Chapter 5 #2
"Someone is using those trailers to move product," I say.
"The horses are collateral damage. If fentanyl is being stored inside the rigs near the livestock, any failure in containment would produce exactly the kind of inconsistent, low-level contamination I'm documenting.
The exposure would depend on proximity, duration, and how well whatever is carrying the product is sealed.
That's why some horses show symptoms and others don't, even on the same haul. "
"And you think Thornton is running product alongside livestock."
"I think five contaminated horses on one hauler's routes is past the point of coincidence. The transit time anomalies match. The lab results match. It's one corridor, one hauler, one operation."
He reaches across the desk for one of the Thornton delivery receipts near my elbow, and his arm passes close to my face without warning.
I flinch. The reflex is fast and involuntary, a full-body contraction that pulls me sideways before my conscious mind registers that the movement was harmless.
His hand stops in midair, receipt pinched between two fingers, and his eyes come up to mine.
The moment holds for half a second. I straighten, take the receipt from his hand, and set it between us on the desk.
My expression doesn't change. His doesn't either.
But his gaze hardens, fast and controlled, and he pulls his arm back to his own side of the desk with the deliberate precision of a man who just learned a thing he intends to use.
He doesn't mention it. I don't explain.
"Colt told me about a vet named Salazar," he says, and the shift in subject is abrupt enough to feel like a door slamming shut. "Circuit vet before you. Started asking questions about Thornton. Disappeared."
The information lands in my stomach with a weight that has nothing to do with surprise. I already suspected someone else had noticed. "When?"
"Months ago. Nobody went looking very hard."
"That's reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be." He holds my eyes, and the weight of the look pins me where I'm standing.
"We just mapped a federal drug corridor.
And the veterinarian asking questions about it is you, not me.
The people running this have already made one vet disappear.
This isn't a phone call to the state board, Laney.
This is the kind of thing that gets people killed. "
"So we go to the FBI." I pull the manila envelope toward me. "I know it was an agent named Torres who ran the Merrick investigation. We hand her everything, let the feds build the case, and get out of the way."
"And Thornton shuts down the routes before a single warrant gets signed.
" Wade leans forward, elbows on his knees.
"You've seen how fast these people adapt.
Merrick goes down, Thornton adapts. You blow the whistle on Thornton, somebody else picks up the contract next season with cleaner trucks and smarter methods.
The corridor doesn't die. It just moves. "
"So your plan is to keep gathering evidence until we have enough for an airtight case while a drug operation keeps poisoning horses and a missing veterinarian stays missing?"
"My plan is to not get you killed by walking into a federal office with half a case and a target on your back."
"I already have a target on my back." The words come out harder than I intend. "I've had one long before Thornton. The difference is this target I can do something about."
His expression goes flat. The assessment is rapid and thorough, and I can feel him recalculating everything he knows about me against what I just implied. His mouth thins into a hard line, and the temperature in the room drops.
"We need more," he says. "Another week. I can get to Reyes through a contractor who owes me a favor. If Reyes is the one running the loaded rigs, he's the weak link. Drivers talk when they're scared, and a man hauling federal weight across state lines has plenty to be scared about."
"A week."
"One week. If I can't get to Reyes by then, we go to Torres with what we have."
"That isn't your decision to make."
"I'm not making it. I'm asking."
"One week," I say. "And if another horse gets sick before then, I go to Torres immediately. With or without you."
"Fair."
My phone buzzes on the desk between the manifests. I glance at the screen.
Unknown number. Oklahoma area code.
The buzz cuts through the room like a blade, and every muscle in my body locks into a stillness that predates thought. The number isn't one I've seen before. It's never the same number twice. Different phones, same area code, same silence on the other end if I'm stupid enough to answer.
I don't answer. The call rings through to voicemail.
Three seconds later, the phone buzzes again. Same area code. Different number.
I pick up the phone and hold down the power button until the screen goes black. The motion is controlled, deliberate, the practiced efficiency of a woman who's been doing this for fourteen months and has the choreography memorized.
When I look up, Wade is watching my hands. The dead phone. The white-knuckle grip I haven't loosened. I set it face-down on the desk between the manifests.
His body has gone still in a way I've learned to read on him, the same locked-down tension he carries into the chute before the gate opens. Controlled fury looking for a direction. His knuckles are white on the edge of the desk.
"Who," he says. One word. Not a question.
"Not your problem."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's the answer you're getting." The echo of our first conversation lands between us, deliberate, and his nostrils flare at the callback. I hold his gaze until the fury in it banks into low heat, still burning but pulled behind his teeth.
"I should go," I say.
"Probably."
Neither of us moves.
The room is too small. It was too small when I walked in, and every minute I've spent inside it has compressed the air further.
His maps and my manifests overlap on the desk, and the visual is uncomfortably accurate, two separate investigations tangled together by proximity and the growing suspicion that pulling them apart would cost more than leaving them woven.
"You're staring at me," I say.
"Would you rather I stopped?"
"I'd rather you did it less obviously."
"That's not how this works." His voice is low enough that the words barely carry across the desk between us. "I've been obvious since Midland. You just haven't wanted to deal with it."
He's right about that too, and the bluntness of the admission hits a crack in the wall I've been mortaring shut with professional distance.
The disciplined refusal to want things I can't afford.
I've been measuring the distance between his body and mine since I walked in, the way I measure every distance in every room I enter, assessing threat, calculating escape routes, mapping the fastest path to the door.
Except the calculations have been running wrong for weeks. The distance between us doesn't register as threat. It registers as gravity, pulling from my sternum, and I've been compensating for it the same way he compensates for his bad shoulder, by pretending it's not there.
"This is a bad idea," I say.
"I didn't suggest anything."
"You didn't have to."
"Then what are we arguing about?"
"We're arguing about what to do with a federal drug corridor."
"That's not what we're arguing about."
The accuracy of that lands like a fist. The anger it triggers has nothing to do with Thornton Livestock.
It has everything to do with the heat pooling low in my abdomen while I sit across from a man who drinks too much, watches too carefully, and makes me want things I stopped letting myself want a long time ago.
"Don't make this something," I say.
"I'm not making anything. You walked over here."
"With evidence."
"With an excuse."
The word hits like a slap, and the worst part is how precisely it lands.
I could have called. I could have texted.
I could have waited until morning and met him at the pens where the light is flat, the distance is wide, and the smell of livestock would overpower whatever it is about his skin that's been pulling at me since the first time he stood too close.
Instead, I walked to his motel room in the dark.
I'm on my feet before I've decided to stand. He's faster, out of the desk chair with a quickness that shouldn't belong to a man held together by tape and ibuprofen. He rises to his full height and the room shrinks by half, his shoulders blocking the overhead light.
"Tell me to sit down," he says. His voice is low, stripped of the easy drawl he wears in public, and the raw sound of it drags heat through every nerve ending south of my collarbone. "Tell me this is about the case and you'll walk out of here and I'll let you go."
"I don't need your permission to leave."
"I know. That's why I'm asking."
There it is again. The single word that keeps rearranging the wiring in my chest, and I resent the rearrangement almost as much as I need it.
"This doesn't mean anything," I say, and I close the distance between us.
His mouth is bourbon and coffee, and the taste lands with a jolt that travels straight through my chest into my hips.
His hands find the sides of my face, thumbs along my jawline, the hold firm enough that the pressure registers against my teeth.
I could pull back. He'd let me. And the fact that I know that makes me want to stay exactly where I am.
I fist the front of his t-shirt and drag him down to me.
His breath catches, a sound I file somewhere between triumph and warning.
His hands slide from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers threading through the base of my braid, and when he tilts my head back the exposure of my throat should make me flinch.
I arch into it instead.