Page 106 of Ransom
Ransom put the truck in gear and drove.
I pulled into PaeSaco around ten and put the truck in park. It felt wrong to come back in a truck when I'd left on Galahad, but Mateo and the others would bring him back. Galahad would forgive me. Eventually. The burnt remains of the barns smoked in the distance. Wasn't much left of the horse barn, just two mismatched timbers jutting out of the earth like teeth.
I shut the truck off, and we sat in the silence. The killing was the easy part. I'd been doing the killing for Rafe for ten years and I knew the shape of it, the after of it, how it sat in a man between dawn and dusk and went where you put it. Tonight I'd killed past Rafe's permission and I'd killed in front of Winston, and I would do both again before breakfast if anybody so much as said his name wrong.
Winston shifted in the seat. He was wearing somebody else's blood.
"You need a minute?" he said.
"I need about ten."
"Take twelve."
I let out a breath. "Meet me at the casita, will you?"
"All right then." He slid out and limped toward my casita without looking back. He'd left his hat on the dash. I picked it up and brought it with me.
Sierra was on the porch beside Rafe with Pearl at his hip and a coffee mug in his hand. Pearl thumped her tail twice when she saw me. Sierra didn't move, just lifted the mug an inch in my direction and set it back on the rail.
Rafe came down off the porch slowly, hat in his hands. He stopped at the bottom step, looking out across the yard. Then he tugged his jeans up, waved for me to follow, and started walking. We stopped at the paddock rail where he turned his hat over once in his hands.
"I called Aguilar tonight. Told him there'd been a fire at Bonney and he might be getting calls. He said he'd handle the calls."
"Good."
I waited. The wind had started shifting while we'd been standing there, a cooler breath of it coming flat off the southwest, the kind that meant the rain was an hour out, maybe less.
"Ransom."
"Yeah."
"I'd have gone."
"What?"
"You heard me." He looked past my shoulder at the mesa, not at me. "If somebody had taken Sierra out of this yard like they took your man out of yours, I'd have gone past you. I'd have gone past the gate. I would have burned the road behind me on the way, and I'd have burned anything else that needed burning to get him back, and I'd have come back through that gate one way or the other." He brought his eyes back to mine. "I knew that earlier when I was telling you not to go. I told you anyway."
He put his hat on the paddock rail between us.
"I was wrong about the ask, son. The price came due and we're paying it. None of that's on you to make right with me."
"Rafe."
"I'm not finished."
I shut up.
"You been part of this place ten years. I'm not undoing that today. I'm not undoing it tomorrow. Not next year. You ride out that gate again, you ride back through it. You hear me?"
I couldn't get the word out, so I nodded.
"Say it."
"I hear you."
He came around the rail and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me in. "Pae Saco is your home. You're family. And if that Ranger of yours sees fit to walk away from his badge, might be there's a place for him too."
I swallowed. "Thank you."
