Holt
She is asleep on the arm I shouldn't be using.
The stitches pull every time she breathes. It’s a low steady fire I could fix by moving her and have no intention of fixing. Her hair falls across my arm in a tangle my hand made, and her fingers rest over the scroll on my chest like she fell asleep trying to read the numbers underneath it.
Through the small east window there is nothing yet. The sky is black and the stars are still out over the plains.
Somewhere behind the dark shape of the Front, the day is coming but has not committed to it.
The stove has gone cold. It is the first day of March, and nothing that happened in this bed is going to survive what the morning does to it.
She wakes like I do. All at once, everything online, a full second of inventory before the body moves.
I feel the change: breathing shifts, muscles go from slack to ready, and she holds there, taking stock.
Whose skin. Whose arm. What she let happen and how much of it she is going to have to take apart before breakfast.
Then she stirs, and the cold finds every place she was.
Her eyes find mine. For half a second they are the eyes from last night, open and unarmored. Eyes of the woman who said my name into the dark still in them. Then they close, fast, practiced.
"Don't," she says.
"Didn't say anything."
"You were building up to something."
"I was going to mention your hair's in my stitches."
She glances at my arm. At her hair caught in the gauze. Then at me, and I watch her put the whole night behind a lock I will spend the rest of the week trying to pick.
She doesn't reach for her shirt.
That's the tell I shouldn't read and can't unread. A woman putting the wall back up goes for her clothes. A woman climbing back over it goes for something else.
Her hand lands flat on my chest and pushes, and there is nothing soft in the push. I go down because I want to and because whatever she is about to prove will prove the opposite.
She finds my jeans on the floor before she finds me. The foil packet comes out of the back pocket, the last one, and she tears it with her teeth, same as I did last night. She’s watching me the whole time, daring me to say a word about it.
She rolls it on with one hand and the efficiency of a woman who has decided this is evidence processing, not intimacy.
This time is hers. Fast, no talking, her knees on either side of me and her jaw set like she's closing a case. She takes me in one hard slide and holds, and the breath goes out of both of us.
Last night we took our time. This morning she is making a point, and the point requires speed.
I put my thumb to the base of her throat where the pulse is doing something her face will not admit to. She knocks it away and I let her, and she comes with her teeth in her lip and fury running under everything.
I follow with my hands on her hips and nothing in my mouth but her name, said once, at the ceiling, where she can pretend she didn't hear it.
She is off me and reaching for her shirt before either of us has a full breath back.
"That was..."
"If you say interesting, I will find my sidearm."
"I was going to say fast."
Every button a perimeter re-established and she does them all, collar to hem, without looking at me.
By the time she turns around, Agent Tatum is back in the room and the woman who used my chest as a proving ground sixty seconds ago has been reassigned to a room neither of us is going to open in daylight.
"The truck's in a ditch."
"Noticed."
"Do you have a plan, or is this the part where we walk five miles?"
"Knox runs the line shacks after a storm. He'll be here before light."
"And he'll see us."
"He's already done the math. Knox always does the math."
"How reassuring."
I find the tin pot and the propane burner and put coffee on, because the alternative is standing in a twelve-foot room watching a woman who just disproved her own thesis pretend she didn't. The cup I hand her is black, no cream like the way she took it at Nell's. She drinks it anyway.
The Chinook hits while we wait.
No warning. One minute the air is still and fifteen degrees and the frost on the window is holding. The next, the whole shack bucks on its foundation and the wind is screaming through every seam in the old logs, warm air replacing cold so fast I can feel the pressure change in my ears.
The temperature jumps thirty degrees in the time it takes to cross the room. Icicles on the eave crack off and shatter on the frozen ground, and the snow on the south slope goes from solid white to running meltwater while I watch.
March on the Rocky Mountain Front. Chinooks that eat a foot of snow in an afternoon, then freeze what's left by midnight.
Knox's diesel comes up the fence road in the dark, headlights bouncing off the ruts. He gets out leaning into the wind, hat clamped with one hand. He looks at the shack and does not knock.
"Tried your phone twice. Tried the radio. Checked the barn at four-thirty and your truck's not in it." He lets that sit for exactly one second. "So I drove down here."
He does not say what he expected to find. He does not need to.
"Heifer on the south pen's been laboring since four." He leans on the fender. "First calf. Breach." He looks past me to the open door, to the bed behind it and to Mackenzie standing by the stove with her coat on and her hair still a wreck. His expression does not change. "But take your time."
"Knox."
"Didn't say a word." He pushes off the fender. "Also, county already tagged your truck. Aldridge is writing it as weather." A beat. "Same as everything else in this valley."
The pattern. The template Jacob's death wrote for the town, and now every violence that touches us gets stamped with it.
We ride back in his truck.
She takes the back seat without discussion, puts her shoulder against the far door, and opens her phone like a wall between the front seat and whatever just happened.
Knox catches my eye in the mirror once. I give him nothing. He pockets it same as he pockets everything, which means Sage will have the full picture by dinner, and I will deal with that when it arrives.
On my front porch, placed with ceremony on the second step, a dead vole. Grey, intact, belly up. The barn tabby sits four feet away with its yellow eyes on me, waiting for the review.
"There's a body on your porch," Mackenzie says behind me.
"There's usually two."
She studies the cat, then the vole. Her mouth twitches once and she puts it away before I can use it.
"Does it have a name?"
"The vole?"
"The cat."
"No."
"You've lived here two years and you haven't named your cat?"
"It's not my cat. It's a barn cat that brings me dead things."
"Sounds like a relationship."
I step over the vole and head for the calving barn, because every answer I can think of puts us in territory her buttons are working overtime to close.
The heifer is down.
Two hands are in the pen with her. Roy, who has been on this ranch longer than I have been alive, and a kid named Danny who came on in November and still looks startled by most of what happens here.
Roy has the heifer's head and Danny is at the hindquarters with a headlamp that keeps slipping off his forehead, and neither of them is smiling.
"Breach," Roy says, same as Knox did. One word carrying the whole situation. "Both legs back. I can get one but not both."
"I've got it." I strip my coat, roll my sleeves, and wash to the shoulder in the bucket by the gate. The cold water lights up the stitches all over again.
Danny steps back, hands me the headlamp, and looks as relieved as only a twenty-year-old can about someone else putting their arm inside a cow.
"Hold this." I hand the lamp to Mackenzie without looking. Looking at her while I am about to do this is a bandwidth I don't have.
She takes it. Angles the beam on the hindquarters without being told, clean light, no shadow, no wobble. Better than Danny had it in thirty seconds.
She has been around livestock. She has not said so, but how she holds that lamp says it louder than saying it would.
Roy watches the handoff and says nothing, which from Roy is the same as a standing ovation.
Both front legs are back. I find the first hoof and bring it forward, and the calf shifts in the canal, and the heifer bellows once and goes quiet, deciding to trust whoever is handling this.
"Other one," Mackenzie says, and the beam moves before I ask for it, tracking my arm, reading where I am going next the way a spotter reads a shooter.
The second hoof comes forward. I line them up and pull, slow and steady, and the calf slides into the straw in a rush of fluid that goes to my boots and everywhere else.
It doesn't move.
I clear the mouth and nose. Rub the ribs hard with a fistful of straw. Nothing. The heifer cranes around and looks at the dark wet shape on the ground. Beside me, Mackenzie goes still.
I rub harder. Thumb along the jawline. The chest fills once, hitches, fills again. A cough, then the front legs fold under and the whole thing tries to stand and fails and tries and fails and stands.
"Got you," I say, and nobody answers. The barn is quiet except for the heifer licking and the Chinook hammering the walls outside like something trying to get in.
I tag the ear. Number 4-117. Not a name. I don't name things on this ranch. Haven't in two years. That job, I'm beginning to understand, has been reassigned to someone who does not know she has it yet.
We come out of the barn into sunrise.
The first light has come up over the plains while we were inside, and across the valley the granite face is turning from grey to pink to orange. Ten thousand feet of rock is warming from the top down while the Chinook tears at everything below it.
The air is warm enough that I am standing in my shirt with blood to the elbows and I am not cold. The gusts still hit hard enough to press my shirt flat and take my breath sideways.
A house finch sits the fence wire by the tack room in a lull, the first of the year, arrived overnight on a wind that carried it over the divide and set it down above a valley still deciding what season to be.
Purple crocuses along the south wall of the barn. Three of them, pushing through mud and old snow. Nobody planted them. They come back every year on their own schedule, indifferent to what the ranch thinks.
Mackenzie stands beside me, close enough that her sleeve nearly touches my arm. She looks at the crocuses and does not move.
"You're good at that," she says.
"Calving?"
"New things. Alive things." A beat. "It doesn't match the rest of you."
"Which rest?"
"The part that reads a murder in four seconds. The part that comes sideways into a parking lot on ice at midnight." She pauses. "The part your file doesn't explain."
I look at her. She is looking at the flowers.
"Those are different skills."
"No. They're the same skill used in different directions, and that is worse, and you know it." She turns. "Last night you told me things I am going to hear for a long time."
"I know what I said."
"Did you mean any of it, or is that the vault doing what the vault does?"
The vault. She named it. A breath comes out of me that is almost a laugh, because she has been paying close enough attention to build a word for the thing I do, and she chose the right one.
"All of it."
"That is not a safe answer."
"You didn't ask for a safe one."
She holds there three seconds. Then she moves first.
One step. Her hand comes up and touches the blood on my forearm, above the stitches, where the calf left it.
"You're bleeding again."
"It's not mine."
Her thumb stays on the skin as she holds my gaze. A gust hits the barn broadside hard enough to bow the wall. The heifer calls once from inside, and the finch abandons the wire, and neither of us pulls back.
"This doesn't mean what you think it means," she says.
"It means exactly what I think it means."
"Then we have a problem."
I turn my arm so her hand slides down to the inside of my wrist, where the pulse is. And I hold it there.
"We've had a problem since the airport, Mackenzie."
Her fingers tighten. The wind pushes her hair across her mouth like it did in the snow over Jacob, and this time I reach over and move it back.
She lets me, and that is worse than all of it.
She doesn't let go.