Page 15 of Broken Ride

"That's a hell of a way to start a phone call." Colt's voice is steady, the calm of a man who's already survived the worst thing that could happen to him. "What's going on?"

The silence on his end isn't casual. It's weighted.

"Wade." His voice drops half a register. "Where's this coming from?"

"The circuit vet pulled some delivery records that don't add up. I've been asking around, and contractors are telling me the same thing: animals arriving late, stressed, dehydrated. Routes that don't make any geographic sense unless the trucks are going somewhere they shouldn't be between pickup and delivery."

"You and the vet." It isn't a question. "You're both looking at this."

"From different angles. She's got the science. I've got the relationships."

Another silence. Longer this time. I can hear wind on Colt's end, the distant sound of livestock.

"Be careful," he says. "And I mean that."

"Careful how?"

"There was a vet on the circuit before your doc. Guy named Salazar. Worked the Southwest stretch for a couple of seasons. Good vet. Started poking around Thornton's operation: the routes, the schedules, why certain loads were running at odd hours. Quiet about it. The same kind of digging you're describing."

"What happened?"

"Nobody knows. He stopped showing up. Told the event committee he was taking personal leave. Never came back. Nobody's heard from him in months."

The air inside my truck feels thinner. I lean my head back against the seat and stare at the ceiling liner, water-stained and peeling at the edges. A vet. Asking the same questions. Gone.

I grip the phone tighter. "You're telling me a vet who went digging into Thornton disappeared."

"I'm telling you a vet who went digging into Thornton stopped being visible." Colt's voice is careful. "There's a difference. Could be he got spooked and walked away. Could be he got a better offer somewhere else. Could be something worse. I don't know. What I know is that nobody went looking for him very hard, and that bothers me more than the disappearance itself."

"Colt."

"Yeah."

"There are men on this circuit watching the current vet. I saw them today. They're not rodeo."

The silence on the other end of the line is the loudest thing I've ever heard from Colt Holloway.

"Get her out of there," he says quietly.

"She won't go. She's not the kind who runs from a problem."

"You know her well enough to say that?"

"I know her well enough to know I couldn't make her leave if I tried. She found the contamination on her own, pulled the delivery records on her own, started connecting the pattern before I even knew there was one. She checks under her truck every night and parks facing the highway. That's not a woman who scares easy, Colt. That's a woman who's been scared before and decided to keep working anyway."

The silence on Colt's end shifts. I can hear him processing that.

"Then make sure she's not solving it alone." A beat. "And Wade. Whatever's in that flask of yours, tonight would be a good night to put it down." He hangs up before I can answer.

I sit in my truck in the dark lot and listen to the engine tick. The bottle is under the seat where it always is. I reach for it without thinking, unscrew the cap, fill the flask.

The movements are automatic. Same as hers when she checks the locks. The difference is her autopilot keeps her alive. Mine is doing the opposite.

A vet named Salazar started digging into Thornton and vanished. Two men in clean boots are watching a woman who's pulling on the same thread.

And I'm sitting here with a flask in my hand, trying to decide what kind of man I am. The kind who does something about it, or the kind who takes another drink and pretends he didn't see.

I take the drink. It burns going down. It solves nothing. Tomorrow I'll find out who runs the Thornton rigs, because whatever kind of man I am, I'm not the kind who looks away.