Chapter 18
WADE
First light is an hour out and the staging lot is a gravel pullout on a forest road, trucks parked nose-out with their engines ticking and every light killed. Somewhere north of us, past a ridgeline I can't see yet, Laney is waiting on the same gray I am.
Torres hands me a vest and a thermos cap of coffee, in that order, and watches me take both with hands that want to shake.
"How long?" she asks.
"Since the cell." The coffee is bad and I drink it like the medicine it is. "Every hour counted and banked, if you're auditing."
"I'm auditing." Her flat federal deadpan doesn't change in the cold. "You're upright, you're dry, and you did it without being asked. That buys you a seat in my vehicle and a radio you don't touch. It doesn't buy you a step past my bumper. Tell me you can bank that too."
The old answer stands up in me on reflex, the one that's carried me over chutes and past doctors and through every man who ever told me where my line was. I look at it for a second, and I put it down.
There's a difference between being handled and choosing my ground, and lately I've had nothing but practice telling the two apart, one ugly hour at a time.
"Your op," I say. "My roads. That's the whole deal, Torres. I'll keep my side."
She studies me the length of a breath, the appraiser's read, the one that prices a man before it trusts him. Whatever the appraisal comes to, she jerks her chin at the hood of her truck, where the map is spread under a red-lensed light.
The map on the hood is federal paper, but the work on it is hers. I was there for some of it. Route lines running border to distribution-like veins. Way stations circled where the manifests lied. The dot we're staged under got circled in my truck with my coffee going cold beside her elbow.
Now there's a perimeter with badges around that dot. If I know Laney, she's been leaving signs since Garrett put her in that truck, marking the trail any way she could and trusting somebody behind her would know how to read it.
"Here's why we're on this section and not the other five," Torres says. "The shell companies paying Voss hold title to a handful of properties. This is the one sitting on Dr. Prescott's route map inside a tank of gas."
She taps the ranch road, the only marked way in or out.
"Entry team takes the yard at first light. We're on national forest west of Flagstaff and the nearest paved county road is behind you. He's a cop, so we do it right, and we do it slow. Your job is to sit in my passenger seat and tell me I'm wrong about anything on this map before they move."
She's wrong about one thing, and I've been chewing it since they showed me the property line.
"This road's a front door." I put my finger on the pale seam that runs off the northeast corner of the section, thin as a scar, no county number on it.
"That's the back. Old stock driveway runs the fence line north and comes out at a wash a few miles up, then ties into the haul network past the cattle guard.
It's not on anybody's map because it was never anybody's road.
It's just where cattle walked for generations until somebody put gravel down.
A truck driving on a stock route at dawn looks like any day of the week. He thinks nobody knows it's there."
"Do you know it's there?"
"I know where it slows to a walk." The wash. Loaded or empty, a truck takes that crossing at a crawl or it takes it on its side. "You want him, you want two units and a set of spikes sitting in that wash before your entry team knocks."
Torres looks at the seam, then at me, and gets on the radio. The argument is over. Whatever else the government thinks of a bronc rider fresh out of a drunk tank, it reroutes for him in the last hour of the dark.
I sit in the passenger seat of a government truck with my hands wrapped around cooling coffee and my heart running slow and hard, the pre-ride pace, the body clearing the ledger for what's coming.
The want is here too. It rode out with me from town, patient as a bill collector, and it sits in the back seat all the way up the seam pointing out every reason a man could use one drink to steady down.
I don't answer it. Answering it is how it wins, and I've got a woman up that road who's already paid my tab twice.
We set the block in the wash while the sky is still all stars. Two county units nosed into the brush on the far bank, spikes laid where the gravel funnels, Torres's truck broadside behind a cutbank with the engine dead.
Cold pools up out of the drainage and sits on us. Nobody talks. The radio is a low mutter of positions and holds, the entry team ghosting up the ranch road miles south of us in the dark.
I sit there doing the one job I've got left, which is nothing, which is the hardest work I've been asked to do in my life.
I think about her boots by the door of every room she's ever slept in. Toes pointed the direction she chooses.
I think about a man who's spent a year moving them an inch at a time like he owned the floor they stood on, and I bank that thought too. It's fuel, and Torres is watching my hands.
The cold works down into the truck and I let it. There's a heat under it that has nothing to do with the heater, banked all season and burning anyway, and in the dark of a government vehicle I spend one minute of it.
Laney in lamplight with her chin tipped up in my hand and her voice coming apart around one word.
Laney across a war-room table, sure of her numbers, taking a criminal operation to pieces with a pen.
Laney in a doorway telling me nothing moves until she says it moves, and meaning it, and me finding out that taking that deal was the best trade of my life.
A man in my line of work knows what it costs to want something eight seconds at a time. I want that woman across whole decades, and I've got one hour of wanting to get through first, and then the one after it. That's the ride now. Hours, laid end to end, reaching for her.
First light comes up gray through the pines, and the radio changes.
"Entry, entry, entry."
Then the channel erupts.
"Movement in the yard. Subject is mobile. Subject has the female. Truck on the ranch road. Say again, truck on the ranch road."
Then a change.
"He's turning."
Torres looks at me.
"He's not going on the ranch road. That's where a cop expects a roadblock, because it's where he'd put one." I listen another second. "He’s headed for the wash."
Torres keys her mic. "All units, subject may be on the stock route toward the wash."
The engine digs in again, pulling away through the trees.
"Not maybe," I say. "He's on it. Minutes out."
Torres corrects the call, calm as a dispatcher, then looks at me.
"Stay in the truck, Wade."
The sound gets bigger. Gravel under tires, a motor being asked for everything it has, and under all of it a note I can't place until I can, rubber gone wrong, a tire running on its cords.
Beside me Torres draws her sidearm and rests it on her knee, and the wash holds its breath like an arena when the gate hand reaches for the latch.
The truck comes out of the trees with its lights off, and it's moving wrong.
I see it before I can name it, the way you see a lame horse from across a lot. It's crabbing. Sitting low on the passenger rear, bodywork rocking on a tire that's mostly rim, and a truck that should've had a mile of head start is limping into the wash at half the speed of a running man.
Something happened to that truck, and I'd bet the gate money it has her name on it.
It comes down the grade into the wash slowly, nose heavy, no room to turn. At a walk is where the spikes take what's left of his morning, and there's nothing behind him but the entry team closing the seam.
Headlights open up all around him at once. The night turns federal.
The truck stops in the bottom of the wash with steam starting off it, and for one long breath nothing moves. My hands are on the dash and Torres's hand is on my forearm, one pound of pressure, a reminder with a badge on it.
The driver's door opens.
Garrett Voss comes out of that truck the way a man comes out of a squad car, unhurried, hands managed, every movement narrating cooperation, and none of it true. He pulls Laney out in front of him, a pistol laid against the hinge of her jaw.
All season I've been building this man out of phone calls and photographs and the sound of his voice filling a motel room.
He's smaller than I built him. Pressed shirt gone soft with hard wear, hat squared, jaw shaved, a man keeping regulation grooming in the middle of a kidnapping, and I understand him all at once and wish I didn't.
He came out here to be right. The running is incidental.
Laney is upright in his grip with her hands cinched in front of her. Even from behind a cutbank at forty feet in bad light I can read her like I read her the first day, before I knew her name.
A prey animal's stillness. Except I know her now, and I know what her stillness is for. My heart goes so loud I can hear it over the radio.
"You're going to want those lights out of my eyes," Garrett calls, level, reasonable, the voice of a man running a traffic stop. "And you're going to want to think about jurisdiction, because I've got a distressed woman here I'm transporting to safety."
Nobody answers him. Rifles settle on hoods all around the wash, quiet as frost forming. Torres is out of the truck with her credentials up, walking the slow walk, giving him procedure because procedure is the only language that holds his attention.
I am standing at the fender with all of me pulling one direction and my word to Torres holding the other, and the space between those two forces is where I live now. Sober feels like this. Everything at full volume and nothing to turn it down.
Forty feet. I could cover it in under four seconds. Worse ground has gone under me faster than that, with worse footing, and everything I own has already run it a dozen times, mapped the angles, weighed the risk, and come back with the same answer.