Page 41 of Captive

“Was that the one?” she says. “The one who took you?”

“Yes.”

She’s quiet a second. “He threw you out of the way.”

“Yes.”

“Huh,” she says. Then she hands me a clean pair of gloves, the way she has a thousand times, and takes the bloody ones out of my hands without being asked, and only then do I notice my hands are shaking so hard I couldn’t have gotten them off myself.

The red steer has scrapes on one hock. The black one is breathing hard but sound. His yellow tag reads 71K, and one of the forged papers scattered across my service walk lists 71K as a fourteen-month-old heifer. The animal in front of me is a steer at least two and a half years old.

The tag matches. The animal doesn’t.

Becca brings me the gelding’s chart without being asked, and Mr. Salazar comes over to shake my hand with both of his.

“That man,” he says, nodding toward where the ambulance was. “The big one. He jumped in front of you.”

“He did.”

“Your husband?”

“No.” It comes out faster than I mean it to. I don’t know what the true answer is. I know that isn’t it, and I know it isn’t nothing, either.

Mr. Salazar looks at my face and pats my hand like I’m his granddaughter. “Ah,” he says, like that settles something. “Not yet.”

I don’t correct him. I don’t know how.

Three more forged certificates are lying on the seat of the pickup, every one of them wearing my name. I don’t touch them. I don’t have to touch a lie to recognize my own signature on it.

A deputy opens the stainless cabinet mounted behind the trailer axle. Cold air rolls out. The display reads thirty-nine degrees. The racks are empty and wet with condensation. No drugs. No labels. Nothing.

Just a strip of green-and-gold inventory tape across the back wall, torn off everywhere except for three words.

VALE HERD & REPRODUCTION SERVICES.

Chapter 12

Cole

The clinician cuts the field dressing off without praising me for holding still.

I’m on a steel table at a rural clinic twelve miles from Sofia’s yard with my right leg bare from boot to hip. My left forearm, bruised dark where the wrecking bar landed, rests on my stomach because every other position hurts worse.

“No artery,” the clinician says. “No tendon. Circulation, strength, and feeling below the cut are all fine. It stopped short of the deeper layer.”

The part I hear is that I keep the leg.

She irrigates it, pulls out two bits of denim, and closes it in two layers. It hurts through the numbing in dull, distant pulls that turn sharp every time I tense.

Sofia comes in before the last stitch. She’s changed gloves and shirt. She has not changed her expression enough to fool anybody.

“Both steers are contained,” she says. “Seventy-one K is sound. The county has the trailer, the pickup, the papers, and the cabinet. Mr. Salazar and his horse got out the public gate.”

She gives me every fact I’d ask for before I can use asking as an excuse to sit up.

“Becca?”

“At her sister’s. Unhurt.”