Page 56 of Broken Ride

Two wars, we've been calling it, splitting the watch, one eye on the badge and one eye on the money. Wade stood at a dark window a week ago and told me he couldn't find the seam between them anymore. There's no seam. There never was one.

Kenna needs a subpoena to finish the sentence and I don't, because I spent a marriage learning how Garrett handles money. Nothing in his own name, never a line a friendly judge would have to notice. Every careful dollar arriving through paper, the same way his voice arrives through burners.

There's a ledger in Texas with my whereabouts priced into it, and a paper company in the town I ran from, and the hunt I've been surviving on instinct just acquired a budget and a boss. Hendricks is signing the invoices. Garrett is cashing them. The job is me.

"Send everything to Torres tonight."

"Already gone. She's waking up a prosecutor." Papers again, then Kenna's voice comes back with the wire pulled back into it. "One more thing and then I'll let you not sleep. Documents can't hurry, but people can. A retainer means deliverables, and men like Hendricks don't keep cutting checks for surveillance photos. At some point the corridor's going to want the deliverable. Watch your six, and put Wade on your other six, and call me at any hour. Any hour, Laney."

The line goes dead and leaves me sitting in the drill I've run alone for fourteen months, and the first coherent thought that surfaces is professional and absolute.

He needs to know tonight. Whatever's broken between the honky-tonk and here, whatever I recognized under those bar lights and can't unrecognize, the man keeping watch beside me just became a line item in the same ledger. No woman leaves a partner unbriefed in the field. The case is ours. The war is merged. He needs to know.

The honky-tonk is still lit up and roaring, and Wade isn't in it. His table is four strangers deep in somebody else's celebration, and his hat is nowhere. The bartender squints at my description and shrugs at the crowd.

Out back where the trucks park, his slot at the fence holds nothing at all, just ruts gouged through the gravel where he swung out wide enough to clip the fence post going by. Brenda's number rings through to nothing, which means she's driving or dancing or both.

The champion is loose somewhere in a strange town with a payday in his pocket and half a bar in his blood. Nobody thought to watch which direction he fell after all.

I stand in the empty slot with my phone in my hand and call him once. It rings the full count and dumps me into a voicemail he never bothered to set up. A recorded woman apologizes for him.

Fourteen months of being hunted taught me what a search is worth when a man doesn't want finding. I don't spend long on mine.

The walk back to my truck happens the old way, keys laced through my fingers, eyes on the dark between the vehicles. Wade is gone where I can't follow tonight. Brenda is somewhere she can't hear. For the first time since I quit running, nobody in my corner knows where I am.

The only one who's never lost track of me is the man being paid to find me.

16

WADE

Concrete has a smell when your face has been against it long enough. Bleach over old sickness over older regret. I know where I am before I know one other fact about the night, because I've collected enough hungover traveling partners from county counters over the years to know the smell by heart, and the smell says drunk tank.

Every wreck I've ever taken, I knew which way the ground was before I hit it. This one I have to piece together from the wreckage.

The fluorescents hum the way they hum in every government building in the Southwest, and my skull answers them like a struck rail.

I sit up slow, fast being permanently off the menu, and take inventory. Boots still on my feet, belt gone, hat gone since the honky-tonk, wherever champions' hats go. There's a knot over my left eyebrow with gravel still in the story of it, and my mouth tastes like the inside of a rain barrel.

The night comes back in torn pieces. The bar. The glasses that kept arriving. Laney's mouth at my ear saying something my morning self was supposed to find, and me laughing at it.

Then comes gravel. Then a fence line standing sideways in my headlights, a flashlight making a sunrise out of the driver's window, and a voice asking me to step out with the particular patience the law saves for men it recognizes.

I remember thinking I was fine to drive. Of everything the night broke, that one sits worst. Every drunk on every road in this country was fine to drive, right up until the count came up different.

There's a kid in the corner of the tank, twenty maybe, hugging his knees and wearing last night like a borrowed suit. He's been watching me since I sat up.

"You're Wade Ashcroft," he says.

"Not this morning."

He has the good sense to leave it there, and the two of us sit in the bleach hum while the little window in the door goes from gray to daylight.

The deputy who works the morning shift reads me the sheet without theater. Small words, a stack of them, none big enough to end a career and every one big enough to print. Driving under the influence gets said out loud in a room built to echo.

The word champion doesn't come up, and its absence has a weight all its own, because everybody in the building knows it and nobody needs it for the paperwork.

Two-time title holder. Biggest purse of my life still clearing the bank. First light of the first morning after, and the county has my belt in an envelope so I can't hurt myself with it.