seven belonged to people who’d handed me animals worth more than my truck, my trailer and most of my house. Every one of those people had my number, and they used it. They called to check on their horse’s leg. They called to check on the bill. They called when they’d heard something at the feed store and wanted to know if it was true.

That was the business. I fixed bowed tendons and sore backs and horses that had quit on their riders, and I did it on reputation, because in this corner of New Mexico nothing else sold. Word got around fast out here. One whisper about trouble at McGuire’s and I’d hear stock trailers rattling up my drive to collect.

“Chain again?” Mia asked.

“Chain again.”

“Kids?”

“Kids don’t close it after.”

She frowned and pushed her hair off her face with the back of her wrist. Mia came in three mornings a week while her boy was at school, and she was the only help I’d ever hired who didn’t need telling twice. “You calling the sheriff?”

“The sheriff’s barely upright.”

Sheriff Warren White had taken a bullet on a county road earlier that year and gone back to work before his doctors wanted him to, because nobody else was going to do it. Every time I saw him in town he looked a little grayer. He didn’t need my loose chain report on his desk. And a county cruiser parked in my yard would reach Carol Pruitt by lunchtime. Carol Pruitt had two horses in my barn and a phone she used like a bullhorn.

“I’ll deal with it,” I said.

Mia gave me the look that meant she’d heard that one before, and went back to scooping grain.

I did the stall-rest checks myself. Deuce came last, like always, because Deuce was the one who kept me up at night. He was a big sorrel rope horse who’d come out of the box wrong at a jackpot in Hatch and cracked the coffin bone in his near front. Strict stall rest, padded boot on the bad foot, and an expression that said the whole world owed him an apology.

A few steps cost him. He couldn’t be trailered, turned out or led anywhere short of the barn being on fire.

“Morning, handsome.” I slid his door. “Back.”

I raised my hand and he rocked onto his hindquarters and shuffled back two steps, off the sore foot, leaving me room to muck around him. It had taken three weeks and a sack of carrots to teach him that. Now he did it on the word, every time, because he’d worked out it was the one thing that eased the ache.

“Good man.”

He pinned his ears at me for stopping at one carrot. Fair.

That afternoon I drove into town for a heavier chain and a padlock that would take bolt cutters and some sweat. On the way home, the thought I’d been shoving to the back of my head all day finally shoved back.

Whoever was using that mine road knew it existed. Most of Salvation had forgotten it. It came out of the dead workings in the hills, crossed the back corner of my land and let out on a county road nobody drove. If anybody in this town knew who’d been out there, it was the man who knew every track, wash and washed-out crossing for fifty miles.