Mackenzie
The study smells like woodsmoke and money that stopped needing to prove itself sometime before I was born.
Gideon Blackwater does not stand when I come in. He gestures at the chair across the desk with two fingers, the way a man indicates a horse he's decided not to buy.
I sit because sitting is the move, not because he offered.
"Agent Tatum."
"Mr. Blackwater. Thank you for making time."
"I didn't." He squares a pen against the edge of the desk, aligns it, and leaves it. "I made a decision. Time was already mine."
Behind me, near the north wall, Holt exists.
He hasn't spoken since the truck.
He came through the door two steps behind me, put his back against the wall between a gun cabinet and a window, and stopped.
I have spent every second since aware of exactly where he is in the room. It’s the awareness you keep on a dog that hasn't decided about you yet.
Dark eyes under his black hat pulled low. The hoop catching light every time he turns his head, which is twice in ten minutes, both times toward the window.
I open my file and take out the least important document I brought. I want him watching my hands early, before it matters what my hands are doing.
"You run cattle, hunting leases, mineral rights, and a holding company registered in Delaware," I say. "That last one's unusual for a family that's been on the same ground since before Montana was a state."
"It's unusual to be anywhere that long." Nothing crosses his face. "The rest is accounting."
"Your accountant is in Calgary."
"My accountant is expensive. Geography followed the invoice."
"Do you know a man named Ray Coleman?"
"No."
"He's moved four hundred thousand dollars through a feedlot in Shelby with your brand on the paperwork."
"Then he knows me." Gideon's hands stay flat on the blotter. "I'd be careful, Agent, about the difference. A great many people in this state know me. I've met almost none of them."
Twelve minutes and he's given me his name, his patience, and no purchase.
So I stop asking questions and start setting bait.
"How much of the Front does your family survey?"
The pen doesn't move. Nothing on his face moves. But his breath, which has run one steady rhythm since I sat down, catches half a beat on the intake. His dark eyes come up off the blotter and land on me full weight for the first time since I walked in.
Half a second. Maybe less.
"We don't survey," he says.
"Nobody surveys their own ground?"
"Not that ground." He squares the pen a second time, which he has not needed to do since I sat down. "My father didn't. His father didn't. Whatever the reason was, it went in the ground with them, and I've never had cause to go dig it up."
He hears himself. I watch him hear himself.
And underneath my own pulse, cold and a half-second late, I hear myself too. A Tatum, in this study, asking about surveys. That's a card face-up on his desk now, and there's no taking it back. I played it anyway, because I wanted his face more than I wanted my cover.
"Was there a second question," he says, "or was that the whole visit?"
My pulse is going hard enough that I can feel it in the soft place under my jaw. I make myself lift the document and slide it across the desk at exactly the speed I'd use if my hands belonged to me.
Behind me, the wall gives up a sound. Fabric, once. He came off it.
Gideon reaches for the paper. His hands are dry and weathered, a working man's hands gone hard with age.
Holt crosses to the desk, unasked, and puts down a second folder his father didn't request. In doing it, his forearm passes an inch above the back of my hand. An inch. Close enough that the heat off him arrives on my skin and stays after he's gone.
I don't move. He doesn't apologize.
He goes back to his wall.
"That's a subpoena preview," I tell Gideon, whose eyes have not left the page. "Courtesy. If the books don't come voluntarily, I'll take them."
From the wall, flat as a coin dropped on a table: "Bring boxes."
I don't turn around. I will not give him the turn.
"How many?" I ask the room.
A pause. Two seconds. Then, "You'll want a truck."
Gideon sets the page down, squares it to the desk edge, and the interview is over.
"You've come a long way to look at cattle numbers." His eyes hold mine. "Whatever you're actually here for, Agent, I hope you find it fast. Winter is long, and this county does not like being looked at."
I stand. My legs are fine. I check.
"That sounded like a warning."
"It was weather."
The Sullivan house is twenty minutes south and one entire philosophy away.
Where Gideon gave me a chair, Declan Sullivan gives me a hand, a first name, a fire already lit, and a woman named Kathleen who brings coffee I didn't ask for, cream already in it, exactly the way I take it.
She reads the room in the four seconds it takes her to set the tray down. She looks at me, looks past me at Holt, who has followed me in like weather and stopped just inside the door, and then looks back at me.
She smiles at nobody and leaves.
"Five generations my family's been on this ground," Declan says, pouring.
He's a big man who never went soft, silver at the temples and still built like the work.
Every word he speaks is a small gift he expects to be receipted.
"Whatever you need. Books, leases, hands, my kids.
I've told every one of them to talk to you. "
"Your daughter too?"
"Especially my daughter." He says it with the fondness of a man who knows exactly how cheap the concession is. "Maren will tell you the truth right up until it stops being hers to tell. You'll like her. Everybody does."
"And your accounts, Mr. Sullivan? The feedlot paper, the transfers. Does the open door reach that far?"
"All of it. It's nothing."
"It's four hundred thousand in feedlot transfers, a Calgary routing number, and your foreman's cousin on my witness list." I set my cup down untouched.
"So it isn't nothing. You're offering me everything so I'll notice the offering instead of the paper, and when I subpoena you in three weeks, you'll be able to say you cooperated from the first day.
It's a good play, Mr. Sullivan. I'd have made it. "
The fire pops. Declan's smile stays exactly where it is, and behind it a man does some fast arithmetic.
I lose my place. Two seconds, maybe three, because I can feel Holt behind my right shoulder taking all of this down. I have to reach for the next question like a woman who left it in another coat.
I find it. Nobody in the room lets on that I dropped it, which is not the same as nobody noticing.
"Kathleen said you'd be like this," he adds.
"Does Kathleen usually get told before I arrive?"
"Kathleen is usually the one telling."
He laughs. I don't. Across the room, Holt Blackwater shifts his weight for the first time in an hour, and when I glance over, he's already looking at me.
Nobody has looked at me that way in an interview. It is the way you look at a thing you'd assumed was one size and just found out is another.
He drops his eyes first. Which, I'd bet the case, he has never once done in this house.
The light's going by the time we're back in the truck. The mountains are turning that blue that isn't a color so much as a temperature.
I have my notebook open on my knee, writing survey / half-second / not that ground, because if I don't write it, I'll talk about it.
"You didn't blink," he says.
Three words.
"At which one?"
"Either."
"Should I have?"
He drives. The heater's been running since Sullivan's and the cab has gone warm and close. I notice that he does not smell like a ranch.
He smells expensive. Dark, smoky, deliberate. A man who stood in front of a mirror this morning and chose it.
Nothing in the file accounts for it. I've been breathing it since the airport.
"People blink," he responds.
"Is that admiration, Blackwater?"
"It's information."
"You've collected a lot of that today."
"So have you." Two fingers come off the wheel at a truck going the other way. He knows the truck, and there was a time I would have too. "You baited my father on purpose. One word."
My pen stops.
He doesn't look over. He doesn't have to.
He watched me bait a man nobody in three counties would bait, and he hasn't decided yet what to do with it.
My blood does the wrong thing about it, and it does it in the dark where he can't see.
"Which one?" I ask.
"You know which one."
"Then why ask?"
"I didn't ask," he says.
There is a smile trying to happen. I give it to the window instead of to him.
Outside, the fence line runs black against the last of the light. Sullivan ground is giving way to Blackwater ground with nothing between them but four strands of wire and a century and a half of graves.
I'm still deciding what to say next when his phone lights the cab.
He answers on the first ring. Doesn't say hello.
A voice comes through, too loud, too fast, frayed at the edges. A man named Wyatt. Grown, and not handling it.
I catch three words and none of them are the ones that matter. What matters is the truck. What matters is that Holt Blackwater's hands do not tighten on the wheel, do not move at all, and that the speedometer climbs eleven miles an hour without a single change in his face.
That is how I learn what this man looks like when something is actually wrong.
He hangs up.
"What?" I ask.
He takes the turn onto the timber road so hard my shoulder hits the door.
"Jacob's horse came down off the mountain," he says. "Without him."