14. Thirteen
I had my boots on before Linc released his radio key.
John was already answering him, so I reached past him for my knife and clipped it to my belt one-handed while the other hand dragged my shirt down over the marks his mouth had left on my throat.
Later, when the ground had told me what it knew, every man here would see them.
Not while I was reading dirt. Something had crossed into my territory while I lay soft against a big man's side with my ear full of his heartbeat, and I couldn't let that stand.
I lifted Nimue out of the rag crate, and she slithered up my arm and settled her coils at my collar, cool through the cotton.
"We're coming," John told the radio. "Don't touch him."
"Wasn't going to." Linc's breathing still ran hard under his words. "I haven't been off my horse."
"Hold where you are," I said toward the radio. "Keep the horse standing still. The dirt around him is mine until I've walked it."
The yard lay blue and cold under a sky just graying at its east edge, and my breath showed all the way to the barn.
I saddled my mare, who pinned her ears at the hour and thought better of it when I looked at her, and then I hauled John's saddle up onto the gelding myself while John stood at the horse's head with his jaw set about being helped.
He mounted off the corral rail instead of the stirrup, guarding his right side the whole way up, and I tracked every inch of the climb, hands loose and ready in case he needed me.
We rode east at a walk, while the light behind the fence line turned a dirty gray. My thighs held a deep, used ache from the night, and an hour ago that ache had been the best thing I knew. John had given me the word in the dark, and I hated Zaroff even more for ruining that.
Linc sat on his horse fifty yards up from the stock tank with his rifle across his back and his flashlight pointed at the dirt, and the third keeper on his bridle still hung loose where I'd told him twice to fix it.
Fenix was with him, which was unusual. Fenix didn't often come out of his space in the cellar unless there were bodies to handle, and he couldn't have known about the body ahead of time.
Could he? With Fenix, it was always hard to tell.
Nobody had told him about this one. His dead had, probably.
They tell him things before they tell the rest of us.
I stepped down well short of them and left the mare standing. "Walk where I walk," I told John, "and only when I tell you."
Then I made my circle alone, eyes down.
Two sets of boot prints led in from the fence, where somebody had cut the wire.
The prints ran deep and even on the way in, side by side, stride matched, the two of them sharing the load the whole distance, and they ran shallower on the way out, single file, without one hurried step anywhere in them.
They had dragged nothing and hidden nothing.
Two men had carried a dead man four hundred feet onto Pae Saco land, laid him down, and strolled out.
I followed the out-trail to the service road and found where something heavy had backed in off the gravel with dual tires, and pulled away without spinning a wheel.
I returned along my own prints and waved John in.
The man lay across the patrol track, face up, arms at his sides, laid out straight.
He was nobody I knew. He looked thirty-some, lean and hard-used, his dark hair cropped close.
Whoever had put him down had squared him to the track our riders crossed every night, so the first horse through would have to stop for him.
His feet were bare, and ruined. I crouched and examined them: torn pads, split heels, cholla spines driven in deep and snapped off level with the skin, and he'd walked on all of it long after. My own soles ached in sympathy.
"He was scared," Fenix said, and I looked up. The kid was staring straight at the body, head cocked, but he wasn't seeing it. He was somewhere else. "He was so scared."
"Hush, birdie." Linc's horse shifted under him.
John lowered himself over the body, set Sierra's kit on the dirt beside him, and pulled on gloves before he touched anything.
He laid two fingers against the throat and watched the chest, and he held them there a long moment.
"Definitely dead. Cold, too, so he's been that way a while. Looks dehydrated."
"He ran," I said, and pointed to the soles of his feet. Most of the barbs were in the front part, which meant he'd been moving fast.
John moved the flashlight down the body and stopped above the chest wound without touching it.
"One wound I can see, and it's the exit.
If the entry's in his back with no soot and no stippling around it, he was shot from behind while he ran, and from a good distance. I'll say that when I've turned him."
He eased the collar back into place. "And the blood settled while he lay flat on his back, and it's fixed now."
"They killed him somewhere else and carried him here for us to find," I said.
John's hands left the collar and there it was: a hole through the cloth at the dead man's shoulder, and wired through it, drilled at the root, a boar tusk, filed to a point, the wire ends twisted shut.
There was a second thing on that wire. Smaller, tucked up under the fold of the collar where the cloth had bunched: another tusk, half the size, and strung between the two of them, drilled through the root with the same care, a tooth. A coyote's canine.
Nimue drew tight at my throat. I put two fingers on her and made my shoulders drop, and with my other hand I laid the collar back down over the tooth and left it lying there.
"This was Zaroff," I said.
John looked at the tusk for a long time without touching it. "His people, probably."
I shook my head. "No, this was him personally." I stood and looked down the fence line toward the service road, and wanted to follow those treads.
I put the story together without trying to. The man running across the open desert, barefoot and scared. I knew that run from the inside. Zaroff would've given him a head start. More sporting that way. And then, when he got tired of chasing…
The radio hissed once. "Ransom is already riding to you," Rafe said. "I want both of you back here now."
Ransom loped up the fence line with his rifle balanced across the pommel before the sun sat full above the horizon, looked at the dead man, looked at the two of us, and made no remark. He stepped down, set a boot on the bottom wire, and stayed there until dust came up off the service road.
He was off it before the cruiser stopped rolling. Winston got out with his hat already on, and his hand went straight to the back of Ransom's neck and stayed.
"Mornin', darlin'."
Whatever Ransom said back was too low for me. His hand flattened on Winston's chest, the band on it bright in the new sun.
We left them to it, with Linc and Fenix to deal with the body, and we rode for the house.
John rode loose and quiet most of the way back, eyes on the middle distance, his right hand on his thigh along the line where a rifle would lie if he carried one.
Sarah stood in the kitchen washing dishes and frowned at us as we walked through.
"Where's Sierra?" I asked.
"Back office." She jerked her head toward Rafe's office. "Said there was a body found. Anybody else hurt?"
"No," John said. "He wasn't one of ours. Nobody was hurt. It was more a warning than anything else, but you stay away from the windows today."
She nodded. "Sierra's got coffee in the office for everyone," she said as John kissed her cheek. I didn't like watching him do that, but I wasn't going to stop him. It just meant he owed me two kisses for every one he gave her.
In the office, Rafe sat with his reading glasses low on his nose and his braid over one shoulder.
Cruz and Mateo took the two chairs nearest the door, and Joe filled his usual seat across from me, his hands flat on the wood, engine black worked so deep into the knuckle creases that no soap ever lifted all of it.
Winston was there with his hat and badge on and looking annoyed that he had to be.
Sierra went around the table with the pot and filled every cup.
"It's the fox again," Cruz said. "Right? A message, same as the fox, so maybe it's the same guys who—"
"Cruz," Rafe said, and Cruz stopped.
"It's worse than the fox," I said. "A fox says I see you. This says I can reach you."
Nobody answered that, and I waited until I was sure of my own voice.
"He knew which shed John slept in," I said, glaring at Joe.
"He found John because he walked past the bike," Rafe said. "That was luck. You're the one who told us so."
I waved it off. "And now he knows what path we ride to check the perimeter, and he was confident enough about it to send two men."
Joe clenched his jaw. "You got something to say, say it, boy."
"You worked for Bonney Ranch before this. For the man who'd have hung Winston and would've shot all of us dead a year ago. We only took you in because you had nowhere to go. Maybe you're harboring some resentment about that."
"Those bastards sold me out, and you know it," Joe said. "Bonney was set to put me in the ground. This ranch is the only reason I'm not in it. So no, boy, I'm not feeling a whole lot of resentment about my second chance."
"He pulled the first tracker off the belly of Zaroff's motorcycle while the rest of us were still looking for footprints," Rafe said. "He's earned his place at this table."
"Maybe he knew where to find it because he put it there," I said.
Sierra banged the coffee pot down. Joe pushed his chair back, rose, and walked out through the kitchen without a word. Sierra looked at me then and said nothing, and I held his eyes as long as I could, which wasn't long.
"The treads turned toward the county road," I said to Rafe. "They've got to be getting gas and supplies somewhere. Let me go ask around town."
"No," Rafe said.
"I've hunted further on less."