CHAPTER 25 #3
Beck knew that stillness. He'd learned, these last weeks, to read it the way she read everything else — the way you read a body before a face.
With anybody else stillness meant calm. With Laney it meant the opposite, it meant a thing had gotten past her guard and she didn't trust her own face to carry it. He waited. He'd learned that too.
“You're on the wrong side of that horse to be alive,” she said finally. Dry. But her voice wasn't quite level, and she'd notice that he'd noticed, and she'd hate it.
“He hasn't read the part where I'm supposed to be dead.” Beck rubbed the stallion's neck. “We're keeping it from him.”
She came through the gate. Slow. Hand out flat the way he had done it, the way Tom had taught her and she had taught him, and Diesel let her run a palm down his face, and she stood close to the both of them in the falling light and he could smell the antiseptic and dust of her, and her shoulder was a hand's breadth from his, and neither one of them moved away.
“The inspector took the samples,” she said, quiet now, the dryness gone out of it.
“Logged them. Dated them against the night I pulled them.
He'll cross-reference the camera if it catches anything.” She turned her head and looked up at him, and there was something in her green eyes he didn't have a name for and was afraid to name, the same thing he'd quit looking for behind his own face.
“It's a real case now, Beck. It's not just us knowing. It's on paper.”
“It's on paper,” he echoed.
“And the sale's circled.”
“Five weeks.”
“And the horse,” she said, looking at Diesel, and then at Beck, and then not looking away, “is gentled.”
The sun went down behind the mesas and threw the whole sky up red, and the corral and the cottonwoods and the far green smudge of the camera-tree all went to gold and shadow, and Beck stood there with the woman he'd left and the horse nobody could ride and the date circled on his sister's calendar, and the whole reckless thing of it crested under him like the heave of an animal coming up out of the chute — that high lifting half-second when you're past committed, past thinking, when there's no more deciding to do because you're already on and the gate's already open and either you ride or you don't.
He'd spent his life living for that half-second and then turning loose before it could finish. Turning loose was the only safe thing. You let go clean, while letting go was still yours to do.
This was the one he meant to see all the way to the end of.
The understanding settled into him quiet, the way Diesel had settled, all four feet on the ground at last. His head had gone empty of the old furniture — the plane ticket, the comeback ride, the motel in the next county where a man could be by morning.
He had bet the whole of himself on three things he couldn't control — a sale, a contract, a hearing — and a fourth he was learning he couldn't control either, standing here close enough to touch and not pulling away, and he had not, anywhere in the back of his mind, marked the door.
A wiser man would be terrified. A wiser man would have kept his weight back on his heels and one eye on the gate, the way he'd kept them his whole life, because the one thing Beck Calhoun knew about himself, the thing his own father had said out loud in the dark ten years ago, was that he broke what he touched and he left before the breaking, and a man who's all the way in has got the farthest in the world to fall.
He knew all that. He looked at Laney in the red light and at the dark stallion standing easy under his hand, and he found, turning it over, that he wasn't afraid of it.
That, more than anything — more than the debt, more than the hearing, more than Vance's smooth voice or Dell's bolt cutters — that was the thing he'd remember.
That on the highest day, with everything circled and set and finally going right, he stood all the way out in the open with nothing held back and no way out planned, and he wasn't afraid.
He should have been.
Hutch had left a torch lit out by the far pen — a second weld he'd meant to come back to, the little tank rig hissing its blue flame against the dusk, a hard clean star burning low against all that red.
Beck looked at it across the yard, that small ferocious blue holding steady in the dark coming on.
The right color for what was in him. Something burning right. Something that would hold.
Diesel sighed and dropped his head against Beck's chest, heavy and trusting, and Beck stood with his hand on the stallion and his eyes on the blue acetylene flame and the woman warm at his shoulder, the sale date five weeks out and the camera watching the fence line in the dark, and let himself, for once in his life, all the way in.
The flame burned on, steady and blue, and did not so much as flicker.
He breathed in the dust and the antiseptic and the warm hide under his hand, and held still, all the way out in the open, and did not once look for the door.