Page 47 of Forbidden Protector

"I'm not a patient man tonight, Tatum."

"You're the most patient man I've ever met. You told me so yourself." Her hand tightens on my arm.

Her mouth is an inch off mine, and neither of us moves to close it. Closing it means admitting the rifle isn't the only thing either of us is guarding tonight.

That's when I hear it.

Not an engine. A footstep in frozen grass thirty yards off the fence line, careful, and wrong. Nothing on this ranch walks that careful except something that doesn't want to be heard.

She has her sidearm clearing leather before I get the rifle up off my knees, and I put myself between her and the dark anyway, because old instinct doesn't ask permission.

We find it twenty minutes later, after a sweep that turns up nothing but the shape of somebody's boots in the frost and a gate latched wrong. Wedged under a fence post at the property line, wrapped in a sandwich bag gone brittle with cold: a burner phone, dead battery, the kind you buy for cash and throw in a ditch when you're done.

Mackenzie crouches over it with a gloved hand and a flashlight cupped low.

This isn't a drop made in a hurry. The frost under the post is packed flatter than one visit would leave it, boot-worn enough to mean somebody has stood this exact spot more than once. Close enough to the house to watch it and far enough to be nothing but a shadow past the barn lights. Gus has caught the sound of him twice now and been right both times.

"Somebody's been standing right here before tonight." She turns it, careful, reading the case for prints she isn't going to find out here in the dark. "This wasn't a one-time thing. Somebody wanted a place to watch from, and this was it."

She gets the SIM out with the patience of a woman who's done this before, in weather worse than this, and reads what little the dead screen gives up before the battery quits for good.

One photo, timestamped, metadata intact.

Her, walking out of the Riverview office with her coffee, the day before the flue got packed.

Before the room ever turned into a threat. Before anybody had a reason, that she knows of, to be watching her that close.

She goes very still. It’s the kind of stillness I recognize because it's the same one I do.

When she looks up at me, her face has gone the color of the frost on the grass.

"Somebody was on me before Room 6 ever happened," she says. "Before there was a case anybody could explain."

My hand finds the small of her back without asking permission. The same place it landed twenty minutes ago during the sweep.

This time neither of us pretends it's tactical.

Neither of us has an answer for what the photo means. The cold coming up off the ground doesn't care that we don't.

Somewhere behind us, Gus lets out that same low sound again, aimed at nothing either of us can see.

We haven't moved from the phone when the sun comes up flat and grey across the rolling fields to the east.

I call Knox before I call anybody else, because a burner with her picture on it needs a name on it fast.

Knox takes it like Knox takes everything that matters, quiet, then gone to make calls of his own.

Mackenzie catches two hours of sleep on the couch with her boots still on. I don't try.

I head to the barn. By the time the ranch wakes up around me, chores done, I've told myself the day has a shape to it that doesn't involve a dead man's dog reading engines nobody else can hear.

I don't get that far.

I'm halfway across the yard at noon, with the burner still bagged in my coat, pocket when I hear tires on gravel. Wrong tires, too far up the road for anybody who belongs here. Coming on steady and slow in full daylight like whoever's driving has nothing in the world to hide.

Out-of-county plates. A vehicle I don't know, turning straight in through my own gate at noon like it's been invited.

I go for the rifle.