Chapter 20 #2
The mare isn't nervous. The mare is eating grain and ignoring both of us with the professional disinterest of an animal who has never once required a human to narrate the obvious.
The phone rings on the drive.
We're headed home from a clinic call two counties over, a stock contractor with a colicky mare. Her vet truck holds the highway behind my trailer same as it has since the finals, because Laney Brooks, or Prescott, or whatever the paperwork says this week, doesn't follow anybody's trailer for long.
Torres's name on the screen pulls the cab temperature down by several degrees. I put it on speaker because the deal cuts every direction.
"Ashcroft." Her voice has the flat edge I've learned to price. The edge means the news comes with weight. "Is Dr. Prescott with you?"
"Behind me. You're on speaker to an empty cab."
"Then she'll hear it when you tell her, and I'd rather you heard it first." A breath. Not a pause for drama. A pause for the kind of accuracy Torres builds her career on. "We found a body this morning on the old Thornton corridor outside Tucumcari. Male, mid-forties. He was on our witness list."
The highway stretches out flat and long, and the sun sits low enough to throw the cab into amber light that makes everything look warmer than it is.
"Hendricks was middle management," Torres says.
"Garrett was a tool. What we didn't expect is how fast the people above them would move once the indictments went public.
" Another breath. "Somebody's cleaning house, Wade.
The man they killed this morning wasn't a threat.
He was a message. The corridor isn't closed. It's under new management."
"The approval column."
"Still blank. Still signing checks." Her radio goes in the background, a burst of dispatch static she talks over without breaking stride.
"Kenna Corbin's been working a paper trail out of the Thornton financials that runs uphill past anything we indicted.
She's close to a name. When she gets it, a whole new set of indictments starts writing itself, and I need to know you're both still in. "
"Ask Laney. She's the one holding the paper."
"I will. One more thing." The pause is longer this time, weighted with something Torres doesn't name.
"Slade Carrick didn't show for his statement this week.
His trailer's gone from the lot in Prescott.
His phone goes to voicemail. Nobody on the circuit knows where he went, and the people I've asked all say the same thing, which is that Slade's been saying less than usual, which for Slade is almost nothing. "
The name sits in the cab with me. I've known Carrick since before he did his time, back when he was the best steer wrestler on the circuit and the worst judge of a bar fight.
The man who came out of that sentence was quieter, more careful, rebuilt from the inside in ways that went past reformed and into something I never had the leverage to name.
He watched everything. He said little. He pulled Grant Corbin out of the dirt at Las Cruces and then spent the rest of that season and all of this one holding whatever he saw at arm's length. The effort of holding it has been visible to anyone paying attention.
Colt told me last week that Slade's been making calls to numbers nobody recognizes. Brenda told me he left his saddle with a friend in Prescott, which is either traveling light or not planning on needing it where he's going.
A man who holds something that hard for that long is either protecting himself or protecting somebody else. I've never been sure which one applies to Slade, and tonight, driving south with Laney holding steady behind me, I'm less sure than I've ever been.
"I'll keep an ear open," I say.
"Do that." Torres hangs up the way she always does, mid-thought, already dialing the next number, a woman running a war on a government salary and a half-charged phone.
Laney's still back there. She doesn't know yet.
She'll know inside the hour, because that's the deal, and it hasn't changed since a motel room outside Amarillo where we built the first draft of this thing out of highlighter ink and cold coffee.
Her war and my roads. Her charting and my gut.
Neither of us pretending the other one's fight is finished.
I think about the approval column. Whoever holds that pen watched an entire hauling operation fold and started another one before the paint dried on the subpoenas. That kind of patience has weight.
I've been around livestock operations long enough to know the difference between a man scrambling and a man culling, and the body outside Tucumcari sounds like culling. If that's the operation Kenna Corbin is working her way toward, the paper trail she's following has teeth at the far end of it.
Laney held up a fentanyl corridor with charting and a livestock crayon. Somewhere ahead of us, whatever the corridor became is already running, and the man whose name sits at the top of it has never once been inconvenienced by the work we've done.
The road runs south into the dark, and behind me Laney's headlights follow at the distance she keeps, not because I set it but because she spent over a year measuring gaps and doesn't take the habit lightly.
The gap between our bumpers is honest. Not too close, not too far. The distance of two people who trust each other enough to share a road and respect each other enough to drive their own rigs.
Somewhere behind us the arena is going dark for the last time this season, and the trailers that carried the stock are rolling toward winter pastures. The circuit is doing what it does every year, which is ending so it can start again.
The difference this year is that the ending doesn't scare me.
I've spent my whole career measuring my life in eight-second increments, and the man driving this truck tonight is learning to count in longer intervals.
The body count on the corridor says the intervals might not be as long as I'd like.
Laney says they're worth counting anyway.
I drive. She follows. The corridor waits.
The count sits where it always sits, in the quiet between the want and the choice, and the man I am tonight is the same man I was yesterday, which is the only promise I know how to keep.