Page 12 of Savage Ranger Daddy

"Branch on the feed line," he says. "Cleared it. Secured the housing. Won't happen again tonight."

"Thank you." I mean it for more than the generator.

He looks at me for a long moment. Snow is melting in his hair and his beard. His cheeks are raw from the wind. And his eyes are doing that thing again where he's reading me, seeing past the jokes and the crossed arms to the scared woman underneath.

"You want the truth or the reassuring version?" he asks.

"Truth. Always."

"That transmission tells me they're organized, they're operating nearby, and they're accelerating because of your article. That's the bad news." He pulls off his jacket and hangs it by the door. "The good news is they don't know this outpost exists. They don't know you're with a marshal. And they just gave us intel they didn't mean to share. By the time this storm clears I'll have a frequency to monitor and a better picture of how close they're operating." He pauses. "You're not disappearing, Hazel. I told you that. I meant it."

The fear doesn't vanish. It never does. But it settles from a scream to a hum, and that's enough to let me think again.

"Okay," I say. "So we use the storm. While they can't move and we can't move, we keep working the case. When it clears, we're ready."

He nods. Something close to approval moves through his expression. "Now you're thinking like an operator."

"Don't tell my editor. She already thinks I'm reckless." I uncross my arms and flex my fingers. The shaking has stopped. "There's one more thing that's been bugging me. I keep thinking about those three journalists. The ones who got too close to operations like this and ended up dead or missing. If this ring has been running for years, there might be other reporters or investigators who got close and didn't even know it. Old articles. FOIA requests. Trail camera footage from wildlife agencies. If I had internet access I could start pulling threads."

"No internet up here. But I've got offline copies of the regional case files Mason sent over last month. Federal and state. Never had time to go through all of them." He moves to the storage shelf near the loft ladder and pulls down a heavy folder. "Knock yourself out."

He sets the folder on the table with a thud. It's thick. At least a hundred pages of printed reports, incident logs, and interagency memos.

I pull out a chair, sit down, and open the first page. The fire crackles. The storm howls. Somewhere out there, men with radios are asking where to find me.

But right now, in this cabin, I've got a case to crack and a folder full of answers that might be hiding in plain sight.

I start reading.

7

Brock

Hazel's been buried in the case files for three hours straight.

She's sitting at the table with the folder spread open, pages arranged in clusters around her notebook. Every few minutes she makes a small noise, a hum or a muttered "huh" or a sharp intake of breath that means she's found something. She hasn't looked up in over an hour. Her pen moves constantly, filling page after page with notes and circled names and arrows connecting things I can't see from across the room.

She's good at this. That's the part that keeps catching me off guard. I've worked with federal analysts who don't read files with that kind of focus. She processes information the way I read terrain: instinctively, patterned, always looking for the thing that doesn't fit.

I've been using the time to inventory the weapons cache, check the comm equipment, and monitor the frequency from that intercepted transmission. Nothing else has come through. Just static and the storm. But I logged the band and set the sat phone to scan. If they talk again, I'll catch it.

The list from last night is still in my pocket. I haven't looked at it since I folded it up, but I can feel it there, a small square of paper reminding me that my plan to keep my distance lasted exactly one morning. I'm not running from it anymore. Lying on that couch last night after Colt's call, I made a decision. Not to act on what I'm feeling, but to stop pretending I'm not feeling it. The pretending is what makes me stupid. The running is what makes me sloppy. And sloppy gets people killed.

So I'll feel it. I'll let it be there. And I'll do my job anyway, because that's what I was trained to do.

The storm hasn't let up. If anything it's gotten worse, the wind shifting to the north and bringing heavier snow. We're not leaving this cabin tonight. Probably not tomorrow either. Which means we've got time, and the smartest thing I can do with it is make sure Hazel can handle herself if I'm not right beside her.

"Hazel." I push off the couch. "Take a break."

She holds up one finger without looking up. "Give me thirty seconds. I think I found something. There's an incident report from two years ago, a wildlife officer near Crescent Fork filed a complaint about unauthorized vehicles on a restricted trail. The complaint was logged and then nothing. No follow-up. No investigation. The officer's name was Calvin Hutchins."

I go still. "Your source. The game warden."

"Retired game warden. But two years ago he was still active. He filed an official report about suspicious activity on one of the exact trails we identified this morning, and somebody buried it. No follow-up means someone in the system decided it wasn't worth pursuing. Or decided it was worth suppressing." She looks up at me, eyes bright. "Brock, if there's a law enforcementcontact inside this network, that changes everything. It means the ring doesn't just have routes and supply chains. It has cover."

"Yeah." The word comes out harder than I intend. Law enforcement corruption is the nightmare scenario. It means we can't trust the usual channels. It means whoever we report to could be the same person making evidence disappear. "We flag it for Mason. He's the only one I trust completely on the federal side. But we keep it tight until we know more."

She nods and scribbles something in her notebook. "Agreed. I want to go through the rest of these files, but my back is killing me and my eyes are starting to cross."