Page 103 of Coyote

"What did you say to him?" I asked her.

"That's between me and him," Sarah said, and the line clicked dead in my ear and left me smiling at the dial tone. Getting the last word ran in the family.

The house quieted in stages: Cruz's boots, Pearl's toenails on the linoleum, the slap of the screen door, then nothing but crickets and the dry ripple of Linc's solitaire deck two rooms away. By the time I crossed the yard to our room the lamp was out, the window was open, and the desert cold came in honest, sage and damp earth on the air.

Coyote stretched along my good side with Nimue coiled in her crate against the wall, his splinted hand riding the rise and fall of my stomach. He put his fingers on the scar on my chest in the pitch dark.

"Big man. I love you and you're mine."

He said it without moving. And then he lay there with his heart hammering against my ribs like something trying to kick a door down. I didn't make it a moment. He'd have bitten me.

"I love you too," I said. "Say the other part again."

"Mine."

His heart slowed. Off the ridge the coyotes started up, and he lifted his head an inch to hear them, and then he put it back down and smiled into my chest.

Two Months Later…

Mateo's bench had the only good vise on the ranch, so that's where I was before sunup, with the casing clamped in the jaws.

Nobody looking at it would have known what it was. A stub of brass, dull from two months of weather, small enough to disappear in a fist. It had taken me the better part of yesterday to find it. I'd walked the pass on foot, put myself where John had braced against the rocks that night, and worked the ground one stone at a time until I found the brass wedged in a crack where the rifle had thrown it. John had told me where he'd stood without once asking why I wanted to know. He'd learned not to ask me questions I'd have to answer.

I ran the small bit through by hand, a turn at a time, backed it out, blew the curl of metal off the bench, and cleaned the burr off with a file. Then I cut a length of rawhide, worked it through the hole, and tested the knot with my teeth. It held. I'd cut the cord long, to go over a big man's head. There was exactly one of those on the property.

The barn and the house were still dark. Nimue sat around my neck with her chin on my jaw, asleep or close to it, and I had the whole property to myself except the windmill and the horses shifting in the near pen. My right hand had come out of its splint two weeks back, and this was the first morning it had done every job I gave it without seizing up. I intended to spend it.

"What's that?"

Cruz. Of course it was Cruz. The kid turned up wherever anything happened, and apparently a man filing brass before dawn qualified. He hung in the doorway of the equipment bay with a feed bucket in one hand.

"Go feed something."

"Weirdo," he said, and hauled his bucket off toward the pens.

I swept the metal curls off Mateo's bench so he wouldn't find them and ask better questions than Cruz had. The cord sat in my pocket with a little weight to it. Not much. A piece of brass weighs nothing. It had still bought me every morning since.

That was the day's whole job, right there against my leg. Get him down to the cave. Alone. Before dark.

Everything else could line up behind it.

At breakfast, Sierra had the ranch books open next to the biscuit pan, running a finger down a column between trips to the stove, and when Rafe came in off the east tank and reached past him for the coffee, Sierra moved the pot out of his reach without looking up.

"Wash your hands. You smell like the east tank."

"It's my coffee."

"It's my kitchen. There's a pump."

Rafe looked at him for a second, then went to the pump and washed his hands.

John sat to my left, close enough that our elbows fought over the same territory. Mateo and Cruz were already racing each other through the biscuits. Linc walked in under his own power, which was new that week. One boot landed harder than the other, the limp heavy enough to track blindfolded, and his face dared anybody at the table to say a word about it. Fenix drifted in behind him, pale and pleased about something nobody else could see. Winston sat next to Ransom, out of uniform, and the band on his finger caught the lamp every time he passed something down the table. Sarah, up from Socorro since the night before, settled in last.

She waited until everybody's mouth was full before she made her announcement. "I signed for a place in town yesterday."

Everyone at the table stopped.

"Two bedrooms," she went on. "Water heater's new. I move in the first of the month."