Page 21 of Broken Ride

I grab my phone from the floor where it landed in the paper avalanche. Power it on. While it boots, I gather the manifests and square them into the envelope.

Wade pulls his jeans up, collects his maps from the carpet without a word. The pushpin holes in the wall stare down at us like punctuation at the end of a sentence neither of us is willing to finish.

The screen lights up. Three notifications. Two missed calls from the Oklahoma numbers. One text message.

The text is from a number I don't recognize. No area code I can place. The message contains a single image attachment and nothing else.

I open it.

The photograph shows my veterinary truck parked at the fairground. The angle is low, taken from inside another vehicle. Through the passenger window of the shooting vehicle, the lettering on my truck's side panel is legible. The fairground fence is visible in the background, along with the livestock pens where I treated the dun bronc this afternoon.

The image metadata shows today's date. The timestamp is late afternoon. I was inside the pens then, close enough to the camera's position that whoever took this photo could have read the name stitched on my work shirt.

Someone sat in a vehicle and photographed my truck while I worked, and then they sent the image to a phone number I've given to exactly four people on this circuit.

My hands don't shake. Fourteen months of practice at swallowing fear has made the composure automatic, the same way checking under my truck is automatic, the same way sleeping with my keys on the nightstand is automatic. The body runs the protocol. The mind catches up later. I set the phone face-down on the desk and look at Wade.

He reads it in my face before I say a word.

"Show me," he says.

I turn the phone over and hand it to him. He studies the image for a long time. When he looks up, the man who poured bourbon into his coffee and leaned in doorframes is gone. The man looking at me now is the one I saw when he grabbed the young rider's wrist behind the chutes, the version that sits beneath the practiced surface, watching everything, waiting for a reason.

"You're not walking back to your room alone," he says.

I should argue. I've survived fourteen months on this circuit by refusing to let anyone else decide where I go and when.

But the woman in that photograph wasn't expecting the camera. And the person behind it wasn't expecting her to see the picture tonight.

"Then walk with me," I say. "And don't make it a habit."

6

WADE

The smell of her is still on my skin when I wake up, and the first thing I do is reach for the bottle on the nightstand. The bourbon goes down warm and familiar, the oldest relationship I've got, and for a few seconds it quiets the noise in my head enough for me to think.

The noise has a name now. Several of them. Thornton. Reyes. The corridor through the boot heel. Oklahoma.

Laney.

I walked her back to her room last night. She didn't invite me in, and I didn't ask. The photograph of her vet truck was like a loaded weapon neither of us wanted to pick up.

She checked under the vehicle before she went inside. Methodical. Unhurried. Like a woman running through steps she's practiced so many times the movements have worn grooves into her muscles.

I waited in the parking lot after her door closed and watched the light come on behind the curtains. Watched it stay on. Thirty minutes. An hour. She wasn't sleeping either.

The flask is empty by the time the sun clears the fairground fence. I don't refill it. Not because I'm making some kind of decision about my drinking. Because I've got a phone call to make and I want my voice steady when I make it.

Colt gave me Torres's number after the Salazar conversation. Federal agent, Albuquerque field office, the one who built the case against Merrick.

Colt trusts her. That's a short list, and being on it means something.

I dial from the fairground lot with my truck idling and the AC running because the morning heat in southern New Mexico is already brutal enough to curl the edges of the maps I've got spread across the passenger seat.

She picks up on the third ring. "Torres."

"Agent Torres, my name is Wade Ashcroft. Colt Holloway gave me your number. I'm calling about Thornton Livestock."