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“A year ago, Cole put a tracker on my equipment because Garrett told him to. The morning I found it and left, Cole stood on the porch and told Garrett he was wrong. He said he should have said no himself.” She says it the way she says everything, exactly. “I’m not telling you that to defend him. I’m telling you because he knew better a year ago, out loud, and he still did it to you.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Yes,” she says. “I just thought you should have the whole file.”

She goes back to her work. I sit there a while with my pen not moving.

* * *

Garrett’s lawyer brings Cole to the door at seven-thirty. He’s on both crutches. He looks like he slept about as well as I did. His eyes find me before they find anything else in the room, and the back of my neck goes warm.

“I need you to identify one place,” I tell him. “One map. You don’t read the certificates.”

He sits in the chair nearest the open door. I show him the gate.

“South lease access,” he says. “Road crosses the leased pasture and turns west after the dry wash. There are six old pens behind a windbreak. A loading alley. A shallow well. We used them for contract grazing before the lease went bad. They should be empty.”

“Who has the gate?”

“Garrett and the lease manager. Two years ago, the brass line-camp key opened the inside locks.”

That key is in county evidence now. But the outside gate opens on a public road, and anyone who knew about the pens wouldn’t need it to get in.

He answers three questions and then gets up and leaves without being asked, because I told him he could identify one place and he identified one place. At the door, he stops and looks back at me.

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks, the way he looked at my window that first night. Like a man keeping count.

Then he goes.

I sit there with my hand flat on the table and let my pulse settle.

* * *

At eight-eleven, my lawyer gets a second complaint from Warren. This one says I stole blank forms and samples when I left his practice five years ago, and that the forgeries are the natural result of my poor security.

Five years later, it’s the exact same thing. He doesn’t need to prove anything. He just needs to be the one talking.

I send my lawyer the receipt Warren signed when I returned every piece of his property, and every stolen number was issued by my own practice years after I walked out of his door. My account stays open. I still have both hands pressed flat on the table at eight-fifty, when Dr. Cho mutes herself for a call.

Through the window, she stands up in the state command post and picks up a piece of paper by the radio. She comes back thirty seconds later without sitting down.

“The permits desk got an emergency request at seven fifty-four,” she says. “One load of nineteen breeding cattle, described as exposed animals that need to be moved to separate pens for welfare.”

“From where?”

“Checking.”

“To where?”

“Barbed Crown south lease access.”

The fake paper points at empty pens you can reach from a public road. And Warren has just filed a complaint designed to make my records look dirty before anyone compares them to the next load.

“Don’t approve anything based on my work,” I say. “I haven’t seen those cattle. I didn’t make that request.”

“Nothing’s approved,” Dr. Cho says. “It’s frozen until we verify the origin, the authority, and the destination. I’m telling you because the request has your license number on it.”

My stomach turns over.