Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
MAREN
Wyatt Mercer looks like a man whose world has just cracked.
He's standing at the tailgate of his truck with a topo map spread across it, both hands flat on the paper like he's holding it down against a wind that isn't blowing.
When I get close enough to read his face, I understand that search and rescue told him something an hour ago that he hasn't said out loud to anyone yet.
"Wyatt."
He doesn't look up. "They want to switch classifications." His voice comes out even, too even, the voice of a man narrating someone else's tragedy. "Recovery instead of rescue. That's the word they used. Classification."
"Wyatt."
"My dad's not a classification."
I put my hand flat on the map beside his. Not on him. He doesn't want to be touched right now, I can tell that from the set of his shoulders. I let the map hold us instead, something solid under both our hands.
"No," I say. "He isn't."
Knox is fifteen feet away, talking to the search coordinator, his voice low and direct.
Holt is already moving equipment out of his truck bed without being asked.
I stand next to Wyatt while he stares at a piece of paper covered in elevation lines like it might rearrange itself into an answer if he looks hard enough.
"He came to Knox," Wyatt says. "Three weeks before the rodeo. Tried to warn him about something." His jaw works. "Knox told him to wait. I heard that today. First time anyone's told me that."
"That's not on you."
"I know it's not mine to carry. Doesn't mean I've figured out how to put it down.
" He finally looks at me, and his eyes are red-rimmed and dry.
The dry that comes after a man has already cried everything he has and is running on the fumes of composure now.
"I just keep thinking he called me Sunday.
Asked if I wanted to come out and help him fix the fence on the east boundary. I said I was busy."
"You didn't know."
"Neither did he." His hand comes off the map and rubs hard across his face. "That's the part I can't get past. He didn't even know he was running out of time. He just wanted help with a fence."
I don't say anything else. There's nothing to say that fixes a fence he'll never fix or a phone call that's already happened the way it happened. I stand next to him and let the silence do the work grief actually wants, which is company, not conversation.
Knox crosses to us. His hand finds the back of Wyatt's neck, the same gesture he used on me at the Lodge. Wyatt doesn't flinch away from it.
"They're pulling the dogs if nothing turns up by dark," Knox says. "That's still eight hours out. Doesn't mean anything's decided."
"It means what it means, Knox."
"It means the county's giving it a full day before they change the paperwork.
" Knox's voice doesn't soften for anyone, not even now, and somehow that's the kindest thing he could offer.
Refusing to hand Wyatt a lie dressed up as comfort.
"If he doesn't show by dark, I have three men ready to go tomorrow, first light.
Private search. Not county resources, not county rules. "
Wyatt looks at him for a long moment. "You'd do that?"
"I'm already doing it."
Something moves through Wyatt's face that isn't quite relief, because there's no relief available today, but it's close enough to hold onto. He nods once, folds the map with hands that are shaking just slightly, and walks around his truck to make calls I don't envy.
Knox turns to the search coordinator, a heavyset man with a radio clipped to his shoulder who's been watching the exchange with the careful blankness of someone deciding not to have an opinion. Knox's voice drops into a register I've heard maybe three times, flat and without a single wasted word.
"Whoever's running the grid tomorrow," Knox says, "I want the timber roads worked into it, north toward the corridor. Officially it's search and rescue. Unofficially, if your men see anything that looks like fresh vehicle traffic up that way, I want to know before the county does."
The coordinator's jaw works once. "That's outside my authority to promise."
"I'm not asking for a promise." Knox doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. "I'm asking you to remember whose land your trucks are running on tomorrow, and who's going to remember the favor."
The man nods, fast, and finds something to do with his radio.
"You didn't have to promise Wyatt a private search," I say, once the coordinator's out of earshot.
"I wasn't asking permission." He looks at me.
"Jacob's been on this ranch since before I could walk.
Sat me down at nineteen and made me eat a sandwich after the equipment barn because he could tell I hadn't eaten in two days and didn't ask why.
" He looks toward the tree line, toward the county road, toward the sky.
"I owe that man more than daylight hours. "
My phone rings.
I almost let it go. Almost, except the screen says Dad, and Declan Sullivan doesn't call twice if you make him wait once.
"Give me a second," I tell Knox, and step away toward my truck.
"Maren." My father's voice, clipped, already moving past hello. "I heard about Mercer."
"It's not good."
"I'm sure it isn't." A pause, paper shifting somewhere on his end, a man already three steps past sympathy and working the angle underneath it.
"If Mercer had information about our routes before he disappeared, we need it before McKenna's people bury it with him.
Whatever you find out there, Maren, you bring it to me first."
"He's not dead, Dad."
"Before Blackwater." He says it like I hadn't spoken. "Before law enforcement. Before Knox."
Something cold slides down my spine that has nothing to do with grief. "And if Knox is with me when I find it?"
Silence. Two full seconds, an eternity from a man who never hesitates. "Then you make a choice about which family you're serving," he says, and hangs up.
I stand there with the dead phone against my ear.
Fifty feet away, Knox is telling a search coordinator to run a covert sweep dressed up as a rescue mission.
My father just told me, without ever using Knox's name, that my access to him is an asset to be spent at the right moment.
Same instrument. Different hands. Neither one of them has ever once let a piece on the board sit still if it could be moved.
I put the phone in my pocket and go back to find Knox.
He reads it off my face before I say a word. That's the thing about him now. He doesn't need the whole sentence anymore.
"Declan," he says.
"He wants whatever I find before anyone else sees it. Including you."
"And?"
"And I already decided the answer before he asked the question." I look at him. "I just didn't like hearing it out loud. Hearing exactly what he thinks I'm for."
Something shifts behind Knox's eyes, recognition instead of surprise.
"Welcome to the club," he says, quiet.
"Not a club I asked to join."
"No." He reaches out and tucks a piece of hair back from my face. His thumb stays against my jaw a beat longer than the gesture requires. "Neither did I."
I lean into his hand before I decide to. It happens on its own, my whole body tilting toward his palm like it's been waiting all day for permission.
"I'm scared," I say.
I don't plan to say it. It comes out small and true. The rawest thing I've handed him since a narrow bed in a storm-locked cabin, and the second it's out I feel how much it costs me, how many years I spent building a woman who doesn't admit that word out loud to anyone.
Knox goes still.
He just hugs me and doesn't say anything back.
I find a folding table someone set up near the command tent, Jacob's photographed pages spread across it where Knox left them this morning, the ones we've both been staring at for two weeks without finding the shape hiding inside them.
I sit down and start again from the beginning, because I don't know what else to do with my hands and because somewhere in these pages is the reason a good man is missing.
Coordinates. A column of numbers I dismissed the first time as GPS shorthand for the corridor route. I photograph it, zoom in, and jog to Wyatt's truck for the topo map he left folded on the seat, spreading it flat across the table beside Jacob's pages.
Not corridor coordinates. An elevation marker and a runway heading.
An airstrip.
Private, unmarked, sitting on land that borders both a Blackwater grazing lease and a Sullivan Transport spur road, built by someone who understood that the fastest way to hide something in this county is to put it exactly between the two families who never share information.
My pulse goes very quiet and very fast at the same time.
Knox is fifty feet away, deep in conversation with the search coordinator, still working tomorrow's grid. Holt is running weapons inventory into the bed of his truck. Wyatt is still on the phone, his back to me, his voice cracking on something I can't hear.
I know exactly what happens if I hand this to Knox right now. A plan. A timeline. A room full of men deciding when it's safe for me to move. By the time anyone agrees, I've lost the one thing working in my favor: nobody expects a woman to go alone.
I fold the map. Then, before my phone goes into my pocket, I send Tate the coordinates and one line: If I haven't checked in by four o'clock, give these to Knox. A Sullivan doesn't ask permission. She also doesn't leave the board without a fail-safe.
I look once toward Knox.
Then I get in my truck anyway.