Page 51

Her mouth curves. “Save your strength.”

She doesn’t let go of my hand. I don’t make my restraint into a performance that needs credit. We keep working because the book still has pages and the food is warm, and ordinary closeness is becoming something neither of us has to force.

Near the back, she stops on a feed-cost calculation dated three weeks before Calvin died. Beneath the total is an address in darker ink, slanted instead of squared.

I know that handwriting. It’s on my birthday cards. It’s on every loan amendment this family has signed in twenty years and every board motion built to sound less dangerous than it is.

Tessa turns her laptop so the shell-vendor file faces me. The mailing address is the dead weigh station.

“Who wrote this?” she asks.

My mouth is dry.

“Russell.”

Chapter 17

Tessa

The transport plan fits on one page, because danger doesn’t get better with an appendix. Calvin’s count book is in counsel’s custody, and Mercer has the image of the dead weigh-station address in Russell’s handwriting. Garrett hasn’t called his uncle. When I asked why, he said he wanted the record checked before Russell knew which page we had.

At 9:20, I’m driving counsel’s short four-wheel-drive out of the secured lot with Garrett in the passenger seat and a sealed case bolted to the cargo floor behind us. It holds authenticated copies of the rancher’s records, his signed statement, and a forensic duplicate of the game-camera drive. The originals are in independent storage. Losing this case would hurt the investigation without killing it, which is the closest evidence ever comes to wearing a seat belt.

Mercer’s lead unit leaves ninety seconds ahead of us. A second unit follows ninety seconds behind. I built the route myself: paved crossing first, and an alternate service track that only a short vehicle can use, with the landowner’s written permission. Nothing depends on a Barbed Crown gate, camera, driver, or radio.

The plan went out through an encrypted portal to five people. Me, Mercer, Garrett, counsel, and Cole.

Garrett checks the side mirror. “I should drive.”

“You have a healing cut on your forearm and a written lifting restriction.”

“Neither keeps me from steering.”

“The route is mine. The vehicle is counsel’s. The keys are experiencing professional alignment.”

His mouth moves. “You practiced that.”

“I had ninety seconds.”

Last night I slept next to him in the guest-suite bed with his arm under my neck and his breathing slow against my hair, and nothing else. I woke at four with my hand flat on his chest, over his heart, and I lay there and felt it beat and didn’t move for a long time.

I don’t tell him that. I drive.

The cattle truck pulls out of a gravel entrance after the lead unit has disappeared over the rise.

An old straight truck with high stock sides. No animals visible through the slats. It swings across both lanes at the low-water crossing, stops diagonally, and kills the engine.

I slow without stopping close enough to get pinned. “Lead, the crossing is blocked.”

“Reverse to your last turn,” Mercer says. “Tail’s closing.”

Garrett looks behind us before I do. A marked county unit crests the rise and drops into our lane with its lights off. The push bumper, the markings, the number on the door. I’ve seen it on the rancher’s porch camera.

“That isn’t timing anybody guessed,” I say.

I throw it in reverse. The county unit accelerates and stops at an angle behind us, cutting the road to one narrow shoulder. Our tail officer calls that the deputy won’t clear the lane.

The cattle truck’s passenger door opens. A man drops to the pavement. Dark work shirt, gloves, a cap pulled low. I can’t see his face. He’s carrying a short steel bar with a hook on the end, the kind you use to pull a stubborn gate chain from the safe side of a fence.