Chapter 16 #3
"Colt. Don't go back."
The way she says my name, with the fear she won't let herself show jammed underneath the command she won't let herself soften, hits me somewhere below the rage and the adrenaline, in the place where the only thing that matters is that her voice is in my ear and she's alive and moving and not in that storage yard.
"I'm not going back," I say. "Keep driving. I'm right behind you."
The three of us converge at a gas station on the interstate.
Wade is white-knuckled at the wheel, his flask on the passenger seat, untouched.
The cap is still on. The man who hasn't been sober at an event in months sat through gunfire and didn't reach for the bottle.
I file that away in the place where I keep the things about Wade that tell me he's not as far gone as he wants everyone to believe.
Kenna is already out of her car and on the phone with Torres, her voice steady and precise as she relays the location, the timeline, the shots.
I lean against my truck and press my palms flat on the warm metal of the hood and breathe.
The adrenaline is still running hot, making everything sharp-edged, and when Kenna finishes the call and walks toward me, I track her movement the way a drowning man tracks the surface.
She stops in front of me. Close. Closer than the situation requires and exactly as close as I need her.
"Torres is sending a team to the storage yard," she says. "She wants us at the field office first thing tomorrow. All three of us."
I nod. The adrenaline is still hammering through me, and the woman standing in front of me was parked two hundred yards from the gunfire, and the thought of those bullets finding her instead of Thornton is a thing I can't make my brain stop replaying.
"Thornton told me things," I say. "Before the call. The reason Grant was killed; the reason Tyler was killed. The dose was wrong, Kenna. The bull was supposed to hurt him, not kill him. Grant knew it was drugged and rode it anyway to catch them on camera."
Her face doesn't change. Her body does. The stillness that moves through her is the kind that comes before a thing breaks.
I reach for her before the break hits, pulling her against me with my hands spread across her back and my chin on the top of her head and my arms locked around her like I can keep the grief out through sheer physical force.
She lets me hold her. For a full ten seconds, she lets me hold her, and her fists press against my chest and her forehead presses against my collarbone and the tremor that runs through her body is the only evidence that the composure she wears like armor has cracks underneath.
Then she pulls back. Not far. Just enough to look up at me, and her eyes are dry and her expression has hardened to cold resolve.
"What else?" she says. "You said Thornton told you things. Plural."
"It's bigger than the drugged bulls and the prize fraud. Thornton said the livestock transports have been carrying cargo between states for years. The whole circuit is a cover for a smuggling operation. He didn't know what was being moved or who was running it. Merrick kept him on the money side."
"That's bigger than Merrick. That's infrastructure. Supply chains. People above him."
"I know."
"We need to find out."
"We will."
She studies me. Her hands are still on my chest, and I can feel the heat of her palms through my shirt, and the gas station fluorescents are turning her skin pale gold and catching the freckles across her nose.
I want to kiss her so badly my teeth ache.
"You okay?" she says.
"I'm standing."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's all I've got right now." I cover her hands with mine and press them harder against my chest, and my heartbeat is still running fast enough that she can feel every thud under her fingers. "You were two hundred yards from a shooting. Are you okay?"
"I'm standing too." The corner of her mouth lifts, barely, the ghost of the smile she gives me when the world is falling apart and the only thing holding is the two of us.
"We match."
I look at her in the gas station light, with the desert dark behind her and the adrenaline still singing through both of us, and the thing I want to say is three words long and too important to waste on a parking lot next to a man with a flask and a truck with a shattered window.
So I say something else. "We should go."
"We should go," she agrees.
She doesn't move her hands. I don't move mine.
For a beat that lasts longer than either of us intends, we stand there with our pulses synced and the night pressing in and the gravity between us pulling with the same relentless, inevitable force it's been pulling since a bar in Fort Worth where a woman told me her fake name and I believed it because I wanted to.
We drive in convoy to a motel forty miles south. Two trucks and a sedan in a line on a dark highway.
I'm in the lead, Kenna's sedan behind me, Wade bringing up the rear. I watch her headlights in my mirror like they're the only fixed point in a world that keeps shifting underfoot.
Thornton is dead because he waited too long to find his conscience. The smuggling corridor is still running. The conspiracy goes deeper than murder and fraud, deeper than anything Grant suspected.
We pull into the motel lot forty miles south and park side by side. Before I cut the engine, my phone buzzes. Kenna, two parking spaces over, her face lit by her phone screen.
Torres is sending agents from the Tucson field office. 8 AM. Be ready to give them everything Thornton told you. Every word.
I look through my window at her. She looks back through hers. I type one line.
Every word.
Thornton is dead. But the dead man talked first, and what he said is going to blow the doors off the Southwest Circuit. Merrick just lost his operation manager, his buffer, and his best chance at controlling the narrative.
He just doesn't know it yet.