Page 42 of Broken Ride

Colt gives me the report in that spare way of his, stable, still hasn't opened his eyes, the swelling coming down slower than anybody likes, his wife reading him the sale papers by the hour. Brenda's been driving over twice a week with real food.

Then I stop dressing it.

"Colt. How long has Wade been drinking like this?"

The line goes quiet, and I let it stay quiet. Silence is a room people will eventually furnish.

"He rides hurt," Colt says at last, and there's no surprise anywhere in his voice, which tells me more than the words do. "Then he drinks so he can sleep. Then he gets up and does it all over again."

"How long."

"Since before I knew him, some. Worse the last two seasons. Worse than that since the knee, and he never let a doctor look at the knee, so don't bother asking what's wrong with it." A door closes on his end, and his next words come quieter. "I'm not going to sell you a story, Laney. I've hauled him out of two bars and one ditch. I've watched him ride a winning score on a morning he couldn't hold a fork. Everybody on this circuit has watched it and calls it Wade, and I called it that too for years, because it was easier than calling it what it is."

"And what is it?"

"A man paying interest on something he won't name, at a rate that's going to take the whole ranch." He breathes out. "He's better since you, and I'm not saying that to put it on you. He's better and it's not enough, and those two things are going to stay true no matter what anybody does, until the day he decides different. If that day comes, he'll need somebody standing there. I've just quit pretending I know how far off it is."

After we hang up I sit in my truck in the fairground lot and think about every person back in Oklahoma who watched Garrett work a room and decided that whatever they'd glimpsed underneath must have some other explanation, because it was easier to call it marriage.

Torres calls me at the pens in the early afternoon, while I've got a rope horse's foot in my lap and my phone on speaker in the grass.

"Two things, and then I'll let you get back to your patient. First thing. A bucking horse died a few days back at a stand up the corridor from you, dropped in the pens overnight, contractor thought twisted gut until the insurance company wanted a necropsy." Paper moves on her end. "The state lab ran the toxicology. Dr. Brooks, it matches. Same compound family, same metabolite profile, same exposure signature you've been flagging since the first mare in Midland. An independent laboratory just replicated your chemistry without ever having seen it."

The hoof pick goes still in my hand. The rope horse leans his weight into me, patient, and I make myself finish the foot, because my hands work better when the rest of me is taking a hit.

"As of this morning the Bureau has formally connected the cases. One investigation, multi-state, and your analysis is the spine of it. The US Attorney read the lab comparison twice and started talking about the grand jury calendar in the present tense."

"That's the good news," I say. "You always deal the good news first."

"You'd have made a fair investigator." Her chair creaks. "Here's the other card. Everything that makes the case stronger makes you more expensive to leave standing. Yesterday you were a vet with a theory. Today you're a vet with corroboration, and these organizations read a calendar as well as any lawyer. Whatever their timetable was, it just got shorter. Watch your patterns and tell that cowboy of yours the wall matters more this week than last."

I look across the pens to where the wall in question is coiling a rope in the sun, hat tipped back, laughing at something a pickup man said, beautiful and functional and three hours late to his own life, and I don't tell her that the wall has a crack running foundation to roofline and I'm the only one standing close enough to see it.

"Noted," I say.

"Get it in writing, Doctor. Get everything in writing."

The evening follows the shape our evenings have taken. Supper out of a sack at the little table, his boots by the door next to mine, the sample pouch riding its cold packs across the room like a pilot light, because the last time I trusted my coolers somebody opened every one of them.

I tell him about the rope horse and Torres's toxicology match, and the ease goes out of him between one breath and the next. What settles into the chair in its place is the other Wade, the one the circuit tells stories about, still in a way that makes the room feel smaller.

"Who knows the samples are in this room?"

"You. Me. Torres."

"Keep it that way." He reaches across the table and wraps his hand around my wrist, thumb resting on my pulse like he's taking custody of it. "They connected the cases. That means tonight somebody's getting told his problem got bigger, and his problem has your name on it. From here on, you don't work a pen I can't see."

"That's not how my job works, cowboy."

"Then my job just got harder." There's no apology in it and no negotiation either. His thumb strokes once over the inside of my wrist, and the look he runs down me has nothing safe in it at all. "Come here."

"I'm eating."

"You're done."

"That's the most annoying thing about you," I tell him, going. "You're occasionally right."

He pulls me into his lap and puts his mouth to my throat like a man who's decided the rest of the night is already his, and for a while the room belongs to the two of us and nothing hunting either of us gets a vote.