Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
DAWSON
I’ve reached for a gun before. Tonight all I need is the threat of two broken arms aimed at a county assessor three drinks past good judgment who tries to put his hat on my wife’s head like he’s got a standing invitation.
He doesn’t. I watch him find out.
The Dead Horse Saloon smells like it always smells this late, spilled beer and fry oil and the kind of sawdust nobody’s bothered sweeping, and half of Rimrock’s poured in here straight off the fairgrounds still sunburned and pleased with themselves.
Somebody’s already racked the pool table.
Somebody else has claimed the jukebox and is punishing the room with it.
Four hours ago I had my hand on my gun for real.
By the time I turned, the grey Silverado was already easing out of the fairground lot, no plates, windows black, and gone before I cleared the truck bed.
Holt had deputies on every road out of town inside five minutes.
Nothing. A truck with no plates can’t last a mile on a county road with Aldridge’s men watching, which means it doesn’t use them.
It uses the back roads and the spliced fences between our ranches.
It isn’t hiding from the law. It’s hiding inside our property lines.
I brought Sage here instead of home anyway. I’ll be damned if a truck decides where my wife spends her Saturday night.
Sage is at the bar in a sundress the color of the last hour of daylight, laughing at something Tessa said, and the man from the assessor’s office, mid-thirties, golf tan, wedding ring he’s apparently decided doesn’t count tonight, leans into her space like the drunk fuck that he is.
Marcus is drunk and closing in on Sage and Tessa both, working some story about the fair board that neither of them asked to hear, and I watch Sage take a step sideways without breaking eye contact with him, the kind of practiced retreat a woman learns before she’s old enough to need it.
Tessa’s already angled her whole body half a turn away, arms crossing, the universal posture for get me out of this conversation.
Marcus doesn’t read either signal. He pulls his cowboy hat off, sweaty and grinning, and reaches to set it on Sage’s head. “You wear the hat, you ride the cowboy,” he says, like it’s the funniest line he’s ever landed, like it’s landed for him before.
“Don’t,” she says, catching his wrist an inch from her hair, even and final, no room in it for a joke.
I’m across the room before I decide to be.
I don’t say anything to him first. I put myself in the gap between his hand and my wife, close enough that he has to look up to find my face, and I let him take his time looking.
“We were handling it,” Sage says, not moving back, arms folded now to match Tessa’s. “Tessa and I had this.”
“I know you did.” I don’t look away from Marcus. “I’m handling something else.”
“Sullivan.” Marcus laughs, too loud, swaying half a step. “Just being friendly, man. No harm.”
“You put that hat anywhere near her again,” I say, quiet enough that only the three of us catch it, “and I will break both your arms in front of the entire fair board, and every one of them will agree you had it coming.”
The color drops out of his face fast enough that the beer in his hand tips and slops over his knuckles. He mumbles something that might be an apology or might just be air leaving his lungs and stumbles off toward the bathrooms like the floor’s decided to tilt under him personally.
Sage watches him go, then turns on me, eyebrow up, still unmoved.
“Both arms,” she says. “That felt excessive.”
“He put his hands on you.”
“He put a hat near my hair. I already said no. I didn’t need backup.”
“I know you didn’t need it.” I hold her eyes, and there’s nothing apologetic in it, no version of me that’s sorry I put myself in front of him. “I wanted to be standing here anyway.”
Her expression shifts, not quite forgiveness, closer to a woman deciding not to fight a battle she’s already half enjoying.
“That’s lethal politeness with the volume turned all the way up,” she says. “You should still trademark it.”
“I’ll add it to the road sign.”
“You already put your name on a road. Don’t get greedy.”
Eli materializes at my shoulder with two beers and a grin he’s had loaded since I walked in. “That’s one grown man who’s suddenly remembered urgent business at the bathroom sink. You’re a menace to this town’s hydration levels.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You never do anything. Somehow half the county still ends up needing a moment alone.”
He steers me toward the pool table before I can argue it, and I let him, mostly because Sage is already deep in a conversation with Tessa and a woman I recognize from the fundraiser, dark hair in a braid, sheriff’s-department polo and jeans and a Rimrock High baseball cap she’s wearing backward.
Cora Aldridge. Sheriff Aldridge’s daughter, hockey co-chair with Eli, and the only person in this bar who’s beaten me at darts and a bet about calving season three years running.
“Don’t let the cap fool you,” Eli says, following my eyes to the bar. “She’ll take your money at pool faster than I will.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“It’s a warning.”
It isn’t a warning I take seriously until a half hour later, when Eli beats me two racks running, first time in a decade he’s managed it, and Cora peels off from Sage and Tessa to see what the noise is about.
She takes one look at the table, cracks her knuckles like she’s about to perform surgery, and picks up a cue without asking whose game she’s joining.
“Cora.” I nod at her. She nods back, already chalking up like she’s been waiting all night for a reason to embarrass me.
She runs the table on both of us without missing once.
“Where’d that come from?” I ask, watching my cue ball scratch for the third time.
“Four years growing up with a father who thinks pool is an integral part of law enforcement training.” She chalks her cue without looking at me, which is an insult all by itself. “You want to talk about your defense contract next, Sullivan, or should we just settle up now?”
“He’s already down thirty from Eli,” Finn says, appearing out of nowhere with a basket of fries he clearly stole off somebody else’s table. “Don’t kick a man while he’s bleeding.”
“I have never once seen you show mercy in your life, Finn.”
“That’s different. I have a system.”
“Your system is cheating.”
“My system is strategic optimism.”
I look up mid-argument and find Sage watching me from the bar over the rim of her glass, not even pretending she isn’t enjoying my losing streak, and I miss my next shot entirely because I’m too busy holding her eyes to watch the table.
“You’re not even trying anymore,” Cora says, unimpressed.
“I’m distracted.”
“By what?”
I don’t answer that. Cora follows my line of sight to the bar, sees exactly what she finds there, and has the decency not to say anything else about it.
Tate wanders over with his phone already out, thumb moving, his habit when he’s decided a conversation needs a citation.
“The state semifinal,” he says, apropos of absolutely nothing, which means Finn and Cora have clearly been fighting about this for years and he’s just now catching up to the argument in progress.
“Rimrock lost by six,” Cora says. “I was there. I was fourteen and I remember how much it hurt.”
“You were not fourteen. You were twelve. And we lost by four, not six, because Wyatt hit that three at the buzzer that didn’t count because the clock ran out a full second before it left his hand.”
“The clock was broken that whole season.”
“The clock was fine; you’re just still bitter your brother fouled out in the third.”
Tate turns his screen toward both of them without a word. Box score, pulled from some archive I didn’t know existed, timestamped and merciless. Cora reads it, goes quiet, and hands it back.
“Fine. Four. I stand corrected and I still hate that game.”
“See,” Finn says, delighted beyond all reason, “this is why I keep him around.”
Maren finds Knox by the jukebox and drags him onto the small stretch of floor that passes for a dance area, and he goes without a single word of protest, which from my brother-in-law is surrender.
Tessa’s telling somebody the story about the fire extinguisher at the drive-in movie theater, the Prairie Star, the one that ends with Eli losing his eyebrows for a month, and Eli’s protesting the details loud enough that half the bar’s turned to listen.
Holt stands near the door with Mackenzie, not dancing, not playing pool, just watching the room like every room, patient and missing nothing.
I catch myself doing the same thing a beat later, counting exits out of habit, counting who’s armed and who isn’t, and I make myself stop.
A truck with no plates followed us to the fairgrounds and a federal informant’s blood is still somewhere under my fingernails no matter how many times I’ve scrubbed, and for one night I want to be a man in a bar with his wife instead of a man running threat assessments constantly.
It doesn’t fully work but it works enough.
Sage catches my eye again and doesn’t look away.
I leave the table mid-game, which earns me a groan from Finn and a not-so-subtle count of my losses from Cora, and I cross to her because there is not one single reason left in my body to stay on the other side of the room.
“You’re losing,” she says, when I reach her.
“I’m rebuilding my strategy.”
“You’re sulking.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain a business degree and a pool cue you don’t know how to hold.” Her mouth curves, slow, wicked, the exact expression that used to mean trouble for both of us at twenty. “Dance with me, Sullivan. Prove you’re good at something tonight.”
“I ran this entire county’s freight logistics before I was thirty. I think I can manage a two-step.”
“Freight logistics and dancing are not the same skill set, Sullivan.”
“They’re both about knowing where to put your weight.”
“That’s either very wise or something you read on a fortune cookie.”