Chapter 9 #2
“That’s how you killed my road.” He says it without heat, almost admiring, and I feel it land low and warm despite myself. “You didn’t fight the county commission. You gave them a better idea than mine and let them think they found it themselves.”
“You’re only figuring that out now?”
“I figured it out fourteen months ago. I’m just telling you out loud for the first time.”
We ride the fence line in a silence that isn’t uncomfortable, the Corridor stretching green and empty ahead of us, alfalfa fields catching the early light on one side, cattle grazing in the rotation pasture on the other.
The Front rises up out of the grassland to the west like it grew there overnight, granite gone bright and yellow and brilliant where the sun hits it, the kind of abrupt, ten-thousand-foot wall of rock that still stops my breath even after a lifetime of waking up underneath it.
Dawson checks the tree line every few hundred yards without seeming to, the same quiet vigilance he wears into every room he doesn’t fully trust.
“You’ve been photographing my desk,” he says, out of nowhere, conversational, like he’s commenting on the weather again.
I nearly lose my seat.
“Excuse me?”
“Both nights.” He’s not looking at me, eyes still on the fence line, voice perfectly level.
“I notice things move. Everything back exactly a half inch off from where I left it. Too precise to be nothing, not precise enough to be me. You’ve been documenting my desk for your father, and you’re better at it than you think, but not quite good enough to fool a man who runs the same operation. ”
Heat crawls up my throat, half mortification, half the sting of being caught at a task far more intimate than surveillance.
“You could’ve said something.”
“You could’ve asked what was on it.” He finally looks at me from under the brim of his hat and there’s no accusation in it at all, just that same infuriating calm.
“Instead, I’ve been leaving things out for you.
The Sullivan border contracts. The freight manifests you needed.
I’ve been handing you what your father wants and watching you take it like you outsmarted me. ”
I stare at him. “You’ve been feeding me information on purpose.”
“I’ve been giving my wife what she needs to do her job.” A wicked ghost of a grin crosses his mouth. “You could’ve just asked me what’s on it, Sage.”
“You could’ve just asked what I was looking for.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Neither of us backs down from it, and the silence that follows isn’t awkward at all. It’s closer to a standoff neither one of us wants to win, both of us grinning like idiots at a fence line while somewhere behind us a dead man’s truck is still evidence in a murder investigation.
Bravo stops first.
Dawson’s whole body goes rigid in the saddle, hand up, and I pull Briar to a halt beside him before I even register why.
Ahead of us, where the Corridor fence meets a stand of lodgepole pine on the Blackwater side, the wire’s been cut clean and re-spliced, professional, recent, the kind of work that doesn’t show unless you’re looking for it at exactly this angle in exactly this light.
“That wasn’t storm damage,” Dawson says, already dismounting. “That’s a crossing point. Somebody’s been using this exact spot to move between properties without tripping a single camera.”
I follow him down, boots hitting dirt still soft from last night’s dew, and crouch beside the splice while he traces the wire with two fingers, careful, reading it.
His shoulder finds mine in the narrow space between the posts, warm through two thin layers of cotton, and even crouched over evidence of a stranger watching our house, my whole body reacts to the point of contact like it’s the only fact that matters.
“This is Blackwater land,” I say, not moving away from him. “Not Sullivan.”
“I know.” That’s all I get. His hand settles briefly at the small of my back to steady me over an exposed root, gone again before I can decide what to do with it.
“Which means whoever’s watching this house has access on both sides of the war.
Somebody your family trusts as much as somebody mine does. ”
I think about Cruz’s hands steady on the wheel two days ago, no flinch, no tell, just a locked door where an answer should have been.
“The evidence against Cruz,” I say, testing each word before I let it go. “It’s too clean.”
Dawson’s whole body goes still beside me, close enough that I feel the change in him before I see it.
“Say that again.”
“A scared dispatcher under duress gives up a name in under a minute. A data entry error I sat on for three weeks suddenly means something the second Robbie goes missing. That’s not an investigation, Dawson.
That’s a story somebody built for us to find, one piece at a time, when we needed a suspect. ”
He turns his head, close enough now that I catch the exact shade his eyes go when he stops performing, slate instead of boardroom blue-grey, looking at me like I’ve handed him the one thing he didn’t know he was starving for.
“I’ve had the same thought for two days and told myself I was being paranoid.”
“You’re not paranoid. You’re right.” I stand, brushing dirt from my knees, my pulse running reckless in a way that has nothing to do with the fence line anymore. “Somebody wants us looking at Cruz so hard we stop looking at everything else.”
He’s waiting for me to catch up to him after he lets Bravo go into a full gallop, man and horse perfectly in tune.
We then ride back to the house at half the pace we rode out, the banter gone quiet, replaced by a heavier quiet neither of us names, and by the time we reach the porch the sun’s climbed high enough to burn the last of the morning chill off the grass.
He walks me to the door like he did last night, close enough that I catch soap and horse and the last of this morning’s sweat still clinging to him, and he doesn’t reach for me this time, even though he has before, when it mattered enough to risk it.
Every threshold in this house has become a small, deliberate test of how long he can stand this close without taking what I haven’t offered yet.
“Goodnight, Sullivan,” he smiles, even though it’s still morning, some private joke between us now, and hearing my own married name in his mouth again lights up the same spot in me that it did at midnight.
“Not tonight,” I say.
He goes still, reading it wrong for half a second, a shutter dropping behind his eyes like he’s already bracing for the door to shut between us.
I let the silence hold just long enough to feel like mine.
“Tonight,” I say, “you can come to my bed.”