Page 6 of Forbidden Protector

Half a second. Maybe less.

"We don't survey," he says.

"Nobody surveys their own ground?"

"Not that ground." He squares the pen a second time, which he has not needed to do since I sat down. "My father didn't. His father didn't. Whatever the reason was, it went in the ground with them, and I've never had cause to go dig it up."

He hears himself. I watch him hear himself.

And underneath my own pulse, cold and a half-second late, I hear myself too. A Tatum, in this study, asking about surveys. That's a card face-up on his desk now, and there's no taking it back. I played it anyway, because I wanted his face more than I wanted my cover.

"Was there a second question," he says, "or was that the whole visit?"

My pulse is going hard enough that I can feel it in the soft place under my jaw. I make myself lift the document and slide it across the desk at exactly the speed I'd use if my hands belonged to me.

Behind me, the wall gives up a sound. Fabric, once. He came off it.

Gideon reaches for the paper. His hands are dry and weathered, a working man's hands gone hard with age.

Holt crosses to the desk, unasked, and puts down a second folder his father didn't request. In doing it, his forearm passes an inch above the back of my hand. An inch. Close enough that the heat off him arrives on my skin and stays after he's gone.

I don't move. He doesn't apologize.

He goes back to his wall.

"That's a subpoena preview," I tell Gideon, whose eyes have not left the page. "Courtesy. If the books don't come voluntarily, I'll take them."

From the wall, flat as a coin dropped on a table: "Bring boxes."

I don't turn around. I will not give him the turn.

"How many?" I ask the room.

A pause. Two seconds. Then, "You'll want a truck."

Gideon sets the page down, squares it to the desk edge, and the interview is over.

"You've come a long way to look at cattle numbers." His eyes hold mine. "Whatever you're actually here for, Agent, I hope you find it fast. Winter is long, and this county does not like being looked at."

I stand. My legs are fine. I check.

"That sounded like a warning."

"It was weather."

The Sullivan house is twenty minutes south and one entire philosophy away.

Where Gideon gave me a chair, Declan Sullivan gives me a hand, a first name, a fire already lit, and a woman named Kathleen who brings coffee I didn't ask for, cream already in it, exactly the way I take it.

She reads the room in the four seconds it takes her to set the tray down. She looks at me, looks past me at Holt, who has followed me in like weather and stopped just inside the door, and then looks back at me.

She smiles at nobody and leaves.

"Five generations my family's been on this ground," Declan says, pouring. He's a big man who never went soft, silver at the temples and still built like the work. Every word he speaks is a small gift he expects to be receipted. "Whatever you need. Books, leases, hands, my kids. I've told every one of them to talk to you."

"Your daughter too?"

"Especially my daughter." He says it with the fondness of a man who knows exactly how cheap the concession is. "Maren will tell you the truth right up until it stops being hers to tell. You'll like her. Everybody does."