Page 63 of Broken Ride

She's wrong about one thing, and I've been chewing it since they showed me the property line.

"This road's a front door." I put my finger on the pale seam that runs off the northeast corner of the section, thin as a scar, no county number on it. "That's the back. Old stock driveway runs the fence line north and comes out at a wash a few miles up, then ties into the haul network past the cattle guard. It's not on anybody's map because it was never anybody's road. It's just where cattle walked for generations until somebody put gravel down. A truck driving on a stock route at dawn looks like any day of the week. He thinks nobody knows it's there."

"Do you know it's there?"

"I know where it slows to a walk." The wash. Loaded or empty, a truck takes that crossing at a crawl or it takes it on its side. "You want him, you want two units and a set of spikes sitting in that wash before your entry team knocks."

Torres looks at the seam, then at me, and gets on the radio. The argument is over. Whatever else the government thinks of a bronc rider fresh out of a drunk tank, it reroutes for him in the last hour of the dark.

I sit in the passenger seat of a government truck with my hands wrapped around cooling coffee and my heart running slow and hard, the pre-ride pace, the body clearing the ledger for what's coming.

The want is here too. It rode out with me from town, patient as a bill collector, and it sits in the back seat all the way up the seam pointing out every reason a man could use one drink to steady down.

I don't answer it. Answering it is how it wins, and I've got a woman up that road who's already paid my tab twice.

We set the block in the wash while the sky is still all stars. Two county units nosed into the brush on the far bank, spikes laid where the gravel funnels, Torres's truck broadside behind a cutbank with the engine dead.

Cold pools up out of the drainage and sits on us. Nobody talks. The radio is a low mutter of positions and holds, the entry team ghosting up the ranch road miles south of us in the dark.

I sit there doing the one job I've got left, which is nothing, which is the hardest work I've been asked to do in my life.

I think about her boots by the door of every room she's ever slept in. Toes pointed the direction she chooses.

I think about a man who's spent a year moving them an inch at a time like he owned the floor they stood on, and I bank that thought too. It's fuel, and Torres is watching my hands.

The cold works down into the truck and I let it. There's a heat under it that has nothing to do with the heater, banked all season and burning anyway, and in the dark of a government vehicle I spend one minute of it.

Laney in lamplight with her chin tipped up in my hand and her voice coming apart around one word. Laney across a war-room table, sure of her numbers, taking a criminal operation to pieces with a pen. Laney in a doorway telling me nothing moves until she says it moves, and meaning it, and me finding out that taking that deal was the best trade of my life.

A man in my line of work knows what it costs to want something eight seconds at a time. I want that woman across whole decades, and I've got one hour of wanting to get through first, and then the one after it. That's the ride now. Hours, laid end to end, reaching for her.

First light comes up gray through the pines, and the radio changes.

"Entry, entry, entry."

Then the channel erupts.

"Movement in the yard. Subject is mobile. Subject has the female. Truck on the ranch road. Say again, truck on the ranch road."

Then a change.

"He's turning."

Torres looks at me.

"He's not going on the ranch road. That's where a cop expects a roadblock, because it's where he'd put one." I listen another second. "He’s headed for the wash."

Torres keys her mic. "All units, subject may be on the stock route toward the wash."

The engine digs in again, pulling away through the trees.

"Not maybe," I say. "He's on it. Minutes out."

Torres corrects the call, calm as a dispatcher, then looks at me.

"Stay in the truck, Wade."

The sound gets bigger. Gravel under tires, a motor being asked for everything it has, and under all of it a note I can't place until I can, rubber gone wrong, a tire running on its cords.