Chapter 12
WADE
Daylight comes through the windshield like a bill collector, and my skull answers the door before I do.
I know where I am before I open my eyes.
A man learns the shape of his own back seat same as he learns his own saddle, and I've woken up folded across this one enough times to recognize the particular ache it deals out.
What I don't recognize, arriving with the headache, is cold air moving through the cab and the smell of coffee nobody in this truck made. I'm not alone.
Laney is sitting in the open passenger door with her boots on the running board and two paper cups steaming in the cold.
She's watching me with the morning sun behind her, and between us, down on the floorboard where I left it, the dead pint lies on its side with its label turned up like it's proud of the work.
I wait for it. The sermon. The tears. The door slamming hard enough to finish what the headache started. I've got answers loaded for all three, worn smooth from years of handling.
She holds out a cup.
"It's from the motel office pot," she says. "I'd apologize for it, but you're in no position to be particular."
I sit up slow, fast being off the menu, and take the coffee because my hands need the job. She shakes two ibuprofen out of her kit and sets them in my palm without ceremony.
"Horse dose?"
"Don't tempt me."
The coffee is terrible and the pills are human-sized and she still hasn't looked at the pint. I can't get ahead of that. She knows it's there. I watched her not look at it, which is a different thing entirely from not seeing it, and the difference is the whole morning.
"Say it," I tell her.
"Drink your coffee."
I've spent a lifetime braced for sermons. Preachers preach them. Old hands preach them. Colt's got a short one he trots out when the occasion calls. Sermons I can ride out same as storms, head down, waiting for the sky to empty itself.
What I can't ride out is a woman handing me coffee in the cold and letting me sit in what I did. It's the meanest kindness anybody's ever shown me, and it works me over better than shouting ever has.
Something in me gives, quiet, like a post starting to lean. I put anger on top of it fast, like throwing dirt on a fire, and the anger's got nowhere to go but inward, which is the only direction it's ever really known.
I pick the pint up off the floorboard because somebody has to.
There's no way to hold an empty bottle in front of the woman who found it that doesn't say everything.
I get out, cross the lot, and drop it in the barrel by the ice machine, and it lands in the trash with a sound too small for what it costs.
She's still sitting in my truck when I come back. She hands me my hat off the dash.
"You've got an hour before the pens need either of us," she says. "I'm told the diner does a plate of eggs that has personally saved lives."
So that's how it's going to be. Not a fight. Breakfast.
I eat the eggs. She reads the local paper and steals my toast and tells me the county fair queen got caught doing burnouts in the church lot.
I laugh before I remember I'm supposed to be dying. She watches me laugh with something in her face I don't have a name for and don't deserve either way.
"You're waiting for me to start managing you," she says, buttering the toast she stole. "You keep glancing at me like a horse watching the gate."
"Occupational habit."
"Break it. I don't manage what I care about. I treat what's in front of me, and what's in front of me right now is a man who needs eggs and quiet." She slides the plate an inch closer to my side of the table. "Eat. You can go back to being bulletproof by lunch."
The first hour of my day has belonged to me alone for more years than I'll say out loud. She just sat in it like it was any other hour. Like the worst of me at a diner table was still worth the price of eggs. That's the part that almost finishes the job the coffee started.
The day is a slack day, no performance until tomorrow night, so the fairground belongs to the help and the stock and the men with nowhere better to be.
Laney makes her rounds. I haul feed I wasn't asked to haul and check rigging that doesn't need checking, and I keep finding reasons to be within sight of her, same as always.
The difference today is that she's the one keeping me in sight. We both pretend not to notice the trade.
Around noon she settles her sample pouch inside her jacket like a shoulder rig, her laptop already stowed in her kit, a lesson the coolers taught her. She's carried both on her body since somebody opened every cooler she owned.
I stand there while she does it and think about what Torres said. Assume they know what she's holding, down to the tube.
When she's done she turns around, looks me over like stock she's thinking of buying, and points at the tailgate.
"Sit. You've been guarding that left shoulder since breakfast."
"It's fine."
"Then this won't take long." I sit, because arguing with her costs more than obliging her, and her hands find the joint through my shirt with a sureness that has nothing shy in it.
She works the wreckage like she's reading it, and I hold still under her palms. I hold still for nobody alive.
The last man who grabbed that shoulder uninvited nearly lost the hand.
Hers I sit for. The wanting kicks up right there in the middle of the pain, which about sums up the whole condition of my life.
"Grind in there like a gravel road," she says, close to my ear. "You're a mess, cowboy."
"You've got poor taste in projects, Doc."
"The worst." Her thumb digs into the seam of the joint and stars come up behind my eyes, and her voice stays easy as Sunday. "Lucky for you."
The old man shows up midafternoon. Every fairground's got one. This one works the pens for day wages, moving slower than the stock, a bronc rider gone to rust with a face like a dry lakebed and a left arm that doesn't finish anything it starts.
The young riders talk around him. The older ones look away. That's worse. Somebody said he rode at Cheyenne once, back when that sentence was the whole resume a man needed.
He asks me for nothing. I give him a folded bill anyway and invent a job to hang it on, and he takes both with the careful dignity of a man who's learned the exact weight of other people's pity.
Laney finds me after, leaned on the rail by the empty chutes, watching him shuffle a hose across the pens. "You've been staring at that man long enough to worry him," she says.
"I'm not staring at him." The words come up from somewhere I didn't authorize. "I'm staring at my old man."
She doesn't say anything. She sets her kit down, leans on the rail next to me, and waits. The waiting is an open gate. I walk through it because I'm too wrung out to do anything smarter.
"He rode broncs. Good ones. Had a buckle they still talk about in two states, and a way of sitting a horse that made other men look like furniture."
The hose kinks and the old man works it loose with his one good arm, patient as erosion.
"A horse went over backward on him in the chute at a nothing rodeo in Colorado.
Crushed his hip and a piece of his spine, and the doctors put him back together the way you put a windmill back up after a storm. It stands. It doesn't turn."
"How old were you?"
"Old enough to drive him home from the bars.
Young enough to think I was helping." The rail is warm under my forearms and I keep my eyes on the pens because this doesn't come out under direct light.
"I've still got his buckle. It lives in a box in the bottom of my war bag, and I haven't opened that box in years, and I've never once managed to leave it home, either. "
Down in the pens the old man coils his hose wrong and starts over. "He didn't die of the drinking, exactly. He just got smaller every year until the funeral was a formality. A big man, going down a size at a time, and everybody around him calling it retirement."
I turn my hat in my hands. "You want to know the joke? I started riding to give him something to watch. By the end he couldn't tell my rides from the television."
"And you ride hurt because he couldn't ride at all."
"I ride hurt because winning was the one thing the bottle never took from me." The truth of it lands in my own ears like a diagnosis. "And I drink like him and tell myself it's different, because I'm still winning."
She takes that in like bloodwork, no flinch, no verdict. Behind us a latch clangs and a horse complains about the service.
"Thank you," she says. "For telling me."
She doesn't hand me it's okay, and she doesn't hand me you're nothing like him. She's too honest for either, and I've never wanted her more than I do right now, leaning on a fence rail with the afternoon coming apart around us, being told nothing but the truth.
Torres calls while the light is going long. I put her on speaker on the tailgate, because nobody filters anymore, and Laney stands close enough that our shoulders settle the question of whose call it is.
"Two developments, Ashcroft, and the second one's going to keep you up nights.
First. The custody mapping is finished. Every horse your vet flagged, every case the labs corroborated, moved on Thornton paper at some point in the exposure window.
Every one. No exceptions, no outliers, no innocent explanations left standing.
The pattern isn't a pattern anymore. It's an inventory. "
"And the second?"
"Yesterday morning a Thornton hauler got flagged at a weigh station outside Las Cruces.
Overweight on the rear axle. Routine stop, routine paperwork, and the driver panicked, left the rig running at the scale, and went over a fence on foot.
Highway patrol is still looking for him.
And before you ask, an overweight axle is a citation and a re-scale.
Nobody goes over a fence for a citation. That driver knew what he was hauling."