Chapter 10
TEN
KNOX
Fire makes cowards honest and criminals sloppy.
By the time we reach Vásquez's place, the volunteer crew is already there, one truck pulled up the gravel drive, a single hose running to the front door.
The structure is intact. No blown windows, no collapsed roof.
Just a thin column of dark smoke pushing out from the hallway window, the kind that says paper and fabric, not timber.
A smoke call, not a structure fire. Controlled. Deliberate.
Maren pulls up behind me. She reads her phone as she walks, then pockets it. "Someone on the county road called it in. Saw the smoke from a distance." She looks at the window. "They're already gone."
"Yes," I say. "They are."
We give the marshal our names, say we knew the missing driver and that we're concerned. He's got enough to manage and we're not the problem in front of him. He waves us toward the perimeter.
We go around the back.
The back door is unlocked. No damage to the frame. Whoever came in didn't need to force anything, or they came in the front and left through here. Maren looks at the frame, then looks at me.
"They knew how to get in," she says.
"Same way we did."
We are not dealing with people who need keys or time. She holds my gaze for a beat. I can see it land.
We move through the kitchen fast. The smoke is thin in here, mostly cleared, the burn already done by the time the crew arrived.
The filing cabinet in the hallway has been emptied and the contents burned in the bathtub.
I can tell from the char pattern, the way the residue runs toward the drain.
Clean. Methodical. They came for something and they found it, or they found enough, and they left without touching anything else.
What they left is the absence of things. Empty drawers. A cleared shelf. The negative space of a search that knew exactly what it was looking for.
Maren crouches by the bathtub and studies the ash. Her jaw is set in the way it gets when she's running calculations and not liking the answers. "Route logs," she says. "Look at the paper weight. This isn't personal documents."
She's right. Commercial printing stock. I crouch beside her, shoulders two inches from hers, aware of this in a way that is not useful right now, so I set it aside.
The way I've been setting aside the fact that three hours ago she was in my shower and I had my hands in her wet hair.
Four days since the rodeo. Four days since Maren hit the dirt and I crossed a fifty-yard truce without thinking about it.
Now she is crouching beside me in a dead man's bathroom and I am not thinking about the rodeo at all.
Set it aside. Focus.
"They knew we'd been here," I say.
"They knew we found something worth coming back for." She stands. "They didn't know what we took."
The notebook in my glove box. She's right. If they'd known about the notebook, this place would look different. More urgent. More thorough. This was a cleanup, not a panic.
We go out the back.
I find it in under five minutes. I know where to look because I know how I would have run this.
One person inside to burn the records, one person outside to watch the drive.
Elevated ground behind the spruce row, clear sightline to the front door and the gravel approach. That's where I would have stood.
I go back to my truck first and pull a shop rag from behind the seat.
The casing is sitting in the center of the path. Upright. Balanced on its base like someone set it there, which is exactly what they did. I crouch and look at it for a long moment before I wrap the rag around my fingers and pick it up.
A .308. Range capability. Precision. Someone who could have put a round through that hallway window from the spruce line and chose not to.
Maren stops beside me and goes very quiet, the quiet of a woman who has just shifted her understanding of the situation.
"They put it there," she read it before I said anything.
"Yes."
"That's not a warning." She looks at me. "That's a demonstration."
I pocket the casing, rag and all. She watched me pick it up with the rag and pocket it.
She says nothing, because she is a Sullivan and Sullivans do not hand evidence to law enforcement when they can use it themselves.
We understand each other completely in this moment and neither of us has to say so.
The marshal is going to want a statement. I need to make a call I cannot make within anyone's hearing. I look at her.
"Go," she says. "I'll handle him."
I walk into the spruce line until the voices from the drive reduce to sound without words. Three calls in eight minutes. The first two are informants, men on Blackwater payroll long enough that I don't need to explain context, just need. The third is Holt.
He picks up on the first ring.
"Controlled burn at the driver's place," I say.
"Records only. Professional entry, no forced anything.
They left a placed .308 casing on the perimeter.
" A pause. "Jacob flagged three names last month.
Anyone in that list with range training, I want to know where they've been for the last eighteen hours.
And Holt." My voice drops into the register I learned before I had a word for it.
"I don't want them comfortable. I want them honest."
Silence. "Understood."
I hang up and stand in the trees. This is the thing about Holt.
No questions, no pushback, and no need to explain the shape of a situation he already understands.
We grew up in the same dark, learned the same things from it, and then he left and the Army made him into something harder and more precise than anything Gideon built.
When he came home two years ago, not a single thing between us had changed.
The shorthand was still there. It had just gotten quieter.
Understood means I'll handle it the way it needs handling. It always has.
I walk back.
Maren signals left a mile north of Vásquez's place and I don't need to ask where she's going.
Every kid in Rimrock knows that turn. A two-track dropping below the highway grade into a stand of cottonwoods so thick the road disappears the moment you clear the top of the bank.
The South Fork of Birch Creek runs at the bottom, cold and clear and completely invisible from the highway.
I follow her down.
We park in the cottonwood shade, the creek running twenty feet below, the mountains white and sharp against the blue to the west. Nobody on the highway can see us. Maren gets out of her truck and stands at the edge of the bank, looking down at the water. I come to stand beside her.
She looks at me sideways. At my boots, my jeans, my t-shirt, my hat. The full inventory.
"You wear too many clothes for July," she says.
Then she reaches down and pulls the sundress over her head.
I stop thinking about everything else.
She steps out of her sandals, hooks her thumbs in her panties and steps out of those too, and I stand there with my hat still on. The morning sun finds every curve of her, the long lines, and the fullness of her that I now know and cannot stop looking at.
She sets her things on the flat rock and picks her way down the bank without a backward glance. Testing the rocks with her bare feet, easy and unhurried, belonging entirely to this place and this light.
She reaches the waterline and looks back at me over her shoulder.
"You coming?"
I take my hat off and set it on her rock.
Yank one boot off by the heel, then the other.
Socks. T-shirt. Jeans and boxers, which take longer than everything else combined.
By the time I get them off, she is already in the water, watching me with that expression.
Patient, amused, entirely aware of what she's doing to me.
"Sometime today," she teases.
I walk down the bank and into the creek without slowing down. All the way, the cold hitting every part of me at once including parts that have very strong opinions about fifty-degree water and are registering those opinions loudly.
I come up making a sound that I will never speak of again and Maren is already laughing, really laughing, one hand pressed to her mouth.
"That was aggressive," she snorts.
"Get it over with," I gasp. My skull is ringing. Ice cream headache straight through the crown, the specific punishment for going all the way under in snow melt. I press the heel of my hand to my forehead and she laughs harder.
"You okay?"
"Fine," I say, which is not entirely true.
She wades toward me through the shallows, still smiling, and stops close enough that I can see the cold raised in goosebumps along her arms, the water on her collarbone and the bruise from her fall a couple of days ago, lighter now, blooming into yellow.
She presses her palm flat to my forehead where my hand had been, checking a fever in reverse.
"Brain still working?" she asks.
"Jury's out."
She laughs again, real, bright, radiant, and I decide the ice cream headache was entirely worth it.
I splash her.
She stares at me like I've lost my mind.
Then she sends a wall of water straight at my face and the next three minutes are not something I will be able to explain to anyone who knows me.
A water fight in a fifty-degree creek, both of us without clothes or dignity.
I am losing badly and I do not care even slightly.
She wins. Obviously. But I get a hold of her, arm locked tight.
We drift into the deeper channel where the current takes us slowly downstream, her back against my chest, my arms finding her waist without deciding to.
The water moves us gently, the cottonwood leaves turn silver in the breeze above, and the mountains stand white and enormous to the west. She is weightless here, slippery and warm despite the cold, her skin against mine everywhere at once, and she floats with an ease that squeezes my chest.
My hands move over her slowly. Her stomach, her ribs, the weight of her breasts soft in my palms. She makes a low sound and tips her head back against my shoulder. I put my mouth at her ear.
"Trouble, with a capital T." My hands moving lower. "Thought I'd gotten it out of my system this morning." A beat. "Turns out glacial water doesn't help."
She exhales, sharp and quiet.
I slide one hand below the water and find her heat and she presses back into me and I say it low against her ear: "I had you three hours ago. Doesn't matter." My mouth at her temple. "Can't keep my hands off you." And then quieter, the one that costs me the most: "You're so fucking beautiful."
She gasps and I am going to think about it for a long time.
She turns her face toward mine and I kiss her properly, deep and unhurried, nothing pulling us back for once. The creek goes around us. The light comes through the trees in long slow bars.
Which is when she discovers that fifty-degree water has done precisely nothing to solve my problem.
She goes still for one second. Then she settles back against me, deliberate, pushing her ass into my cock, and keeps kissing me.
No comment. No acknowledgment. Just her mouth, the creek, her body warm in my arms, and the silence of two people who have decided this moment is enough and don't need to push it further.
I tighten my arms around her. She pulls my hands back to where they were. The creek goes around us, and the light comes through the trees in long slow bars. I hold the only Sullivan daughter against my chest in cold water and feel something I am not going to look at directly.
Four days. That's all this has been. I keep waiting for the part of me that runs the numbers to come back online and tell me what this costs, what it risks, what my father would do with it if he knew.
It doesn't come back online.
The part I can't account for is the quiet, the way the noise in me goes flat and still when she's against me like this, the way I stop calculating and don't notice I've stopped until I'm already far downstream with my mouth in her wet hair and no idea how long we've been drifting.
I don't have a word for it and I'm not going to go looking for one.
I hold onto her instead.
That's all. That's everything.
We dry on a flat rock above the waterline, our clothes spread beside us, our bare skin warm in the sun. She's on her back with her forearm over her eyes. I'm sitting with my elbows on my knees watching the water and not watching her and failing at both.
My phone buzzes on the rock between us.
I reach for it before she can see the screen. Four words in Holt's shorthand.
Got the first one.
I hold the phone for two seconds. Delete the message. Set it face down on the rock.
The creek goes. A kingfisher cuts low over the water downstream and disappears into the willows. Maren hasn't moved her arm from her eyes.
But she says: "Knox."
"It's handled."
She doesn't ask what. She moves her arm and looks at me, reading my face fast and thorough and missing nothing. Whatever she finds there she keeps to herself. She sits up and reaches for her sundress.
"Okay," she says.
One word. It means something I don't entirely deserve. She pulls the sundress over her head and shakes her damp hair out and becomes Maren again, composed and contained. I watch her do it like I'm trying to memorize something I'm not sure I get to keep.
I pull on my jeans. Still damp. My boots go on over bare feet, socks stuffed in my back pocket. I put my hat back on and I am Knox again, more or less, which feels like less than it did an hour ago.
We climb the bank and get in our separate trucks. She goes first up the two-track, cottonwood leaves brushing the roof of her cab, and when she reaches the highway, she turns south without looking back.
I sit at the top of the two-track for a moment with the engine running, the shop rag in my pocket, and the knowledge of what Holt's four words mean sitting in my chest right next to everything else that lives there now.
I try to locate the guilt.
It isn't there.
Only her.
I turn north toward Blackwater Ranch and drive.