5. Hazel
Hazel
I wake up warm and slightly confused about where I am.
The bed is huge. The quilts are heavy. There's a leftover dent in the mattress beside me that still holds warmth, like someone big was here not that long ago.
For a second my sleepy brain panics, then the whole night rushes back.
The drive. The outpost. Admitting I was scared.
Asking Brock to hold me. Falling asleep against his chest like it was the safest place in the world.
I sit up slowly and push my messy hair out of my face. Morning light filters through the small windows, pale and silvery. Snow is still falling outside. The fire has burned down to glowing embers. And across the room, Brock Savage is sitting at the wooden table cleaning weapons.
Not just one. Several. A handgun broken down into neat pieces on a cloth. A rifle resting across his knees. He's methodically wiping each part with focused intensity, and under his breath he's muttering what sounds like a full lecture.
"...always treat the weapon as if it is loaded. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. Know your target and what is beyond it..."
I blink. Rub my eyes. Blink again. He's reciting firearms safety rules while cleaning an entire arsenal like it's a normal Tuesday morning.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and pad across the floor in my socks. "Um. Good morning? Everything okay over there, or did the weapons union stage a rebellion while I was asleep?"
Brock freezes mid-wipe. His head snaps up.
Those gray eyes lock onto me and for one unguarded second I see something raw flash through them before he shuts it down.
He stands so fast the chair scrapes against the floor.
The rifle gets set down with careful precision.
He gathers the pieces of the handgun, slots them back together faster than I can track, and slides everything into a heavy case.
He looks at me. Really looks. Jaw tight. Shoulders rigid. Then he growls. One short sound that somehow manages to be both annoyed and completely done with whatever is happening in his head.
Without another word he grabs his jacket, stomps into his boots, and heads straight for the door. The second he's outside I hear it close, followed by the unmistakable crack of an axe hitting wood.
I stand in the middle of the cabin staring at the closed door. "What was that?"
No idea. One minute he's the man who held me while I cried, the next he's cleaning guns like he's trying to exorcise something and then fleeing to chop firewood like the logs personally wronged him. Did I snore? Talk in my sleep? Accidentally drool on his shirt?
I decide caffeine is required before I can solve the mystery of the grumpy marshal.
The kitchen is well stocked. On the top shelf of the fridge sits a full pot of coffee that's still hot. Of course he was up early enough to brew a pot before deciding to clean every weapon he owns. I pour myself a generous mug, add a splash of cream, and take a sip. Strong and perfect.
Outside the window Brock is chopping wood in the snow, jacket off despite the cold, thermal sleeves pushed up.
He splits log after log with that focused scowl like the firewood has secrets and he's determined to beat them out of it.
I let myself watch for exactly ten seconds because I'm only human.
Then I turn away from the window, set my coffee on the table, and sit down.
Because I didn't come up here to stare at a lumberjack. I came up here because I published a story, and that story isn't finished yet.
I pull my investigation notebook from the stack and flip it open. Last night I spotted Brock's corkboard with the photo of Harker Creek and the hand-drawn map. This morning I need to lay out everything I know next to everything he might know and figure out where the gaps are.
I grab a pen and start a fresh page.
What I know:
The ring moves weapons (assault rifles, possibly military grade) and trafficked wildlife through the Steel Mountains using a trail network called the Spine.
The front company is Ridgeline Outfitters, registered as a logistics firm, but every shipping manifest I got my hands on listed cargo that doesn't exist being delivered to locations with no roads.
Cal Hutchins, retired game warden, gave me the first real lead.
He said the ring had been operating for at least four years and that someone he called "Voss" ran it from somewhere deep in the range.
Cal gave me a set of GPS coordinates before our last meeting.
Three days later he stopped answering his phone.
What I don't know:
Who Voss actually is. Whether that's a real name or an alias.
How deep the local corruption goes. Whether the "hiking accident" and "carjacking" that killed those other two journalists were connected to this ring or separate operations.
Where the active distribution sites are.
And the big one: where the goods go after they come out of the mountains.
Someone's buying. Someone's selling. The Spine is just the highway in between.
What Brock might know:
Harker Creek (burned-out site, six months inactive per his note). At least two other locations marked with red x's on his map. Something called "RC North" with a question mark. Seven months of ground-level surveillance I don't have access to.
I stare at the page. The shape of the thing is starting to form, like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are still face down.
I have the paper trail. The sources. The manifests.
Brock has the terrain. The physical evidence.
The access to law enforcement databases I can't touch.
Apart, we've each got half a picture. Together we might have the whole thing.
I flip to a clean page and start cross-referencing the trail names from my notes against the ones I remember seeing on Brock's hand-drawn map.
Three of them match: Ridgeline Pass, Crescent Fork, and Saddleback Cut.
All three showed up in the Ridgeline Outfitters manifests as delivery waypoints.
If Brock's red x-marks are anywhere near those trails, they could be the active sites Cal said were still running after Harker Creek burned.
My heartbeat picks up. This is how it always starts.
The moment the connections start clicking and the story reveals its architecture like a building coming out of fog.
I've felt it before on smaller stories, local corruption pieces, a money laundering investigation that got me my first real byline.
But never at this scale. Never when the answer might explain why people are dying and disappearing.
I'm so deep in the notebook I don't hear the door open until the cold air hits my neck.
Brock steps in, cheeks flushed from the cold, breathing hard. He stops when he sees me at the table surrounded by open notebooks and scribbled pages. His eyes move from my face to the spread of notes and back again.
"What are you doing?" His voice is careful, like he's not sure if he should be concerned or curious.
"Working." I tap the pen against the page. "I'm cross-referencing my investigation notes against what I saw on your corkboard last night. The Harker Creek photo. Your map. The x-marks."
His expression doesn't change, but something shifts behind his eyes. He closes the door, locks it, and leans against the frame with his arms crossed. "You went through my board."
"I noticed your board. There's a difference.
I'm a journalist, Brock. Noticing things is the whole job.
" I hold up the notebook so he can see my page of cross-referenced trail names.
"Three of the trails on your map match delivery waypoints from the Ridgeline Outfitters shipping manifests I obtained.
Ridgeline Pass, Crescent Fork, and Saddleback Cut.
If your red x-marks are anywhere near those locations, I think they might be active distribution sites. "
He's quiet for a long time. I can see him weighing it. How much to share. How much to keep behind the badge. The wind pushes against the windows and the fire pops.
"One of them is," he says finally. "Saddleback Cut.
I found fresh tire tracks and a cache of empty crates there about five weeks ago.
Military-style packing materials. Shipping labels scraped off but I pulled enough residue to run a partial.
Came back to a distributor in Billings that went dark before I could follow up. "
My heart is hammering. "And the other x-mark?"
"North of Crescent Fork. High elevation. I couldn't get close enough to confirm before the first snow closed the access trail. I've been waiting for a window to go back up." He pauses. "That's what RC North means on the map. Recon north. Unfinished."
I write it all down, fast, hand flying across the page. RC North. Recon north. Unfinished. Active site at Saddleback Cut. Distributor in Billings gone dark. Every detail is a thread and I can feel the web tightening.
"Brock." I look up at him. "I have six months of source material, shipping manifests, and a set of GPS coordinates from a retired game warden who went missing after he gave them to me.
You have seven months of ground surveillance and access to law enforcement databases.
We're working the same case from opposite ends. "
He stares at me. That jaw is still tight but his eyes have changed. He's looking at me the way he looked at the terrain last night on the drive up. Reading me. Assessing what I can do.
"You're asking me to share my investigation with a journalist."
"I'm asking you to share it with the one person who has the other half of the puzzle. And who's already stuck in your cabin with a target on her back, so it's not like I'm going to run off and publish it on the way to Starbucks."
The corner of his mouth twitches. Just barely. "You always this pushy?"
"Pushier, usually. I'm being polite because you made me coffee and held me while I cried. Don't let it go to your head."
He stands there for another beat. Then he pushes off the doorframe, crosses to the corkboard, and unpins the hand-drawn map. He carries it to the table and lays it flat next to my notebook.
"Show me the manifests," he says.
I pull out the thumb drive from my duffel and hold it up between two fingers. "Everything I couldn't publish is on here. Cal's coordinates. The full Ridgeline paper trail. Every name, every date, every route I traced." I set it on the table between us. "Your turn."
He looks at the drive, then at me. Then he sits down across from me, pulls the map closer, and starts talking.
We work for two hours straight.
He walks me through every patrol he's run in the last seven months.
Every anomaly. Every cleared site and every one he hasn't been able to reach.
I walk him through the Ridgeline paper trail, the shipping manifests, Cal's intel, the GPS coordinates.
We lay it all out side by side and the picture that forms is bigger and uglier than either of us had alone.
The ring isn't just smuggling weapons and wildlife.
The infrastructure suggests something more permanent.
Established routes. Multiple sites. Local cooperation, maybe even law enforcement contacts, given how cleanly evidence keeps disappearing.
And whoever's at the top, whoever Voss is, has been running this for years without a single indictment.
By the time we stop, the coffee is cold and my hand is cramping from writing. The table between us is covered in maps, notes, and scribbled connections. Brock is leaning forward on his elbows, studying a page of Cal's coordinates I've plotted against his patrol routes.
"This changes things," he says quietly. "I thought I was tracking a supply chain. You're showing me a network."
"And you're showing me the ground truth I never had." I sit back and stretch my aching neck. "We need to get to that RC North site. And we need to figure out what happened to Cal Hutchins."
He nods once, looking at me with something that might be respect, or maybe surprise that the woman who cried in his arms last night just spent two hours outworking half his department.
"When the storm clears," he says. "We go."
I nod back. Then I glance toward the window where the snow is still falling thick and steady, sealing us in together, and I can't help the small smile that pulls at my mouth.
"In the meantime," I say, "any chance you'll tell me what the weapons-cleaning and firewood rampage was about this morning? Because I've got a couple theories and most of them involve that list I saw you writing last night when you thought I was asleep."
His whole body goes still. The tips of his ears turn red above his beard. It's the first time I've seen anything close to embarrassment on this man's face and it might be the most satisfying moment of my entire journalism career.
"Eat your breakfast, Hazel," he says, standing up abruptly and heading for the kitchen.
I grin at his retreating back. "I knew it. There's a list. I'm going to find that list."
"No you're not."
"I absolutely am. It's what I do, Marshal. I find things people don't want found. It's kind of my whole deal."
He doesn't answer, but I catch the twitch at the corner of his mouth before he turns away.
I sit at the table surrounded by our combined case files and feel something I haven't felt since I hit publish: not just safe, but useful. Not a target waiting for rescue. A journalist working a story that matters, with a partner who actually listens.
The fear isn't gone. It's still there, humming underneath everything like a low current. But it's quieter now, crowded out by something stronger.
Purpose. And maybe, if I'm being honest with myself, something else entirely that I'm not ready to name yet.