Chapter 10
BOULDER
We rolled out before light, her headlights steady in my mirror the whole hour from the compound, and now the sun's coming up on a farm that doesn't look lonely anymore.
Bikes nose-out by the barn. Cross's truck angled across the mouth of the lane where it narrows.
The prospect walking the fence line with his breath showing.
Brick's bike leaned by the equipment shed, where he's been sitting on the back track since midnight because he asked for the worst of it before anybody could hand it to him.
I should feel better than I do.
The vote went the way it needed to. The watch is real. Front lane covered, back track covered, and nobody comes up either one without being seen a half-mile off. But a watched barn isn't a solved barn. It's a problem standing still. And Warden isn't a man who stands still with it.
Spark comes across the yard with a thermos and two tin cups, hair shoved up under one of Wade's old caps, and takes the first cup to Brick.
He's stiff off the cold shift, gray around the mouth, and whatever she says to him gets a grunt that would pass for thanks anywhere in the county.
He drinks it standing. He doesn't look at her one second longer than the handoff takes, and from Brick that counts as manners.
She feeds the chickens next, hens complaining at her boots the whole time.
Then she's at the barn mouth with Wade's parts book open on a hay bale, pencil behind her ear, checking what's on the shelves against what's written down.
Not fixing anything today. Knowing it. Wade's kind of knowing, where the whole farm lives on paper so it can't be argued with later.
I could watch her all morning, and that's the trouble. Half of me wants her behind the compound walls with a brother on the door and no argument entertained. The other half remembers a shop going dim around us while she told me she was done being handled. I stay where I am and let her work.
Cross comes down from the gate unshaved, running on the end of his coffee.
"Lane stayed dead all night," he says. "County road didn't. Same panel truck went by at nine and again after midnight, both directions, forty in a fifty-five. And a rider sat the crossroads east of here for near an hour, engine off. Too far to press him on it. Close enough to count our headlights."
"They're reading us."
"They're reading us. Counting heads, timing the rotations. They want to know if we're the same club at hour ten that we are at hour one."
"Are we?"
"Brick logged that rider down to the minute." Cross lets that be the answer. "They'll test it in daylight next. Probing, not swinging. A man doesn't buy a fight before he's priced it."
He's right before noon.
The frost is gone off the fence wire when a gray sedan comes down the county road slower than any honest errand. My phone buzzes in my cut. Whiskey, on the back track with the prospect.
"Two on foot in the tree line," he says. "Coming up on the track easy, like they're out for birds."
"Let them see you," I tell him. "Stand where the light finds you. Nobody clears leather unless they do."
"Copy."
"Spark." She's already looking at me. I don't tell her to hide. The order sits behind my teeth, and I keep it there. "Stay with Cross."
She closes the parts book on her pencil and goes to stand by his truck while I walk down the lane to meet the road.
The sedan slows to a crawl at the brIGGS mailbox. Mud on the front plate. The passenger window is down in forty-degree air, and the man inside wears no colors, but I've seen that lean build before, standing behind Warden in this yard.
Behind me, faint, I hear Whiskey's engine turn over.
Nobody gets out. Nobody speaks. The lean one reaches an arm out the window and lays a folded paper on the mailbox lid, sets a rock on top of it, careful as a man paying a toll. Then the sedan rolls on north, no hurry in it anywhere, and the sound of it thins out down the county road.
My phone buzzes again. "They pulled off," Whiskey says. "Soon as we stepped out of the trees they quit climbing. Took a long look at the barn, longer one at the yard, and walked back the way they came. Never got within two hundred yards."
"Anybody touch iron?"
"Hands rode close. Nobody drew."
That's the shape of the whole visit. They came to see how fast we'd meet them, nothing else, and we met them fast, and that should feel like winning.
I lift the rock off the paper.
Block letters, pencil, pressed hard enough to groove through both folds.
BARN'S WELL COVERED.
HOW ABOUT THE GIRL.
Covered. A watch report. He's priced the fight. He wants the barn bad enough to start a war and wonders if I'd give it up to keep her safe. Or he's thinking it'll be easier to take the barn if he can make me split my men between the land and the woman.
Boots on gravel behind me. Cross, and Spark two steps ahead of him, because of course she didn't stay put very long.
I could fold the paper into my cut and call it club business, give her the I've got it handled version. I won't. I hand it to her.
She reads it. Her thumb presses a crescent into the corner of the paper, and when she looks up there's fear in her face and fury right behind it, neither one winning.
"Second note they left on this farm," she says. "First one came with rental terms."
"This one's honest, at least."
Cross reads it over her shoulder, says nothing, walks to the gate post and back with his jaw tight, already rebuilding rotations in his head. I put my shoulder square between her and the open road, out of habit older than thinking.
"He thinks I'm the weak spot."
"Or he thinks you're mine." I say it plain, in daylight, where Cross can hear and the road can watch.
She holds my eyes a long moment. Nothing's been said out loud between us, not to the club.
"Well." Her chin doesn't drop. "He could be right about one thing, then."
She hands the note back to me, and when I take it her fingers stay on mine a half second longer than the paper needs — a small deliberate pressure, there and gone, like torque checked on a bolt.
Then she picks up the thermos she left on the gate post, because the watch still wants coffee whether anybody’s leverage or not.
"I'm not going back behind the walls, Cole. So figure out the version where I don't."
"Will do," I say.
She heads up the lane, and Cross falls in beside her without being told. I stand at the mailbox with Warden's note in my hand.
He's right. That's the hell of it. She feels mine and he's built his whole next move on it.
He's also made the worst mistake a man in his position could make. He put her name in the game to split my attention. All he's done is aim it.
Come test me, Warden. I'll be standing right here.