Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Rogue
I reach for her before I'm fully awake.
My hand moves across the sheets to the place she was yesterday afternoon, and there's nothing there but cold cotton and the faint smell of her lavender soap on the pillowcase.
My fingers close on the empty fabric and stay there for a moment while my brain catches up to my body.
She's not here.
She went home before Nash got back from ice cream with Grace yesterday afternoon.
I watched her cross the gravel in one of my t-shirts with her hair down her back, and she didn't look over her shoulder, and I didn't follow her.
I sat at the cypress desk and worked, then I went to bed.
And my body, in its sleep, did what it apparently does now. It reaches for her.
I stare at the ceiling.
The early light is coming through the slats in the blinds.
Soft and grey. My chest feels strange. Not bad. The opposite of bad, honestly. It feels… calming.
It feels like a decision got made in me overnight—quiet, and heavy, and mine.
I want her here. I want her here in this bed.
I want to roll over and find her with her hair across my pillow and the chain at her throat warm between us.
I want to wake up to her breathing. I want this to be the shape of every morning for the rest of my life.
That's a lot of things to want for a man who has spent longer than he should admit not wanting much of anything at all.
I lie there a moment longer with my hand on the empty pillow, then I get up, because I've got work to do, and the things I desire aren't going anywhere.
I make coffee, pull on jeans, a clean shirt, and some boots.
Don't put the hat on yet. It stays on the hook by the door until I'm ready to leave the cabin.
I sit down at the desk.
Three monitors come alive in front of me.
Left for the ranch books. Center for the club ops. Right for off-the-books, the surveillance feeds and the trackers I don't share with anyone but Phantom.
I pull Todd first.
His card was hit again last night at the Hampton.
Eleven drinks at the bar between seven and closing. Whiskey doubles for all eleven, the kind of bar tab a man runs when he's trying to drink himself into making a decision he already knows he's going to make.
His room key registered him going back to the room at twelve-fourteen. He's still in the room now. Hasn't moved.
Eleven doubles.
A man who's drinking eleven whiskey doubles in a hotel bar for days running is a man who's working himself up to something.
I know because I've seen it before, in a different life, in different men.
I think about the options.
I could kill him. Phantom would back me if I chose to.
The brothers would hand me the shovel before they asked a single question.
Marlena would have a casserole in Hadley's kitchen by the time the dirt settled.
The body would never surface. The man would be gone like he was never on this earth.
But a dead Todd is a body that someone has to explain.
His mama in Garrison knows where he is. His employer knows where he is.
The Hampton in Marble Falls has him registered.
A dead Todd is a missing-persons report, a small-town sheriff, and a string of questions that lead, sooner or later, to a ranch in Llano County that has been doing fine staying off the radar of small-town sheriffs.
And killing Todd is the easy answer.
The clean answer for me. Not the smart answer for the ranch.
I close his location feed and open another.
Bell Insurance, Garrison, Texas.
Todd's been there nine years.
Account manager. A book of business worth maybe four million in annual premiums spread across three dozen mid-sized commercial clients in East Texas.
Decent producer. Not a star.
I went through his work email last week. A few messages caught me at the time, and I noted them down, but didn't think about them again until last night.
I open them again now.
The messages are between Todd and one of his clients—an oil services company out of Tyler—about a premium adjustment on a fleet policy.
The math in the emails doesn't quite line up with the math on the policy endorsement Todd filed in the system.
A few hundred dollars per vehicle, spread across thirty-six vehicles, over the course of the policy year.
The kind of small under-reporting that wouldn't show up unless somebody at the home office decided to audit Todd's book.
I pull his other policy endorsements and cross-reference them against the email threads.
By the time I'm done, I have seven separate accounts where Todd's reported premium adjustments don't match the agreements he made with his clients.
Total skim across the seven: a little over thirty thousand dollars across the most recent policy year.
Not enormous, but enough to do what I’m going to.
I write a tip.
Three short paragraphs, plain language, no fingerprints.
Route it through a chain of relays I've used for other things and address it to the compliance officer at Bell's home office in Houston.
Not the regional manager. Not anyone who could be in Todd's pocket. The compliance officer, who has a job that exists for exactly this kind of email.
I send it.
The audit will land within a week.
Internal investigation. Suspension with pay while it runs. The kind of investigation that ends in termination for cause, not in criminal charges, because Bell will want to handle it quietly.
He'll lose his job. He'll lose his standing in Garrison. He'll lose his easy social access to Garrett's mama, because the woman is a deacon at First Baptist and she's not going to keep coffee with a man the insurance company fired for skimming.
He'll lose the version of himself he's been using to justify chasing Hadley.
He won't be in jail.
At least, not yet. There are so many things I can do to a man before shedding his blood is necessary.
He could come back, if he wants to, somewhere down the road. Which means the door stays open—for him, and for me.
He's not going to lay a hand on her. He's not going to come back to my road anytime soon.
And when he does, if he does, I'll be ready to put him in the ground.
The right monitor pings.
I look over.
Hartley's phone has moved.
It's been static in Llano for two weeks—same cell tower, same parking lot pattern, predictable as church on a Sunday.
The ping I'm looking at right now puts him south of Llano, on the county road that runs toward our part of the Hill Country.
I sit forward and pull up his call log.
He made a call this morning at sunup that lasted forty-seven minutes.
The number routes through a relay I don't have visibility into, which means it's encrypted up the chain.
I can see the call happened, the duration, but I can't hear it.
Forty-seven minutes.
That's not a status check. That's a briefing.
A status check is four minutes. Usually something like: target's been static, no changes, will report next week.
A briefing goes over everything from the operational picture, here's the asset's current vulnerabilities, here's what we want to do about it, here's the timeline.
Hartley has reported up the chain, and since that’s happened, it means the firm has made a decision.
Mmm.
My jaw sets. My coffee cup goes still in my hand. I track the GPS for another two minutes—Hartley's phone is moving slowly south, then stops, then moves again.
He's not driving to the ranch.
He's running a pattern.
Familiarizing himself with the geography.
Pre-operational.
Whatever the firm decided in that briefing, the timeline has shortened.
I save the GPS log, the call metadata and close the monitor.
Then I get up, pull the hat off the hook, and walk across the gravel to her cabin.
Hadley opens the screen door before I knock.
She's been watching for me. I knew she would be.
"Mornin'."
"Mornin'."
I step inside.
Nash is at the kitchen table in pajamas with a bowl of Cheerios in front of him. Diesel’s even on the rug at his feet, watching the spoon move with the patience of a dog who knows the rules.
Nash sees me and his whole face goes up. "Mornin', Rogue! I went and let Diesel out so he could have breakfast with me and Mama."
"Mornin', partner, and I see that."
If dogs could smile, I’d say Diesel’s doing it right now.
I sit down at the table and Nash slides the box of Cheerios toward me without being asked.
Hadley sets a coffee mug down in front of me without asking how I take it.
My grip on the Cheerios box loosens. I didn't know I was holding it that tight.
I pour Cheerios into the bowl Hadley sets in front of me and eat slowly. There’s a lot on my mind so I let Nash do most of the talking.
He tells me about the ice cream yesterday.
He had strawberry, Waylon had chocolate, Aunt Grace had something called butter pecan that Nash thinks sounds disgusting but ate a bite anyway to be polite.
He tells me Diesel sniffed his hand when he got home like Diesel could smell the strawberry, and about how he thinks he might want to be a bull rider when he grows up.
"That a fact?"
Nash nods, mouth half full. "Yeah. But Mama says I gotta wait until I'm big."
"She's right about that."
He spoons up another bite. Thinks about it while he chews. "Do you think Spur would teach me to rope?"
I take a sip of my coffee and set the mug down. "I think he would, partner. You ask him this summer, he'll set you up with a dummy steer and a short rope. That's how you start."
He pauses with the spoon halfway to his mouth. "What's a dummy steer?"
"It's a fake one. Plastic head, sawhorses for legs. You learn the throw on a thing that doesn't move before you try it on a thing that does."
His whole face lights up. "Cool."
He goes back to his Cheerios.
I look up at Hadley over the rim of my coffee.
She's leaning against the counter with her own mug in both hands.
She's wearing one of my t-shirts—gray, worn soft, the one I keep folded on the chair in my front room.
She must have grabbed that one before she left yesterday too.
Her hair is up in a messy bun.