Page 14 of Broken Ride

"Both."

The word sits in the air between us. Neither of us moves to take it back. The coffee steam has thinned to nothing, and the concession trailer behind me is shutting its windows, the clatter of metal latches carrying across the emptying lot. Somewhere a diesel engine turns over, coughs, catches.

She holds my gaze for a beat that lasts longer than either of us planned. Then she looks away, and the absence hits like a door swinging shut.

I don't like it. I don't like that I felt it. I don't like that my body is keeping score of every second this woman faces me and every second she doesn't.

She wraps both hands around the coffee cup and stares at something past my shoulder. The silence between us isn't uncomfortable. It's pressurized. Two people standing on either side of a line they can both see, neither willing to step across it yet, neither willing to step back.

"You check under your truck every night," I say. "You park facing out. You scan every lot before you get out of the cab. That's not a vet being cautious. That's someone who learned the hard way that caution keeps you breathing."

Her expression doesn't change. But her jaw tightens, and the warmth drains out of her face so fast the temperature between us drops.

"My parking habits aren't your concern."

"They are if someone else is paying attention to them too."

That lands. Her knuckles go white on the clipboard edge.

But she recovers fast, and when she speaks her voice is level. "I don't need your help, Ashcroft."

"I'm not offering to help. I'm offering information for information." I set my coffee cup beside hers on the tailgate. "You've got science. I've got relationships. Separately, we've both got half a picture. Together, we've got something worth looking at."

She's quiet for a long time. Then the calculation shifts. She stops weighing trust and starts weighing usefulness.

"Find out who's driving the Thornton rigs," she says finally. "Not the company name on the contract. The actual drivers. The men behind the wheel."

"I can do that."

"Then do that. And stop bringing me coffee like we're friends."

"We're not friends."

"Good."

"We're the only two people on this circuit who've noticed the same problem from opposite directions. That's more useful than friends."

She picks up her notes and walks back to the pens without looking at me. Her stride is even, her shoulders set. She doesn't check behind her.

But she drank the coffee. Something tells me she won't leave it sitting there next time either.

I lean against her truck and watch the lot while I finish the last lukewarm swallow from my flask. The conversation is still running through my head, every exchange replaying itself in a different light. She told me the animals are contaminated. She gave me a task. She didn't give me her trust, but she gave me a job, and for a woman like her, that might be the same thing.

I also pushed on her habits. The truck checks, the parking, the scanning. She shut me down cold, but the way she shut me down told me everything her words didn't. Her jaw tightened. Her knuckles went white. Whatever she's running from, it isn't theoretical. It's specific, it's personal, and it's close enough that a stranger noticing her patterns felt like a threat.

The crowd is thinning, trailers loading, the usual post-event migration toward the highway. I'm about to push off and head for my own rig when I see them.

The two men I noticed before. The same watchfulness that is not just looking around at a rodeo. This time they're not watching the stock loading. They're watching the vet truck. They're watching Laney.

I straighten slowly, keeping my body language casual. Take a sip from the flask that's already empty. The movements give me an excuse to turn, to scan, to measure the distance between those men and where Laney is working with her back to them. Forty yards, maybe fifty. Close enough to watch. Far enough to disappear if she turned around.

My hand is steady. The rest of me isn't. Something old and heavy is settling into my chest, the same feeling I get when a horse goes wrong in the chute and I know someone's about to get hurt before anyone else does. Instinct without evidence. The body knowing what the mind hasn't caught up to yet.

She doesn't react. Either she hasn't spotted them, or she has and she's choosing not to show it.

I walk to my truck and dial Colt.

"Thornton Livestock," I say when Colt picks up. "The hauling company that rebuilt itself and got the circuit contract after Merrick. What do you know?"