Page 33 of Broken Ride

She hangs up. Across the room, Laney reads my face with the distance diagnosis she'd run on a limping horse, and I give it to her word for word, the way I said I would.

Laney doesn't reach for her keys. Fourteen months of running have earned her the right to reach for them. Instead she clears the bed and lays her route maps across it, contamination charts on top, building the case the corridor just disappeared a man to keep buried. Anybody can see what she's doing. She's digging in.

I pour the whiskey and let it sit, watching her work, doing the only figuring that matters now. They took Salazar for asking questions. They took Pruitt for a pocketful of paper. The woman at the foot of my bed is the one person left alive who can read their operation front to back, and every one of them knows her face from television.

Twenty years I've made a living staying on animals that wanted me dead, and every single time, the buzzer told me when to let go.

There's no buzzer on this one. I don't plan to come off.

9

LANEY

The bedspread under my maps is the color of weak tea, and it's the biggest flat surface this room has to offer. I've worked up cases on worse, on tailgates and clinic counters and once on the hood of my truck outside a feed store, and every one of those cases was about a single animal.

This one is about the whole circuit and the thing feeding on it, and about a dispatcher who handed us his life's paperwork and vanished at a rest stop with his phone on the seat.

Wade stands by the window with the whiskey he poured when I started clearing the bed. The level in the glass hasn't moved.

He watches me sort the pile into columns, route logs down the left side, contamination charts down the right, and he doesn't ask what I'm doing. He already knows, and he's the rare kind of man who lets a woman work.

Torres calls back before I finish the second column. Wade puts her on speaker unprompted, because we settled that question in a truck outside Amarillo. Nobody filters anymore.

"Two roads," Torres says, in place of a greeting. "Road one, you come in tomorrow. Your bloodwork, your maps, your analysis as it stands, and you go on record while I walk it into the US Attorney's office and ask him to take what we have to a grand jury."

"And he says no."

"He says not yet, which is worse. A no dies in the room. A not yet gets written down, and then your name sits in the federal system with no indictment wrapped around it. On record and unprotected is the most expensive combination the government sells." A drawer slams on her end. "Here's your legal education for the evening, Dr. Brooks. Pruitt's ledgers are hearsay without Pruitt. The route logs and the manifests are numbers. A grand jury hears numbers all day long and indicts nobody, because numbers without a pattern is an audit, and audits don't put men in prison. What turns those numbers into a criminal enterprise is the science, contamination that tracks the routes and exposure that tracks the trailers, with a qualified expert connecting what's in those horses' blood to what's on those trucks.

"The Bureau's copy of that drive is the one that goes to court. Whatever the two of you kept for the analysis, I never heard about it."

"Meaning me."

"Meaning you. Road two, you keep building until the pattern is finished and airtight, and every day you spend building it, the corridor spends hunting the only person left who can tie their trucks to their chemistry."

She lets that sit. "I can't make this choice for you. I can tell you the government would rather have a finished case than a dead expert, and that it's been known to end up with both."

Wade's glass has stopped pretending to be a drink. He doesn't move and he says nothing, because he told me nothing moves until I say it moves, and the man holds to his word the way other men hold grudges.

"If I walk away, the case dies," I say. "Salazar stays a wrecking yard outside Deming. Pruitt stays an idling truck. The horses keep riding those trailers, and next season some other vet pulls blood she doesn't understand and ends up in my chair."

I square the corner of the contamination chart against the route log beside it, and the patterns lock over each other like they've been doing for weeks. "I'm not choosing this because I'm brave, Torres. I'm choosing it because I ran the differential and there's only one diagnosis. Any lab in the country can verify my chemistry. Nobody can go back and draw last month's blood. The samples and field records that prove the pattern exist in one custody only, and it's mine. Without that, it's numbers. With it, it's a federal case. So I'm going to finish the work."

"There's a third thing, and I'd rather say it now than surprise you with it later." Torres's voice goes careful. "When this goes to a grand jury, the analysis needs a name on it, a license, sworn testimony from a human being who exists on paper. You don't have to decide tonight, and I'll hold that door closed as long as the law lets me. But the day is coming when the case needs Delaney Prescott, and you should start deciding before the calendar decides for you."

The name lands in the room like a dropped instrument.

Wade heard it from Torres before he ever heard it from me. He's had days to practice not flinching at it, and he spends that practice now.

"Noted," I say, because I learned that word from a cowboy.

"Get some sleep, both of you."

She hangs up. "You want to talk me out of it?" I ask.

"No." Wade sets the glass on the dresser, still full, beside the bottle, and something in me writes that down without my permission. "You're the only one who can finish it, so you'll finish it. My job is making sure every man who gets within arm's reach of you regrets the reach. Division of labor."

"That was almost romantic."