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I keep my hand on the first cow’s catheter until the line is secure.

The duplicate blood and water tubes are in a small hard case at my feet, still open because I haven’t logged the last sample.

Vale gets to it before I can close it.

He grabs the handle with his right hand and pulls. I hang on, and the force jerks me up off my knee. His left hand clamps above my elbow, hard enough to decide which way I go, and he drags me backward toward the open door of his truck.

For one second I’m back in a locked room. For one second I’m twenty-nine in his office.

Then I’m not.

“Your tech opened that line on camera,” I say.

“Your cameras are gone.”

“The record started before you got here.”

His grip tightens. He gets one foot on his running board and tries to drag me into the cab with the case between us.

His left hand. The one with the tremor he was hiding behind the case.

I stop pulling.

You don’t win against something bigger than you by being stronger. You find where it’s already off balance and let it fall there.

He has one foot on the running board and all his weight going up and back. I turn my arm hard against his thumb, the weakest place in any grip, and feel it tear loose, and in the same motion I drop straight down onto my heels with the case handle locked in both fists.

All that pull has nowhere to go. His boot skids off the running board. He comes down after me, off balance, and his face hits the edge of his own open door.

His hand opens on the case. I roll away with it against my chest.

Chapter 24

Cole

Isee his hand close on her arm, and everything in me goes white.

I’m out of the county car before I’ve decided anything. My right foot hits the ground once and pain rips open along the stitches, and I don’t care. Vale is dragging her toward his truck. Her boots are skidding in the caliche. The case is between them and she won’t let go of it.

Then she drops. I don’t understand it until it’s done. She lets all her weight go at once, and he’s standing on a running board pulling against nothing, and he comes off it face first into the edge of his own truck door. His hand opens. She rolls clear with the case.

I reach them badly. My shoulder slams into the side of the vet truck hard enough to stop me. I get my left hand in the front of Vale’s shirt.

“White lane,” Sofia says. “Cole. Clear the white lane. Now.”

Behind her, a red cow is hammering the bowed panel. Two state techs are caught in the narrowing space between the cow and the clean pen gate. If that panel goes, the cow reaches them first, and the sick cattle behind her break for the healthy ones.

Vale twists out of my grip and runs for the front of his truck.

Every habit I have says follow him.

She gave me the thing that matters more.

I let him go.

“Scene command,” I say into the radio on my vest. “Need the county car back six feet and the west panel swung toward the middle pen. Operations chief on the hinge. Nobody gets in front of that cow.”

“Approved,” the investigator says. “Barrett gives the route. Operations, execute.”