Page 32 of Broken Ride

The payment information is last, fuel advances and consulting fees, amounts that don't buy what they claim to buy. A few of the names I recognize from the edges of the Merrick mess, small players who scattered when it broke and apparently didn't scatter far.

And there's one name that keeps recurring in the approval column, sign-off after sign-off, steady as a metronome. B. Hendricks. It means nothing to me, and I've been on this circuit half my life. That means something all by itself.

I photograph the screen and send it to Colt, because Kenna reads money the way Laney reads blood, and then I put the drive in the glove box and lock it.

She watched the whole exchange through the glass, but glass doesn't carry words. I give her all of it, Salazar's wrecking yard included, because she told me this morning what happens the day I start filtering.

She takes it in and files it with everything else she carries, and her face doesn't change. Tears would have been easier to watch.

I cut the engine. The A/C dies with it, and the heat starts leaning on the glass. Nobody reaches for a door handle. The lot noise goes on around us, air brakes and idle rumble, and the afternoon light comes through the windshield gone gold at the edges.

"I married Garrett young enough to think the badge meant what it says." She stays level, the clinical register she uses over open wounds, and hearing it turned on her own life is worse than shouting would be. "The calls from Oklahoma are him. He never leaves a voicemail, because voicemails are evidence and he's careful. The photograph in my truck is him. And before that, the rooms. I'd come back from an event and my boots would be lined up different than I left them. My hairbrush turned over. Little things nobody else would ever notice, which is the point. He wants me to know he was there and to sound insane if I ever say it out loud."

She looks down at her hands. "I wasn't going to tell you any of it. But keeping it from you was starting to feel like one more room he was standing in."

The file Torres gave me had his name, his county, and a year of database queries. It didn't have the boots. Knowing a thing and hearing the woman say it are two different animals, and the second one has claws.

My hands want the wheel to be his neck. I let them want it, and I keep them where they are.

Every instinct I own is hollering at me to fill the silence, to promise, to fix, to aim myself at Oklahoma like a dropped hammer. I've spent my life being the man who does something. So I hold the doing-nothing the way I'd hold a rank horse, all grip and no sudden moves, and I let her finish.

I turn and look at her, because this part she gets face on. "I told you what I knew. What I didn't do was ask Torres for the whole file. I figured the rest was yours to ask for when you were ready. If that was wrong, it was wrong in the direction I could live with. You want the whole thing, I'll get you the whole thing."

She laughs once, short, no floor under it. "Everybody's been reading my mail."

"Yeah."

She looks out the windshield for a long time. The interstate hums. A reefer unit cycles on a few rows over. When she finally speaks, her voice has sanded itself smooth again.

"Aren't you going to tell me what happens next? That's how this goes. The man hears the story and then the man announces the plan."

"What do you want me to do?"

The question lands and I watch her take it apart, turning it over, looking for the trick built into it, the price tag, the trap on the underside. She doesn't find one, because there isn't one, and watching her fail to find it is the worst thing I've learned about her yet.

"Nobody's ever asked me that," she says.

"Then everybody before me was a fool or a criminal."

"I don't know yet." She says it like a confession, like not knowing is a debt. "Running is the only plan I've had since Oklahoma. I don't have one for a man who asks first."

"Then here's mine. Nothing moves on Garrett until you say it moves. That's not patience, Laney. That's the answer, standing, for as long as it needs to stand."

She doesn't thank me, which is right. "Drive," she says, which is better.

We deliver the drive to the field agent Torres sends to meet us in Amarillo, a kid in a polo shirt with a federal handshake. Laney copies everything to her own machine first, a lesson the coolers taught her, and neither of us mentions it to the polo shirt.

Then the circuit swallows us back up. Two days go by wearing ordinary clothes. I ride slack the next morning and score well enough to earn cash. Laney works the pens and ships more blood to College Station, and one of us keeps checking a phone that doesn't ring.

Waiting has a taste. It tastes like motel coffee and the third read of route logs I could recite. It tastes like Laney across the table building her case in colored ink while I pretend the bottle on the dresser and I aren't having a conversation of our own.

When it finally rings, it's Torres, and I know from the first syllable.

"Pruitt's rig turned up at a rest stop near Tucumcari," she says. "Door open. Engine idled until the tank ran dry. His phone was on the seat and his cash was in the console." She waits a breath. "Runners take the phone and the cash, Ashcroft. Every time. He didn't run."

"Say it plain."

"He was taken. Same as Salazar, and this time we had him first, which means they knew we had him." Her voice goes quieter, and quieter from Torres is louder. "Yesterday you were helping me with an investigation. Today I'm telling you plainly, and you're going to repeat it to her word for word. This is a war. The corridor knows it's a war. Act accordingly."