Chapter 13 #2
Holt runs the shooting range in the far corner of the fairground, a fundraiser tradition older than most of the kids currently lined up to watch, and Erin’s there beside him working the sign-in table with the easy competence she brings to everything, checking IDs, walking nervous first-timers through eye and ear protection like she’s done it a thousand times.
I watch her take a rifle from a fourteen-year-old who’s clearly never held one, murmur something quiet that gets the kid’s shoulders to drop out of his ears and adjust his stance with two fingers and a patience that makes half the dads in line look sheepish about their own coaching.
Then, when the range clears for a demonstration round, she picks up the rifle herself.
She doesn’t shoulder it like a security contractor showing off for a crowd.
She doesn’t shoulder it like a hobbyist either.
There’s a stillness to it, an economy, her breathing dropping into some rhythm I recognize without being able to name, the same rhythm Holt falls into right before he does something none of us want to watch too closely.
She puts three rounds through the same ragged hole at fifty yards and lowers the rifle like it weighs nothing at all, and the crowd claps, delighted, and moves on to the next attraction.
Holt doesn’t move on. He stands there a beat too long, watching her rack the weapon clear.
“Army,” Erin says, catching him looking, already reaching for the next sign-in sheet. “Long time ago now.”
“Which unit?”
“Boring one. Paperwork, mostly.” She smiles at him, warm, nothing in it that reads as anything but true. “You going to interrogate me at my own fundraiser table, Blackwater?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He says it light. He doesn’t look light. He picks up the rifle himself once she’s set it down, checks the chamber out of pure habit, sets it back exactly where she had it, and doesn’t say another word about it.
I catch his eye over the sign-in table on my way past with a fresh raffle roll. He gives me nothing, the same bare courtesy he’d give a stranger, and that’s how I know he’s still thinking about it.
Holt has never once flinched at anything I’ve seen in my life. Watching him quietly recheck a rifle a woman he trusts just handled sits cold and small in my stomach.
She’s Mackenzie’s. Vetted. The first woman I’ve let inside my own house without a clause attached to it.
I let it go, because there’s nothing else to do with it yet.
By evening shadows have stretched across the fairground, the Rockies burning orange at the peaks and the clouds streaking bright red and purple above them, and half of Rimrock is draped over hay bales eating pie they didn’t pay for because Nell gave up collecting money for dessert around five o’clock.
Dawson’s hand finds the small of my back without either of us discussing it, a habit four days old that already feels older than that, and I lean into it without deciding to, the same way I took his arm this morning.
“Good day,” he says.
“Good day.” I mean it, and the guarded, old part of me that keeps expecting to catch myself performing this never quite gets its evidence. “Raised more than the goal. Knox got dunked twenty- three times. Felony’s banned from the raffle table for life.”
“Banned for life feels aspirational for a mule who doesn’t recognize fences as a concept.”
“He’ll be back next year committing a new crime.”
“God help us.”
He catches a smear of huckleberry at the corner of my mouth with his thumb before I can get to it myself, slow about it, and doesn’t immediately let go once it’s gone. I could step back. I don’t.
West finds us by the truck as we’re loading the last of the folding chairs, phone already out, scrolling through the day’s photos with the single-minded focus of a man who takes his role as unofficial family archivist more seriously than anyone has ever asked him to.
“Got some good shots for the ranch page,” he says, thumb moving fast. “Knox in the tank is going to get about four hundred likes by itself. Sage, you and Dawson by the raffle table, that one’s actually kind of—” He stops scrolling. His thumb goes still.
“What?” I say.
“That truck.” He turns the phone toward us instead of finishing the sentence, and there’s something different in his voice now, flatter, the tone he uses when he’s found a discrepancy in a shipping manifest and hasn’t yet decided how bad it is.
“Grey Silverado, no plates. It’s in like six of my shots today.
I thought it was just parked, but.” He swipes back, and back again, faster now, and I watch his face do the math before he says it out loud.
“I’ve got this exact truck in my Knox and Maren wedding album too.
Same grey, same missing plates, different angle, same month. ”
Dawson’s whole body changes beside me, the easy warmth of the day burning off him in one breath.
“Show me,” he says.
West turns the screen fully toward us, and the truck sits there, parked at the tree line behind the dunk tank in a shot from an hour ago, half in shadow, deliberately angled away from the fairground’s own security cameras like whoever’s behind the wheel has done this before and knows where the blind spots sit.
Then West scrolls one more photo forward, the most recent one, taken not sixty seconds ago from where he’s standing right now.
The truck isn’t behind the dunk tank anymore.
My hand finds Dawson’s sleeve without my permission, the same unthinking reflex as the arm I took this morning, except this time it isn’t ease pulling me toward him. It’s every instinct I own telling me to get closer to one of the most dangerous men in this valley and stay there.
It’s parked fifty feet from where we’re loading chairs, engine running, windows dark, close enough that if I turn my head right now I could probably read the dust pattern on the tailgate.
It’s parked behind us.