Chapter 1 #2
She buys the cheaper cut of meat and stretches it with cornmeal and beans the way her mother taught her.
I close the QuickBooks file.
I sit there for a second with my hands on the keyboard.
Then I do the thing I do every morning when I've finished the legitimate work and the cabin's still quiet.
I pull up her file.
It's on the left monitor where it ought to be, because she's a ranch employee, because I'm the man who manages the ranch's books, because there's a reason for it to be there if anybody ever walks into my cabin and asks.
Nobody ever walks into my cabin. But the reason exists, and I made sure of it the day she signed the paperwork.
Hadley Marie Cross.
Twenty-eight years old.
Born in Garrison, Texas.
Married to Garrett James Cross at nineteen.
One son, Nash Garrett Cross, age six.
Husband deceased twenty-two months ago. Cause of death: lung cancer.
I scroll through the addresses she's lived at since the house in Garrison was sold.
The motel on Highway 59. The studio apartment in Tyler that she got evicted from in February.
Three different short-term rentals in the spring.
The Walmart parking lot where she slept in a Ford Ranger for two nights in April—that one I had to add myself, after she told me at the interview, because she didn't list it on the application.
I scroll past her employment history.
The diner. The gas station. The grocery. The other diner.
I scroll past her emergency contact.
Garrett's mother. Address in Garrison.
Then I scroll to the bottom of the file.
To the section nobody else would look at.
To the section I made.
The obituary I pulled from the Garrison Gazette the day she signed the paperwork, two months ago. Garrett James Cross, twenty-eight, beloved son and husband, survived by his wife Hadley and his son Nash. Pallbearers listed at the end of the announcement.
Six names.
Five of them are men I've already run.
One of them I flagged.
Todd Whitley—lifelong friend, best man at the wedding, and pallbearer.
There's a yellow tag next to his name on my screen.
Yellow because I'm not ready to make it red yet.
I put it there the day I read the obit, two months ago, because something about the way the funeral home had written him into the announcement didn't sit right with me.
Best man at the wedding and pallbearer is a man whose face you'd expect to see in the wedding photos.
He's not in any of the ones I pulled. Not the rehearsal dinner. Not the ceremony. Not the reception.
He's not in a single photograph with Hadley that I can find online.
But he's in three with Garrett.
And in two of the three, he's looking at Hadley.
Not at the camera.
At Hadley.
I look at the yellow tag for a long second, then I close the file.
* * *
The black sedan is what I'm thinking about when I leave the cabin for the dog walk in the late afternoon.
I haven't told Phantom about it yet.
Last week, on Thursday, I clocked it on the county road about a mile past the western fence on my morning walk.
Black, four-door, late model, rented—I ran the plate from my monitors the same afternoon and it came back to a Hertz in San Antonio paid for in cash by a man whose name doesn't matter because it isn't real.
The sedan was gone by sundown. I haven't seen it since.
It's not the kind of thing I'd usually bother Phantom with.
I've been in a cold-file holding pattern with the firm for almost a decade. They watch. They don't engage. Every couple years they roll a new asset past the ranch to make sure I'm still here.
The sedan could be that. Fuck, it probably is that.
But something about the timing is sitting wrong with me.
Two months after Hadley moves in, and after Phantom's deposit accounts started carrying a balance that's worth somebody's attention.
I don't believe in coincidences. I never have.
I head down to the kennel.
Nash is already there.
He's standing outside the chain-link with his stuffed Stitch tucked under one arm and a football tucked under the other.
Diesel has his big head pushed up against the gate trying to get at the boy, and Nash is talking to him in a voice he reserves for animals and his mother.
"Hey, partner."
He glances up at me. "Can we take 'em out?"
"Which ones?"
"All of 'em."
"All of 'em is a lot of dogs."
"That's why I brought help." He holds up the football like it's an explanation.
I almost laugh.
I unlock the kennel and let the three of them out one at a time.
Diesel walks. Jagger explodes. Bella waits to see what the others are doing and then sets off after them at her own pace, the way she always does.
We head across the yard toward the eastern pasture, the four of us and Nash, and the late afternoon sun is doing the thing it does this time of year where the light goes gold and heavy and lands on everything sideways.
Nash throws the football.
Jagger goes after it like he's been bred for nothing else.
Diesel watches with the disinterest of a man who's seen too much.
Bella stays close to me.
We walk for fifteen minutes.
Nash tells me about a kid at school named Owen who put a frog in another kid's lunchbox.
He tells me about how his teacher Mrs. Holloway has a baby in her belly and might be gone by the end of the year.
He tells me he wants to ride a horse for his birthday and his mama says he has to wait until he's seven.
I listen.
I tell him seven's not that far off.
He throws the football. Jagger brings it back. We're about a quarter mile from the western fence line when I see the sedan.
Same one.
Parked in the same pull-off on the county road.
The driver's side window is cracked an inch. There's a man in the seat I can't see clearly, but I can see enough—dark shirt, head tilted slightly toward the ranch.
He's not eating. He's not on the phone. He's not pretending to be lost. He's watching the property.
I don't change my pace, but I don't look at the sedan again.
I make a half-turn that brings us back toward the kennel and I tell Nash we ought to head in before his mama wonders where he is. Nash says okay, throws the football one more time for Jagger to chase, and we walk back across the eastern pasture the way we came.
The dogs go back in their kennels. Their fancy kennels at that. They each have a twenty-by-twenty run, with a ten-by-ten heated and air-conditioned house.
There’s even a communal bit where they can all head into if they want, activated by tags on their collars.
I lock the gate.
I crouch down so I'm level with Nash, tell him I'll see him at dinner, and Nash hugs me—quick, the way kids hug, all elbows—and runs back across the yard toward his cabin.
I watch him the whole way.
He climbs the porch steps. The screen door bangs open.
I hear Hadley's voice—muffled, warm.
The screen door bangs shut.
I'm at my monitors three minutes later.
The right one comes up first.
I pull the plate from the morning's surveillance file.
Run it through every database I still have access to.
Cross-reference it against the cold-file watchlist I've been maintaining since the night Phantom dragged me out of that motel in Lubbock half-dead and told me I was gonna live whether I wanted to or not.
The plate comes back to the same Hertz in San Antonio.
Paid for in cash.
Different fake name than last week.
I sit back in the chair.
I look at the time in the corner of the screen.
Five-forty-three.
I pull up Hadley's file on the left monitor.
I scroll to the bottom and look at the yellow tag next to Todd Whitley's name.
I tap two keys. The tag goes red. I close the file.
I take a long, slow breath, lean back in the chair, and look out the window at the cabin behind the bunkhouse where the kitchen light has just come on for the dinner hour.
Hadley is moving in front of it, the small dark shape of her son sitting on the counter beside her swinging his legs.
I watch her for a minute.
Then I say the thing out loud, the thing I've been saying in my head every morning since the day she walked across the gravel in a blouse she couldn't afford to lose.
"That woman is gonna be my ol' lady."
The dogs at the kennel are quiet.
The mockingbird quit hours ago.
Somewhere out past the western fence, a black sedan is sitting on the county road watching the ranch, and I'm sitting at three monitors watching it back, and I'm gonna find out who sent it before the week is over.
For now, I close the laptop, stand up, and reach for my hat.
It goes on last.
It always goes on last.