Page 28 of Captive

He looks down at it. He turns his hand over on his knee so I can see it better. A pale line, old and puckered, from the heel of his hand halfway around the joint.

“Barbed wire,” he says. “I was nineteen. Russell sent me to cut a neighbor’s fence at two in the morning so our cattle could graze his river bottom. The wire was strung tight in a cold snap and it came back at me when I cut it.” He turns the hand back over. “I didn’t go to a doctor. I didn’t want anybody asking where I’d been.”

“That was the first one.”

“The first night job. Yes.”

“Did it heal right?”

“It healed.” A breath. “Right is a different question.”

I sit there with my shoulder six inches from his knee and look at his hand on his thigh, the old white line across the wrist, the split knuckles from tonight. Two sets of damage, twenty years apart, from the same family.

“It’s getting light,” I say.

“Yes.”

“First light.”

He doesn’t answer. He sits with his face toward the gray window at the end of the hall. The muscle in his jaw moves once.

Then he puts both hands on his knees and stands up.

Chapter 8

Cole

At five-twenty, the sky goes gray over the brush, and I stand up out of the chair in her doorway and don’t wait for anybody’s permission.

Not Russell’s. Not Garrett’s.

She’s still on the floor against the doorframe with her knees pulled up, watching me. Her hair has come loose. There’s a scabbed line across one knuckle from the hoof pick. She doesn’t ask where I’m going. I look at her for exactly as long as it takes to understand what I’ve done, and then I stop looking, because I haven’t earned it.

Four nights. I told myself it was the road. It was the rifle. It was Russell’s key and Garrett in Fort Worth and a device left at headquarters and Russell’s voice on the radio saying nobody needs to bother him. Every one of those things was true.

None of them turned the lock. I did.

I’ve known it since the first night on the bucket. I let myself know it and not say it, the way you can know a fence is down and ride past it for a week because the cattle haven’t found the gap yet. She found the gap. She found it in the shed yesterday with her notebook in her hand, and I told her I had an answer and I wasn’t giving it to her, and she wrote down the time.

I carry the white plastic table out of the kitchen and set it in the yard beside the service truck. I lay everything on it in rows. Her phone, still powered off. Her key ring. Both certificates in their sleeves. The samples in the cooler with their seal numbers facing up. Vale’s treatment sheet. The photograph from the man’s pocket. Under each one, a handwritten line saying who touched it and when.

I turn the service truck to face the south gate. I fill the tank from the ranch drum. I put the road kit and water and the ranch map on the passenger seat and draw both routes in pencil. I leave the keys on the dash.

Then I walk to the south gate and open it all the way.

The road runs out past it, pale and empty, to the county blacktop.

I go back inside. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed now, watching me through the open door. She saw the table through the window. I can tell from her face.

“You can leave,” I say.

The words come out rough. They cost more than any fight I’ve ever been in.

She doesn’t move right away. She looks at me like she’s checking the words for a hidden catch.

“Garrett called?” she asks.

“No. I haven’t called him yet.”