Page 79 of Warrior Security
The back road to the equipment shed was barely a road at all. Two tire ruts through tall grass with the ridgeline on one side and the tree line closing in on the other, and I took it slow because I was in no hurry and I knew exactly why.
My phone was in my back pocket. My mother’s number was in my contacts. And I was driving to the far corner of my property to inspect a shed that law enforcement had already processed, because apparently that couldn’t wait, but calling my family could.
Last night in the field, with the sky going from gold to copper and Logan’s voice low and raw beside me, saying I would call them and ask for money had felt possible.
But this morning, I’d fed the animals, cleaned three kennels, reorganized the tack room, and now I was bouncing along the back forty checking on a crime scene that didn’t need checking.
I was fooling exactly no one, least of all myself.
Every version of the conversation I rehearsed with my parents ended the same way: my mother’s silence, or worse, her conditions.I told you this would happen, Eleanor. That you’re not meant to be running a business on your own. You should have listened to us years ago.
The same message in different arrangements, the same verdict they’d been handing down since I was old enough to understand that being kind and loving animals was a character flaw in the Monroe family.
My sister was a lawyer. My brother was in finance. I was running a rescue ranch in Montana, and to my parents, that meant I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere around puberty and never corrected course.
My father wouldn’t even be on the call. He hadn’t picked up the phone when I left Carter or when I went to the hospital or when I disappeared from their lives entirely. My mother was the spokesperson for both of them, and she’d deliver his silence along with her own judgment, as she always had.
I pulled up beside the shed and killed the engine.
Being here in daylight, I could see exactly why the drug runners had chosen this spot. Hidden from the house and the barn, back road access to the county route, enough tree cover to move vehicles in and out without being visible from any direction that mattered.
I climbed out and pushed the door open. The hinges protested, same as always.
The interior held boot prints and in front of the door tire tracks, both from two nights ago, but everything else was gone. The beer cans, the duffel bags Logan had told me about, whatever they’d been staging in here had all been processed, photographed, hauled away. All that was left was a dirt floor and old shelving and a rusted implement shoved into the far cornerand the tracks of strangers who’d been using my land like a loading dock.
I walked through it anyway. I ran my hand along the shelf, and it came away clean, which meant someone had dusted it for prints. The cleared circle in the center of the floor was obvious now that I knew what to look for. I’d walked past this shed a hundred times in five years and never once came back here to check on it or wonder who might be using it. I’d been too busy keeping the front of the property running to worry about the back of it.
Logan had found it. Logan had brought it to Hunter. And two nights ago, I’d stood in my barn doorway with a shotgun while Warrior Security and the sheriff took down six men on the back edge of my own property.
Someone had been operating on it for weeks without my knowing. That was over now. The shed was just a shed again, and the back road was just a back road, and the only thing I needed to do with this corner of my property was forget about it.
I stepped outside into the sun and pulled the door shut behind me. Two cigarette butts lay ground into the dirt right outside the threshold, side by side, like someone had stood here smoking and stubbed them out before going in.
I bent down and picked them up and looked around for any others, but there were only the two.
I shook my head. Of course the guys would process an entire crime scene, bag every beer can and scrap of evidence, haul away six men in handcuffs, and leave two cigarette butts right outside the door. I could practically see it.
I shoved them into my jacket pocket and brushed my palms together. Next time I saw Lachlan, I’d give him a hard time about it.
The drive back across the property was quiet. I kept the windows down and let the air move through the cab, and I did not take my phone out of my pocket.
I would call my mother. I just wasn’t calling her right now. I had important things to do. I needed to finish the training with Gimbal since her new owner with hEDS would be picking her up soon.
Yeah, right. Who was I kidding? Gimbal was perfect and had been ready all week.
I pulled onto the county route toward Garnet Bend with my supply list on the passenger seat. Feed was running low, Duchess’s joint supplement was nearly gone, and I needed a case of dewormer for the goat rotation. Logan had mentioned heading to Murphy’s this morning for a hinge he needed for one of the stall latches, and I’d told him I’d handle the rest.
Because…way too busy with my very important stuff to do to make any calls.
I parked on Main Street a few doors down from the feed store. The morning was bright, and the sidewalks had the easy traffic of a weekday in Garnet Bend, people moving between the hardware store and the bakery and the post office at the pace of a town that wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I grabbed the list, left the truck unlocked because this was Garnet Bend and nobody locked anything, and went in.
The feed store run took twenty minutes. I loaded the fifty-pound bags into the truck bed myself, tipping each one off the dolly and stacking them flat, same as I’d been doing since before I could afford to hire help. Halfway through the fourth bag, my skin prickled. A slow crawl between my shoulder blades, the sensation of being watched landing on me from a direction I couldn’t place.
I straightened and looked around. The street stretched in both directions, two blocks of storefronts, a handful of parkedtrucks, a woman walking her dog on the opposite sidewalk. Nobody was watching me, and nothing was out of place.
The feeling stayed anyway.
I loaded the last bag and closed the tailgate. It was stress. The drug operation, the takedown, the call I was definitely not avoiding… That cocktail was more than enough to turn an ordinary parking lot into something that felt wrong.
