Chapter 6
SIX
DAWSON
Tate’s text came in at four in the morning, four words and no context.
Terminal traced. It’s worse. I read it, put the phone face down, and made three phone calls before breakfast instead of answering him, because the men on the other end of those calls were the only problem I could still solve with my own hands.
Three phone calls, and three men lose the thing they were counting on to make it through the rest of the year.
I don’t raise my voice for any of them. I don’t have to.
The first call goes to a bonding agent in Great Falls who owes me a favor from a shipment that never officially crossed a state line.
The second goes to a contact at the border station who processes permit renewals at a glacier’s pace when I ask him to.
The third is the easiest, because the freight contract I’m pulling was never generous to begin with, and the logistics manager on the other end doesn’t ask why, just goes quiet, the silence of a man realizing the floor under him was never really there.
I hang up on the third call standing on my own back deck at six in the morning, the Rockies already fully lit orange to the west, and by the time I’ve had my coffee, the three loudest voices spreading my name across three counties like a rumor with a rifle scope have lost their bond, their permit, and their income.
None of them will be able to trace it back to a single word I said. That’s the whole trick. My father taught me that the loudest room in Rimrock is the one where nothing gets said out loud.
I drive into town for groceries because my body doesn’t run on rumor and it doesn’t run on rage either, and I’ve got a marriage, a murder, and a man named Cruz to get through in one piece.
That takes more discipline than satisfaction ever will.
I need protein and sleep more than I need to watch Petrie’s face when his insurance bond disappears.
Eli finds me in the cereal aisle, of all places, holding a box like it personally wronged him.
“Sully.” He says it like an accusation. He’s called me that since we were fourteen and it’s never once stopped annoying me, which is probably why he keeps doing it.
“You’re buying chicken breast, Greek yogurt, and spinach at eight in the morning like a man auditioning for a Marine Corps recruitment ad, and half the county thinks you’re an active homicide suspect. How are you like this?”
“Discipline.”
“Discipline’s a personality disorder with better marketing.” He drops the cereal back on the shelf, in the wrong slot, and I fix it without thinking, which earns me a grin I want to slap off him. “You hear what’s already going around?”
“I’ve heard three different versions since yesterday.”
“There’s a fourth as of an hour ago. Somebody at the bank’s saying Petrie lost his bond this morning and he’s blaming you personally, out loud, in front of God and the drive-through.”
“Is he?” I keep my face very still, the same face I used on Curtis the night before last, except now it’s just groceries and it still works on Eli, who’s known me since before either of us could shave.
“You didn’t.”
“I’m buying groceries, Eli. I’ve been in this store for at least twenty minutes.”
“That’s the least convincing alibi I’ve ever heard, and I once watched you talk a sheriff’s deputy out of a speeding ticket using nothing but eye contact.
” He studies me, deciding whether to say the thing on his mind or let it go.
He decides to say it. “You’re different since the wedding.
Not the murder. Before that. Since her.”
“I’ve got a body count in a truck and a wife in a day, Eli. Different’s an understatement.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” He picks the cereal back up just to have something to hold. “You look like a man who finally stopped pretending he wasn’t starving.”
I don’t answer that. There’s no answer that doesn’t hand him more than I want to give away in a cereal aisle at eight in the morning. He lets it go like good friends do, loud, with a parting shot instead of silence.
“Tell Sage I said the county owes her a parade for what she did at Nell’s.” He’s already walking backward toward the register. “And tell your mother-in-law I’m still not apologizing for the toast.”
“Nobody’s forgiven you for the toast.”
“Nobody’s supposed to. It’s a legacy.”
I pay for groceries that will outlast this entire war and drive to the boundary house with dread and contentment fighting for the wheel. She’s going to be under my roof tonight. That’s a new tangle of knots I don’t have time to unpick before I’m parked in the drive.
There’s a horse trailer in the drive that isn’t mine, tack draped over the porch rail that isn’t mine, and Rae Calder, who’s run horses for both families since before either of us could saddle one, standing in my kitchen arguing with Maren about counter space like she’s lived here longer than I have.
“The oil goes by the stove,” Maren says, sliding a spice rack six inches left with the confidence of a woman who has never once lost an argument in this house or any other. “By the sink it’s a hazard.”
“It’s a system, Maren.”
“It’s chaos with good intentions.”
Neither of them looks up when I walk in. My sister doesn’t ask permission to rearrange a kitchen any more than she asked permission to marry a Blackwater, and there’s no version of me willing to be the man who tells her no.
Tate’s running cable for a security panel that wasn’t there yesterday. West is up a ladder wiring a camera into the hallway molding.
Tessa arrives twenty minutes later with three Pizza House boxes she absolutely didn’t need to bring and absolutely knew I wouldn’t turn away. Finn follows her through the door holding, inexplicably, a fondue set.
“Thanks, Tessa.” I take the boxes off her hands before she has to ask. “Sage is upstairs, if you’re looking for her.”
“I was going to make you suffer through small talk first, but fine.” She’s already moving for the stairs.
“Nobody asked for that,” I say, nodding at my brother who’s carrying a fondue set.
“Nobody asks for the things that end up mattering most. That’s the whole tragedy of gift-giving.” Finn sets it on the counter like a peace offering to a house already at war with itself. “Does Sage know about this?”
“Nobody knows about the fondue, Finn. That’s the problem with the fondue.”
“Chocolate fondue can get very sensual. As long as you let it cool a beat first.” He waggles his eyebrows. “You’ll thank me later.”
“Get out of my kitchen.”
He grins like he’s won something and wanders off to bother Tate, who has no patience for him and says so within thirty seconds.
I let it happen. A week ago I would’ve cleared this house of everyone but the people I strictly needed here.
That version of me is losing ground fast to whatever this is, a house filling up with people who love us enough to show up uninvited and rearrange my kitchen without asking permission.
I step outside for air and end up at the fence line myself, close enough to watch one of Erin’s newer hires walk the perimeter with Cruz. Methodical. Professional. The way a security detail should move.
I watch Cruz longer than I watch the other man. I don’t have proof. I have a scared man’s confession under duress and a data entry error Sage sat on for three weeks, and neither one is enough to say a name out loud twice, not with what Knox promised me would happen if I did.
He checks the gate latch. Notes the tree line like a man notes an exit. Some old animal part of my brain records it without my permission, storing every ordinary motion away for the day it stops looking ordinary.
He catches me watching. Doesn’t flinch. Gives me the same untroubled nod he’s probably given a hundred Blackwaters over twenty-two years and keeps walking the fence like a man with nothing to hide.
Which is either exactly what he is, or precisely what a professional would look like if he weren’t.
I go back inside before he can read anything else off my face.
There’s a mule standing beside my truck.
I notice him on my third trip out to the driveway for boxes, a grey, sway-backed, entirely too self-satisfied mule standing in the shade of my truck bed like he pays rent here.
“Whose is this?”
“Felony,” Rae says, going in with an armful of Sage’s things. “He’s Blackwater’s. Escape artist. Opens gates with his lips.”
“How’d he get here? This is Sullivan land.”
“No idea. He does this.” She says it like weather, unremarkable, permanent. “He’ll wander off eventually.”
He does not wander off. I try walking him back toward the fence myself and he plants all four feet, looks at me with an expression I can only describe as personally offended, and when I give up and walk away, I hear his hooves following at a distance, patient, unwilling to leave no matter how many times I ask.
“He’s decided you’re his now,” Sage says from the porch, arms full of a box marked FRAGILE in handwriting that isn’t hers. Dust on her jeans, hair coming loose from wherever she pinned it this morning, and she looks more like she belongs to this chaos than I do.
The sight of her catches me under the sternum before I can stop it.
She stood on this same porch eight years ago, twenty and barefoot, sneaking out past both our families to meet me here because it was the one patch of ground neither side watched close enough.
I kissed her for the first time on that top step, her hands fisted in my shirt, her mouth soft and certain in a way nothing else in my life has ever been since.
Felony chooses that exact moment to headbutt my shoulder, unimpressed with how long I’ve been standing still, and it’s enough of a jolt that I almost thank him for it.
I’ve walked past that step a hundred times in the years since and made myself not look at it. I look at it now. She’s standing three feet from where it happened, holding a box like she has no idea what it took to walk back onto this porch.