Page 79

Everything else is paper, and for once the paper is on my side.

* * *

At six-thirty, Dr. Cho and I wash up side by side at the portable sink. The water runs pink from my gloves, then clear.

“The radio,” she says, not looking at me. “Are you all right?”

“No.”

“Good.” She dries her hands on a paper towel. “It would be strange if you were. I’ve been doing this nineteen years, and nobody has ever declared anything on my state channel except a loose bull.”

I laugh. It hurts.

“You can go,” she says. “I have the herd. The five are stable. Your notes are clean. Nobody on this pasture would think less of you.”

“I’d think less of me.”

She looks at me then. “You told him you’d answer in person.”

“I will. After the next check.” I pull on fresh gloves. “He knows where I am. He’s the one who taught me that knowing where someone is doesn’t mean you get to go get them.”

Dr. Cho is quiet for a second. Then she nods, like I said something that made sense to her, and hands me the thermometer.

The nineteen new cattle stay under Dr. Cho’s hold, separate from the first load. The three cows that died that first morning get full necropsies. Nobody combines the two loads into one tidy story, because the evidence gave me two loads, two poisonings, and one network that shows up in both.

* * *

At seven forty-eight, my phone rings from the hospital.

“Tell me you still have ten fingers,” I say.

“Ten. The right five have filed a complaint with management.” His voice is rough and slow. “The surgeon says I can tell you the rest if I put him on speaker.”

The surgeon says the bullet went through the outside of his shoulder muscle. No broken bone, nothing left inside, no damage to his chest or a major vessel. They closed a smaller bleeder and cleaned both holes. His thigh stitches held but bled after he stood on them, so it’s crutches and a wheelchair again. He’s staying through the afternoon for observation.

“They used the words hemodynamic observation,” Cole says. “Sounds expensive.”

“It sounds like you lost enough blood for somebody to count it.”

“You’d like my chart. It has times.”

I close my eyes. Wanting him alive doesn’t make me his doctor. Understanding his injuries doesn’t give me the right to manage them.

“Follow it,” I say. “All of it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t flirt with me using medical compliance.”

“I have limited material.”

His lawyer gets on next. The shooting is under formal review, like any incident with a weapon. Cole’s written role, his radio traffic, the fact that he had no gun, the fact that he pulled the driver down. All of it is going into a separate report. None of it is being folded into what he did to me.

“That separation is in writing?” I ask.

“First paragraph.”

On the other end of the line, Cole is quiet. He knows why I needed to hear that.