Page 66 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
Then he lowers them and hands them to me without a word.
I raise them and find the driver immediately. Mid-forties, sitting with the patient stillness of a craft that requires waiting and has been practiced long enough that the waiting has become comfortable. Gray jacket. A notebook open on his knee.
"I know him," Mateo says quietly beside me. "He was in the mechanics' shop in the south town three days ago. The shop owner mentioned him when I stopped in—mid-forties, in a gray jacket, asking specific questions about a white Subaru with coolant damage. Wanted to know if anyone had brought one in for repair." He pauses. "The owner didn't have anything useful for him, and he left. Now he's on our ridge line."
I lower the binoculars.
"We move," I say.
We split without discussing it.
The signal passes between us in a glance—Mateo's chin dipping toward the road, my hand dropping to indicate the upper treeline—and then we're moving in opposite directions, the choreography automatic the way it gets when a partnership has been running the same terrain long enough.
Mateo takes the lower route, skirting the eastern edge of the ridge where the treeline runs close enough to the road that he can work his way toward the vehicle without being visible from the driver's seat. His job is the plate. He'll get it, and he'll be gone before the man in the SUV has any reason to know he was there.
I take the high ground.
The upper trail above the logging road is dense pine, the kind that swallows sound and light both, and I move through it the way I move through everything on this territory at full attention—each footfall placed, each branch accounted for, and nothing disturbed that doesn't need to be. My wolf is running at a low, focused hum, reading the air ahead of me, tracking the human presence that has no business being this far up the mountain.
I reach a position in the treeline above and behind the SUV within seven minutes.
From here, I can observe without being seen. The driver's-side window is cracked slightly—he's been sitting a while, which means he arrived before our patrol started, which means he timed this, which means he has been building an approach to this territory with more patience than I'd attributed to him. He has binoculars on the dash and a journal open on his knee. He's not taking photographs. He's sketching something—a rough map, from the angle of his hand movements, marking positions on the page in the particular way of someone building a surveillance record rather than gathering evidence for an immediate presentation.
Professional. Methodical.
I watch him work for eleven minutes. He makes two phone calls, both brief, both conducted in a low voice I can hear but not fully parse at this distance. After the second call, he closes the notebook and looks at the territory for a long moment before starting the engine.
I track his movement down the road until the sound of the engine disappears into the valley.
Then I wait another four minutes to make certain he doesn't double back.
He doesn't.
Mateo is waiting at the ridge fork when I come back down.
"Got the plate," he acknowledges, already typing on his phone.
"Running the plate?" I press.
"Already sent it to two contacts," he states. "Give it ten minutes."
We walk the ridge back in silence. I think about the book the man had been writing in, the careful way he'd been marking positions, the two phone calls. He's reporting back. Whatever he saw today, someone is already receiving it.
The reply comes through before we reach the main trail.
Mateo reads it and turns the phone toward me without comment.
The vehicle is registered to a private investigations firm—incorporated less than two years ago, operating address in the same city as Dawson's development company headquarters. A second message arrives thirty seconds later from Mateo's other contact, a paralegal who has done quiet work for the pack before: the firm's retaining client, confirmed through a financial disclosure connected to a recent legal filing, is Dawson Whitaker personally.
"He's found the region," I state.
"He's found the region," Mateo verifies.
I send Harpera message before I reach the lodge.
Staying at the lodge for a bit. Don't wait up for dinner.
Brief. Practical. The kind of message that doesn't announce anything because there's nothing to announce yet—merely a reason she won't be wondering where I am while I deal with what needs dealing with.
