Page 21 of Switch

“Yeah. This is it.”

She was quiet. Deuce pulled at his hay. Out in the paddocks one of the mares nickered and another answered.

Then she reached over and took my hand. My right hand, the one that had fired twice. She turned it over in her lap and held it there in both of hers.

“Okay,” she said.

That was all. Okay. Like I’d told her it might rain.

I’d spent three years sure that if she ever saw this part of me, it’d be the end. She’d seen all of it tonight, the whole ugly business, start to finish. And she was sitting in wet bedding and horse shit holding my gun hand like it was just a hand.

I’d need a better man’s words for what that did to me. I put my head back against the stall wall and closed my eyes, and she kept holding on.

We closed the road at sunup.

Havoc found an old front loader in the mine yard with half a tank of diesel and drove it down the switchbacks with the bucket full of broken concrete. He dumped it into the mouth of the culvert load after load until the pipe was choked solid. Lock and Gage set steel posts across the track on her side of the wash, deep enough to stop a truck. Nobody was driving that road again without a crane and a week of daylight.

The men from the trucks sat in the dirt by the cottonwood with their hands zip-tied. Deacon sat with them. He’d brought a thermos of coffee from somewhere and he was pouring it into paper cups and talking easy, like they were all waiting on a bus together. By the time the sun cleared the hill, two of them had told him where Tomas kept his crews, which ranchers he paid to look the other way, and which motel in Deming the guns came through.

“They want a ride to El Paso and never to see this county again,” Deacon said. “Seems fair.”

Preacher studied the situation in the way that he usually did.

“Road’s done,” he said. “Tomas isn’t. He’ll push somewhere else.”

“Let him push,” Gage said.

Preacher looked at me. “You still want that Gulf run?”

Every one of them heard it. Havoc cut the loader’s engine. Gage leaned on his bike with his arms folded and waited.

“No,” I said. “Give it to somebody else.”

“Figured.” Preacher put his sunglasses on. “I already did.” He gave a faint smile.

Havoc was grinning like an idiot. Gage squinted at the sky and Deacon poured himself a coffee.

Then I heard hooves on the rock behind me.

She’d ridden down on Whiskey, bareback, with a white square of gauze taped under her jaw and her shirt still reeking of gas. She’d heard every word. I could see it on her face.

I walked over to her. Put my hand on the mare’s neck. Looked up at her.

“I’ve been in love with you since before that funeral,” I said. “Since long before. I should’ve said it three years ago. I should’ve said it every day since.”

She looked down at me for a long time. The sun was on her face. The mare shifted under her.

“I know,” she said. “You’re slow, Switch. But I know. I love you too. I’m going back to the house. I’m dead on my feet. Meet you there?”

I looked at the others. Preacher jerked his chin toward the rise.

“Yeah, meet you there.”

I swung my leg over the bike and started along the dirt track. I turned my head to the right and saw Savannah galloping Whiskey across the scrub ahead of me.

The last time I’d walked out of her place, she’d been asleep and I’d gone without a word.

This time I was riding up that rise with the house coming closer, and I was coming home to her.