Mackenzie
Maren Sullivan drives like she's late for something even when she isn't.
"I like your company."
"That's because you haven't ridden with me past sixty."
I hold the door handle and don't tell her we're already past sixty.
The counter clerk at the airport barely looks up when I sign for the car. A grey sedan with Montana plates and nothing memorable about it at all, which is the exact point.
No black paint. No bull's skull. No name on the door that means anything to anyone who sees it pull into a gas station.
I sit in the driver's seat for a second before I start it, both hands on the wheel. Nobody in this county knows this car. Nobody's phone lights up when I turn the key.
"Feels good, doesn't it?" Maren asks. She’s leaning against her own truck in the lot. "Having something that's yours."
"It's a rental."
"Still yours while you've got it." She pushes off the truck. "You've been riding around in Holt's truck for a while now. People notice, Agent Tatum. My mother noticed the day you landed."
"I noticed people noticing."
"Good." She almost smiles. "Means you're not as far gone as Knox thinks you are."
"As far gone as what?"
"Don't." Maren pulls her sunglasses down off her head and puts them on slow, like she's got all day to enjoy this. "Knox told me you two got stranded in a line shack. One bed. He didn't have to draw me a picture, Mackenzie, I've got a fully functional imagination."
"There's nothing to answer. It's a professional arrangement."
"Sure." She says it the way you'd agree with a child about the moon being made of cheese.
"Professional. That's why that stallion's got a name now.
Two years I've heard Holt Blackwater call that horse the black.
Just that. Like it was beneath him to bother.
" She raises an eyebrow at me over the hood.
"Sage told Knox, and he tells me everything now, apparently, whether I ask or not. The whole family noticed, Mackenzie."
"It's a horse. Horses have names."
"Not that one. Not from him."
Maren looks at me over the hood, arms crossed, with an expression that has clearly been waiting all week for an opening this good. "Honey, denial. It's not just a river in Egypt."
"That doesn't even work. It's the Nile."
"I know what river it is. I'm making a point." She pulls the driver's door open. "I hear the words you're saying, Mackenzie. Your eyes are telling me a whole different story."
She pauses, hand on the frame. "You stitched him up in that shack yourself, didn't you? We've got more in common than you think. It's impossible to resist those Blackwater boys. All that lean muscle and dark ink on top of it, like somebody built them on purpose to ruin a woman's judgment."
"He put himself between me and a drone at a funeral," I say, before I can stop myself. "That's not professional. That's not anything I've got a file category for."
Maren doesn't even look smug about it. She looks satisfied, like a woman watching weather finally do what she knew it would. "Keep that one. You're going to want it later, when you're trying to remember why you stopped fighting it."
I don't ask what that means.
I pull out of the parking lot, ninety minutes of my own hands on my own wheel.
By the time I turn in through Holt's gate, I've caught myself, twice, wanting to tell him about the drive. Why is it so easy with him now?
There's a truck in the yard I don't recognize.
Montana plates, dust to the rocker panels, an equipment box on the roof. Holt's standing loose-shouldered by the porch rail, a man about his age crouched at the truck bed working a booster seat loose, and a boy already halfway across the yard at a dead run toward the porch.
"Uncle Holt!"
Holt catches him without seeming to try and swings him half around. For one second I am looking at a crayon drawing come off a refrigerator door and stand up on its own two legs. Same black hat, if you squint. Same tall stick figure with a hand the size of a tire.
I park and get out slow, still cataloguing.
His jaw isn't set. His shoulders have dropped an inch.
When the man from the truck bed closes the distance between them he doesn't stop at six feet like everyone else in this county does.
He walks straight in and gets an arm around Holt's neck, and Holt lets him, actually lets him, one hand coming up to grip the man's shoulder, easy, like you'd greet a brother.
"John Thompsen," Holt says, when he finally turns toward me, and there's nothing guarded left in his voice. "Spotter. I've mentioned him."
"Once," I say. "The refrigerator mentioned him more than you did."
That gets a look from John, quick and assessing. The same up-and-down read I gave Holt in the truck from the airport, except friendlier. And a great deal more amused.
"Ma'am," he says, coming toward me with his hand out. "Whatever he's told you about me is classified, and whatever he hasn't told you about himself is worse."
"I'm getting that impression."
"You've got no idea." He shakes my hand, firm, easy, a man who has clearly decided within four seconds that I'm worth being charming at.
"Once you get him going he's like a faucet with the handle broke off.
Man went six hours on an overwatch one time and I had to beg him to stop talking just so I could hear the wind. "
"Holt Blackwater talked for six hours?"
"Ma'am, Holt Blackwater does not stop talking. You've just never once given him a reason to start."
Miles is already on his knees in the mud with both arms around Gus's neck, tail going so hard his whole back end moves with it.
"He remembers me," Miles says, delighted, muffled against fur.
"Everybody remembers you," John says. "You're loud."
I watch Holt watch the two of them in the mud.
Not in the truck, not in the barn, not even in the line shack with his stitches half-done have I seen his face go unguarded like this on its own, nobody asking him to hold anything, nobody watching him do it but me.
He catches me watching and doesn't look away. He doesn't cover it, just holds my eyes a second too long across the yard with a boy hanging off his dog and his best friend grinning beside him.
I look away first this time.
"Custody hearing finally closed," John says to me, quieter, watching his son.
"Two years. She fought me on every weekend, every holiday, every single Christmas, and Holt was on the phone with me more nights than not, talking me down or talking me through the filing.
" He shakes his head. "Man drove to Butte twice during it.
Didn't say why he was coming. Just showed up. "
"He didn't tell me any of that."
"He wouldn't." John looks at me, and whatever he sees in my face he decides is worth being honest about. "That's not modesty, ma'am. That's just him. He'll bleed for you quietly and let you think it was nothing."
I already know that. I stitched his arm myself in that line shack and he called it superficial before I'd even threaded the needle.
"We're headed up to Lake Louise. Powder week, for spring break." John claps Holt on the shoulder again. "Told him we'd swing through on the way, since he apparently forgot what day it was."
"I didn't forget."
"You forgot. You've had a look on you since I pulled in like a man doing math he doesn't want to finish." John's eyes go from Holt to me and back, slow. He puts whatever he just decided away for later use.
Holt doesn't deny it. I catch the muscle at his jaw and know exactly what math he's been running, because I've been running the same one, in the truck with Maren, on the drive back down 89, every single day since a line shack.
"There's a flag on my west fence," Holt says, changing the subject, same as he changes everything he doesn't want examined too closely. "Orange tape, tied high, on the survey line."
John's face does something fast and total, the grin dropping clean off it. "Whose land side?"
"Timber side coming in. Walked in, walked out beside his own tracks."
"Beside them." John's voice has gone flat and professional. It’s a different register than the one he used thirty seconds ago with his son. "Not on them."
"Both lines clean."
"That's not a mistake, Holt. That's a man telling you he was there and doesn't care if you know it.
" John looks toward the mountains. It’s the same look Holt gets when he's reading terrain instead of a room.
"That's not casing a target. Casing, you hide.
This is announcement." A beat. "You said the tape was tied at eye height? "
"Rider's eye height. Double knotted."
"He wanted it found." John says it like a man confirming something he already suspected and hoped he wouldn't have to. "That's not subtle work. That's a man with a name he wants remembered."
Nobody has to say the second name out loud for me to feel the temperature in the yard drop a few degrees.
Holt's eyes cut to mine, once, and something in them says later, and I let it be later, because Miles is climbing the fence rail with Gus barking encouragement, and this is not a conversation for an eight-year-old's ears.
We eat at the picnic table under the eave. Sandwiches and a bag of chips John produces from the truck like a magic trick.
For twenty minutes nobody talks about tape or trucks or a county that buries what it doesn't want to look at.
John tells a story about a training exercise that ends with Holt falling face-first into a river, and Holt lets him tell it and doesn't correct a single detail, which is its own kind of gift I understand now is rare.
Miles finishes his sandwich before anyone else, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and looks at me with the flat, uncomplicated directness only a child can manage.
"Are you Uncle Holt's girlfriend?"
The table goes very quiet.
John's mouth opens and nothing useful comes out of it.
Holt has gone still in a way I recognize now, the same stillness from a snowfield with Jacob in it, except there's nothing here to read and nowhere for the stillness to go.
"Miles," John says, finally, weakly. "Eat your chips, bud."
"I already ate my chips. You said Holt didn't have one of those. A girlfriend. You said that in the truck."
Under the table, Gus thumps his tail against my boot, once, twice, patient, entirely unbothered by the silence he's sitting in the middle of.
Nobody answers the boy
I don't look at Holt, and Holt doesn't look at me, and the not-looking says more than either of us would if we opened our mouths.