Chapter 2 Jennie
The Coleman house was an architectural lie straight out of real estate brochures.
Old Texas ranch on the outside, subdivided McMansion on the inside, with just enough original beams left exposed to get it featured in a local charity calendar.
My room was the smallest of the three spare rooms. It was two shades of beige, smelled of dryer sheets, and contained exactly three pieces of furniture.
The bed, a chest of drawers, and a low-slung, solid wood desk.
In the closet, someone had left a plastic-wrapped tuxedo from a rental place in Fredericksburg, which I took as a kind of warning. Why hadn't it been returned?
Who was paying the late fees? I didn't want to know.
Meh, I'd stayed in worse places. Not many, but some.
I'd been here for three days, and the only people who'd spoken to me were the oldest of the two Coleman sons, Wyatt, and the catering staff who’d brought lunch my first day here.
I was, on paper, here to perform a geological survey for American Ceres Petroleum.
In reality, I was here for the Beaumonts, who owned every inch of the Coleman Ranch down to the last cow turd and rented it back to them for an extortionate sum.
The Colemans hated this arrangement, hated the oil companies more, and hated me most of all.
I tried not to take it personally, but I'm only human.
I mostly failed, but that wasn't my current worry.
My very expensive drone was spread out in pieces across the desk, its delicate guts exposed.
The shell was warped, the gimbal dangling at an angle, wrenched from its socket.
The storm had come out of nowhere the night before, pelting the drone with enough horizontal rain to short out the rotors before I could land it.
I'd watched from my phone screen as the wind had taken it, arcing up and then slamming it hard into the ground beside the north pasture fence, the feed on my phone going blank.
When I found it at sunrise, it had been embedded upside down in a patch of wild sunflowers, its camera lens fractured into a spiderweb.
The casing was stamped "PROPERTY OF ACE GEOLOGICS" in block letters, a fake brand I'd put on it the day before driving to the ranch. So far, I'd taken it apart to see if there was some miracle chance of me fixing it.
There wasn’t. No dice. The motherboard had fried. The only thing salvageable was the SD card, which I slotted into my laptop while sucking on a cold cup of coffee I'd scavenged from the kitchen.
Nada. It was dead too. I powered my laptop down, shoved the ruined drone in a duffel bag, and changed into fresh jeans and a button-down. The jeans were dark enough to hide coffee stains, the shirt was a size too large, a thrift store find, one of my favorite shopping pastimes.
Before heading out, I checked my holster.
Sig P365, right hip, with a spare mag in my pocket.
I wasn’t sure how the Colemans felt about me carrying on their property, but I'd rather risk the stink-eye from an angry ranch hand than be unarmed in the middle of nowhere, especially given the reason I was here, and what had happened to me and Wyatt two days ago.
I still wasn't sure I believed it myself.
I spent ten minutes on my phone, searching for info about wolves in Texas.
According to every official source, the last wolf had been trapped in 1970.
Some even said 1942. The state swore they were gone, extinct as the dodo, replaced by the endless coyote chorus that came with every sunset.
But the thing I saw had not been a freaking coyote.
Coyotes didn't run in silence, they didn't have shoulders of linebackers or whip-tails.
Coyotes didn't look back at you with human-level-intelligence eyes.
I'd debated calling someone since the sighting, local law, state wildlife, even the US Fish and Wildlife tipline, maybe.
But the last thing I needed was to be the girl who cried wolf, literally, in a county that already thought I was one step above trespassing.
I could imagine it now. Hi, yes, I'd like to report a wolf semi-attacking me.
No, I know they're extinct. No, I'm not crazy. I have a degree and used to be a fed.
Hard pass.
Instead, I made do with what I had. I headed to the porch, still limping a little from the bruising my ankle had taken my first day here.
The air outside was heavy and humid, the clouds from last night's rain still hanging low over the pastures.
I set up my laptop on the porch's battered picnic table, scanned the perimeter, and pretended to run data analysis while really just watching the yard.
You could see for miles here, all the way down to the creek and up to the limestone outcrop on the northern border.
The pastures were green from all the recent rain, cut by tidy bands of grazing cattle and the occasional dirt road.
Off to the west, a Maddox Ranch truck traced the far fence line, crawling down the county road that ran between the two ranches.
I made a note of the time. It could be relevant.
Everything could be relevant at this point.
A single rider appeared in the eastern field about an hour later, riding high on a bay horse. He was too far to ID, but the way he sat on the saddle screamed professional. I watched until he dipped behind a rise, then went back to my so-called work.
The main Coleman house was on a raised pad, set up to watch the world without being watched in return. Unless I counted the Coleman hands, who were everywhere and nowhere at once, almost certainly watching me.
I was two sips into my second cup of pilfered coffee when they came around the corner, two men, both on foot, both with the same rolling gait from years in stirrups.
The older one had a beard like steel wool and skin the color of wet paper.
The younger was rangier, wore a sweat-stained ball cap and sunglasses despite the overcast. Both wore holsters outside their jeans, casual as hell.
I clocked the makes and models, old Smith on the left, newer Glock on the right, then pretended to focus on my laptop as they passed.
Just two armed strangers ignoring another armed stranger on the porch.
Normal Texas Tuesday. My firearm on my hip gave me some comfort.
I had no idea what kind of mess these people were involved in, or how violent they could become.
I had no desire to find out, but in the meantime, I carried everywhere I went.
They didn't so much as glance at me. Not meaningfully, though no doubt they had noted every single detail of my appearance.
They walked on, muttering something, then cut across the gravel toward the machine shed.
If they'd been told to watch me and, at the same time, ignore me, they were following orders to the letter.
I let them get thirty yards before calling out, "Afternoon, gents."
The older one stopped, pivoted, and gave me a look, unimpressed. "Yeah, we know who you are," he said. Funny, I hadn’t asked if they knew who I was. His voice was flat, noncommittal, not quite hostile. But there was a chill in it. Do not engage. Printed somewhere internal.
"Good to meet you too," I replied. "I'm the geologist. Name's Jennie Cardin." I was overly bright and hopefully annoying. Not that they’d asked who I was. I just wanted to get them to talk to me if possible.
The younger one huffed, made a show of adjusting his gun belt. "We heard," he said, before following his partner into the shed. They didn't bother shutting the door behind them. I heard laughter, then the whine of a bench grinder, and then nothing.
I stared out at the pasture. Not like any of them would care if I just got up and left. They'd probably throw a party. I checked my phone. Zero new notifications. Zero missed calls. I again considered calling the county sheriff about the wolf. Would they think I was nuts?
Fuck it. I was doing it. I searched for, then punched the non-emergency number into my phone and waited.
Three rings later, a dispatcher answered.
"Hello. This is Jennie Cardin with American Ceres, staying at the Coleman Ranch.
I saw a wolf out on the range two days ago," I said, keeping my voice flat.
"Just thought you should know. It was huge. Didn't look like a coyote."
A pause. "Ma'am, we haven't had wolves out here in fifty years. Are you sure it wasn't a big dog?"
That was what Reid had said, and it had kinda pissed me off then, too, though I hadn’t let on to him. So condescending.
I counted to three, then said, "If it was a dog, it was a goddamn dire wolf."
That felt good. Probably shouldn't have.
It got a laugh, but not a friendly one. "I'll make a note," the dispatcher said. "Anything else?"
I almost said yes, but then I hung up. Let them file it in the round bin. It wasn't like anyone was coming. At least I’d reported it. If anyone else saw it, they’d realize I wasn’t crazy.
After closing my laptop, I sat there for a while, watching the world get hotter. The house behind me was silent, the ranch hands were ghosts.
I ran my thumb over the edge of my laptop, thinking about the way the wolf had looked back at me from the fence line. I'd been around enough predators to recognize the look. Wyatt had hightailed it before he would’ve seen the wolf. I wasn’t even sure he saw the boar, he’d left so quickly.
The porch boards creaked under me. The one person I actually trusted was three states away, and anyway, what would I say?
I'm alone on a ranch where nobody wants me, my equipment's trashed, and the locals are armed to the teeth.
Oh, and there's a wolf that's probably smarter than most of the neighbors. Please advise.
Instead, I stared out at the land, the veins of barbed wire and the hunched, slow-moving cattle, and waited to see what would show up next.