14. Thirteen #2
"I know exactly how you hunt." Rafe took his glasses off, folded them, and laid them on the turquoise. "He wants you off the ranch, chasing ghosts, so he can do something worse than leave a body behind."
I put both hands flat on the table. "I want him dead. And you just want us to sit around and wait for more bodies to turn up?"
"Yes," Rafe said. "For now."
I stood. The chair legs scraped the boards, Nimue cinched around my throat, and every face at that table turned up to me except one.
John looked at the turquoise for a moment longer.
Then he looked up at me. "Rafe can forbid you," he said.
"I won't do that. I'm asking. I slept five months on Zaroff's ground, little one, and I know how far it sits from anything that would hear you call.
Stay inside the fences. Stay where I can reach you. "
The trail was five hours old and drying.
I could feel it dying while I stood there, the treads filling with dust one hour at a time, some gas-station clerk's memory of a heavy truck softening by the afternoon.
My whole body leaned toward the door. And John sat there with tape wrapped around his ribs and my mark under his collar and last night's word still hanging in the air between us.
How the hell was I supposed to say no to him?
I sat down, but the want to hunt stayed in my legs for a long while after.
"Thank you," Rafe said to me and not to John. He put the glasses back on. "Patrols double, and we continue to ride in pairs. They want us to escalate, so that's exactly what we're not going to do."
"That's it?" I said.
"No." Rafe turned his head. "Winston. You work the county for me. Fuel stops, feed suppliers, ice, propane, anybody hauling a load out to an address that doesn't exist. A compound that size eats every day and somebody is writing the receipts."
Winston pushed his hat back. "Quiet?"
"Quiet. You ask, we don't. He knows our faces, and he doesn't know yours are ours.
" Rafe put two fingers on the turquoise.
"And Joe's been under our trucks since he left this room.
When he finds what Zaroff has on us, nobody touches it.
Not you, Coyote. Joe decides whether it's worth more pulled out of a wire or left in one, telling him whatever we feel like telling him.
Until then, we drive nowhere we don't already go. "
Nobody said anything. Cruz's hands lay flat on his knees.
Winston sighed and stood. "Well, I'll keep the county deputies off you as long as I can, but if they start dropping bodies anywhere else, won't be much I can do."
"I understand," Rafe said with a nod. "Thank you for your help, Winston."
"You need anything else, you call me." Winston tipped his hat back and slid his aviators on. "Otherwise, I'll see the rest of you all tonight."
Winston's cruiser raised dust out the service road at midmorning, and by noon the east track held nothing but the marks of my own rake.
I did the only hunting left to me: I walked our whole east line on foot and dressed a smooth patch of dirt every hundred feet, so that anything crossing in the dark would leave prints.
The work kept my hands busy and settled nothing else.
All afternoon I caught myself thinking about that cruiser somewhere out on the county road, and every time I did, I turned and counted what stood inside the wire instead: John, Sierra, Sarah's shape at the kitchen window. Every one of them was mine to stay for.
Each time I crossed the yard, Joe's legs stuck out from under a different machine.
He had rolled under the flatbed before the coffee cooled, and by late day both trucks and the tractor stood with their panels off and their seats out on the dirt.
He didn't look at me. I didn't offer to help, and that sat wrong in my chest all afternoon.
The light had turned orange when he rolled out from under Linc's truck.
John and I sat on the equipment shed step with plates full of tacos, and Joe crossed the whole yard to us, wiping his hands on a rag. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes.
He dropped a black plastic contraption about the size of a matchbook onto my plate. Two little wires stuck out of one side, clipped short.
"Linc's truck," Joe said. "Inside the loom behind the left taillight, hardwired, drawing straight off the battery whether the truck ran or not.
" He folded the rag into his back pocket.
"My sweep never had a chance at it. I was looking for magnets and boxes, things stuck on in a hurry.
This was wired in by somebody with time, and taped back so factory-clean I'd opened three other trucks before I trusted my own eyes. "
I picked it up. It weighed nothing at all in my palm.
"Every feed run," I said. My mouth had dried around the words.
"Every feed run, every town run, every time that truck sat still long enough to matter," Joe said. "That's all it does. It tells him where our tires go. It never told him what track you ride at night or when. Somebody lay out there in the dark and watched that with his own eyes."
I turned the wafer over with my thumb. "He never needed a man at our table."
"There was one day between the pit and the shed," John said. "When did anybody take that truck to town?"
"The morning after you came in," Joe said. "Linc ran for Sierra's list, gauze and suture packs, and the truck sat in front of the pharmacy the best part of an hour. I fueled it when he brought it back. By then Zaroff had a stolen motorcycle and four dead men to be angry about."
"That truck hauled the gauze that patched me." John worked his jaw once under the beard.
"Good trade," I said.
Joe walked back across the yard toward the machines he'd opened up. I should have said something while his back was still close enough to say it to, but I didn't know what to say.
John's hand settled warmly between my shoulder blades. I closed my fist around the tracker until the wire ends dug into my palm.