Page 62 of Broken Ride

The door locks. His boots cross the yard toward the truck. Garrett has kept a one-man perimeter his whole life and trusts himself over any door, and from the cab he can watch the road and the only way out of this room.

The scale house holds the cold in its walls like a carcass cooler. His scanner sits on the shelf by the window, turned low, an old cop's night-light, the same hum that lived beside every bed we ever shared, county traffic mumbling through the dark.

I listen to it and go to work.

A hemostat's jaws will worry the locking bar of a zip tie loose if the hands holding it have closed more incisions than anybody's counted, and mine have. It costs me time and two knuckles' worth of skin, and the tie gives with a sound smaller than a heartbeat. I sit up, free, and I stay exactly where I am, because a smart animal doesn't bolt into open country at night with an armed man in the yard and miles of dark in every direction.

Running was the old plan. The old plan fed him for over a year. Position beats flight, and my position improves by the hour. Out by the barn his truck is settling onto its rim, and by sunup his long drive is going to start with a jack and a lug wrench and his schedule bleeding out in the mud.

Under the cold a low burn goes untreated. When this is finished I mean to stand in front of Wade with my hands unbound, let him look at me like something he's been holding himself off of, and tell him to quit holding.

Sometime past the deepest part of the night, the scanner changes.

County chatter thins, then stops. The silence stretches long past shift change, and the channels that stay up go clipped and coded, units acknowledged and moved with nobody saying where.

I know what radio silence around a location means, because the man in the truck outside taught me, back when I mistook his lessons for love. Quiet on a county band means something federal is holding its breath.

I'd stake my license they found the dot. Torres has my season's work in a folder, and Kenna's shell companies with it. Somewhere in that folder there's a trail with my teeth marks on it. The net that's been closing on this corridor all year is coming down over the one man who thought he could stand inside it and be exempt.

I thread the tie back around my wrist and seat it loose, honest at a glance, because when he comes for me at first light he needs to collect the woman he thinks he built.

Then I cross the cold floor on stocking feet and turn my boots around, toes to the door, pointed the direction I choose.

He wanted me to sleep. I sit on the edge of the cot instead with my wrists loosely bound in the dark and watch the window for the gray, a woman keeping her own watch at last. Garrett has spent more than a year telling anybody who'd listen that his wife was helpless without him.

Come morning, he gets to test the claim.

18

WADE

First light is an hour out and the staging lot is a gravel pullout on a forest road, trucks parked nose-out with their engines ticking and every light killed. Somewhere north of us, past a ridgeline I can't see yet, Laney is waiting on the same gray I am.

Torres hands me a vest and a thermos cap of coffee, in that order, and watches me take both with hands that want to shake.

"How long?" she asks.

"Since the cell." The coffee is bad and I drink it like the medicine it is. "Every hour counted and banked, if you're auditing."

"I'm auditing." Her flat federal deadpan doesn't change in the cold. "You're upright, you're dry, and you did it without being asked. That buys you a seat in my vehicle and a radio you don't touch. It doesn't buy you a step past my bumper. Tell me you can bank that too."

The old answer stands up in me on reflex, the one that's carried me over chutes and past doctors and through every man who ever told me where my line was. I look at it for a second, and I put it down.

There's a difference between being handled and choosing my ground, and lately I've had nothing but practice telling the two apart, one ugly hour at a time.

"Your op," I say. "My roads. That's the whole deal, Torres. I'll keep my side."

She studies me the length of a breath, the appraiser's read, the one that prices a man before it trusts him. Whatever the appraisal comes to, she jerks her chin at the hood of her truck, where the map is spread under a red-lensed light.

The map on the hood is federal paper, but the work on it is hers. I was there for some of it. Route lines running border to distribution-like veins. Way stations circled where the manifests lied. The dot we're staged under got circled in my truck with my coffee going cold beside her elbow.

Now there's a perimeter with badges around that dot. If I know Laney, she's been leaving signs since Garrett put her in that truck, marking the trail any way she could and trusting somebody behind her would know how to read it.

"Here's why we're on this section and not the other five," Torres says. "The shell companies paying Voss hold title to a handful of properties. This is the one sitting on Dr. Prescott's route map inside a tank of gas."

She taps the ranch road, the only marked way in or out.

"Entry team takes the yard at first light. We're on national forest west of Flagstaff and the nearest paved county road is behind you. He's a cop, so we do it right, and we do it slow. Your job is to sit in my passenger seat and tell me I'm wrong about anything on this map before they move."