Page 90 of Forbidden Protector

I don't.

Josephine's voice comes back to me instead, in a garden with shears in her gloved hand. The year matters more than the man. Write it down. Put it somewhere safe. And wait until someone asks you for it.

I photograph the page. I set it beside the 1987 file in a folder I label nothing, because a label is a flag and a flag gets read by the wrong eyes. I close the folder and don't open it again. One long look, and then I put it down gingerly, like it could still go off.

Not today. Today belongs to Hartigan and the coordinator and the money that's going to put somebody behind bars before Friday.

By four in the afternoon I have enough.

Wire diagrams, dates, the coordinator's name, the Calgary structure laid bare from the shell company down to the numbered account. All of it printed, stacked, and photographed twice, because I don't get a second chance at this if the house burns down tomorrow.

What's left on the table when I'm done isn't evidence anymore. It's collateral.

Wire records with Blackwater account numbers still visible on three pages, feedlot contracts bearing Gideon's signature from years before any of this went crooked, family paper that has nothing to do with McKenna and everything to do with a man who just spent a hospital corridor confessing the worst thing he's ever carried.

I could hand all of it over intact. The Bureau would take it, McKenna's structure and Gideon's clean pages both, and pretend the difference doesn't matter. Institutions rarely bother separating collateral damage from the target once they've got a warrant in hand.

I carry the family pages into the living room and feed them to the fireplace one at a time, watching Gideon's signature curl and blacken and go, and I don't feel like I'm burning evidence. I feel like I'm proving something to a man who's spent thirty-nine years assuming the worst about what people do with what they know.

I stand there with the poker still in my hand long after the last page has curled to nothing. I set it back in the rack slower than it needs, careful, like the rack itself might notice.

That's the part nobody tells you about burning something. You expect lighter. What you get is the ash, and it weighs more than the paper did, because now there's no version of this where I can hand this family back what I just decided, on my own authority, they were allowed to keep.

I go to the window to find something else to look at.

The driveway's empty.

Holt's truck isn't there. I already knew that, I heard him leave, but I find myself looking at the empty hook by the mudroom door anyway, the one where his coat hangs every night, bare now, like the house is missing a tooth. Gideon called this morning, first time since the hospital, and Holt went, which tells me more than the errand itself does. Whatever's mending between them is still too new to trust with distance.

Gus comes to stand beside me at the glass, nose to the cold pane, and doesn't make a sound.

Whatever's coming up that road isn't here yet.

I stand in a room that smells like woodsmoke and burned family secrets and tell myself he's fine.

I have no way of knowing, tonight of all nights, whether that's true.

TWENTY-EIGHT

HOLT

My phone goes off at ten to five, Gideon's name on the screen, and I get it off the nightstand before the second ring. Some habits never stopped answering to him fast.

"Come by the house," he says, and nothing else, no reason offered. The same four words he's used to summon me my whole life. I don't ask what for.

Mackenzie stirs behind me, half under, and mumbles something into the pillow that might be a question.

"My father," I tell her, quiet enough not to wake her the rest of the way. "Go back to sleep."

She's gone again before I've got my jeans on. I don't have an answer for her beyond that, because I don't have one for myself yet either.

My hand's stiff clear up to the wrist this morning, same as it is every morning, and down the hall there's a kitchen chair. My whole body remembers what that chair remembers. Her mouth first and then the rest of her, patient with a hand that doesn't work right and merciless with everything else. Some petty, satisfied part of me isn't sorry about any of it even now, even half-dressed and summoned like a hand for hire.

Gideon doesn't call at five in the morning to pass the time. I go anyway, already resenting whatever it turns out to be.

Five in the morning and the sky's still doing that flat grey April thing, no color in it yet, raw enough that my breath shows the second I step off the porch.

I drive to the barn first. Habit, same as everything else. I crave the feel of him under me more than I let myself admit most days, but a bad hand can't hold reins any better than it holds anything else, so I settle for these mornings of talking to him over the fence instead.