Page 30 of Broken Ride

"That was Torres," he says.

"What did she want?"

"That video's everywhere. About an hour after it started spreading, somebody called her field office. Thornton's flagged, so the call routed straight to her desk." He sits up, forearms on his knees. "A dispatcher. Says he's got ledgers, route logs, hauling manifests. Says he wants immunity. She wants us reachable tomorrow."

"He's scared."

"Terrified was Torres's word." Wade turns his head, looking straight at me. "Whatever you did in that arena tonight, it shook something loose."

The samples are still riding their cold packs in the pouch across the room. The mare is breathing in a pen across town because I stayed. A frightened man with a flash drive is about to hand the federal government the corridor's paperwork because thousands of people watched me kneel in the dirt and refuse to let an animal die.

And somewhere in Oklahoma, a man who wrote Come home on the back of my photograph is watching the same few seconds of video on a loop, learning exactly where to find me.

8

WADE

The other side of the bed is cold when I wake up, and the pillow still holds the shape of her head. Practice gets a person out of a room quieter than a thought, and she's had more practice than she's told me.

Her vet truck is lit up at the far end of the lot when I check the window, tailgate down, her silhouette moving through the inventory with the economy of a woman who has counted her life in supplies.

She made it out of my room without waking me. She made it as far as the parking lot and stopped. Both of those facts feel like information.

The bottle on the dresser is where it sat last night. I pour two fingers into a plastic motel cup because it's morning and I have rules about mornings. The rules are mine, and that's the whole problem with rules a man writes for himself.

The whiskey goes down doing it’s one job. Somewhere between the pour and the swallow I stop hearing Torres say the word dispatcher in my head, and that quiet is worth what it costs. The deal never changes, only the price, and I keep paying it.

At the fairgrounds, Torres calls early with the particulars of the meeting. A truck stop outside Amarillo, middle of the afternoon, a logistics dispatcher named Danny Pruitt who has been routing Thornton rigs for years and wants out from under it. He won't come near a badge. She says it flat, the professional tone stretched thin over disgust.

"He says Thornton has cops on the payroll," she says. "He doesn't know which uniforms, so to him it's all of them. Then he watched some cowboy hold a dying bronc's head on national television and decided that's the last honest man left in rodeo." A pause. "I hate this plan as much as you want me to, Ashcroft. Take what he hands you, put it in your truck, drive away, and call me. You don't ask questions and you don't play hero. The US Attorney is building his immunity while we speak, and that paper only helps him if he's alive to sign it."

"Understood."

"One more thing. The vet goes or stays, her choice, but if she goes, you keep her in the truck until Pruitt shows himself. Her face has more reach than yours right now."

She hangs up before I can tell her that keeping Laney anywhere she hasn't decided to be is a job I wouldn't take at gunpoint.

I stop by the stock pens before we load up. Sidewinder stands at the hay net with her weight square on all four feet, ears tracking me the second my boots hit the gravel, and the eye she turns on me is clear. Whatever was in her blood last night, the mare on the other side of those panels is present and accounted for.

One of the pen hands asks me to sign his phone case. The video is everywhere. There's a version set to music now.

Laney is waiting at my truck with a shipping box under her arm, blood tubes packed in foam for Amy Perez at A&M as soon as a courier counter opens. She's also carrying a look that says the conversation she promised me has finished loading.

We're an hour east when she fires.

"You gave my face to the federal government."

"I gave them a photograph of your truck."

"Same thing, and you know it." She turns in the seat. There's no heat in her voice, which is how I know how much heat is under it. "You want to understand what you did? Then understand him. He doesn't hunt me with binoculars, Wade. He hunts me with databases. Every report, every query, every case file with my name inside it is a road sign, and he has a login. You planted a road sign in a federal building and you didn't ask me first."

"He'd already found you." I keep my eyes on the road because if I look at her I'll slow down, and this doesn't deserve slowing down for. "That photograph in your truck wasn't a warning. It was a receipt. The man wanted you to know the hunt was over and the part he enjoys was starting. I didn't call the law down on you. I called the one fed who's already hunting the people hunting you."

"You decided for me."

"Yeah." I let that stand exactly as ugly as it is. "And I'd make the same call again before breakfast."

She's quiet for a mile, and I make the mistake of thinking we're through the worst of it.