Page 53 of Broken Ride

"When the case is done," I say, and I feel her go alert at the shift, "and the finals are done, and he's sitting in a cell your charting built. There's an after, Laney. I'm telling you now so you've got time to aim at it. I want you in it."

She's quiet for a moment. The old Laney, the one from the first weeks, would've priced the exits. This one just nods once against my chest, businesslike, like a woman initialing a contract she's already read twice.

"Noted," she says. "I want that too. Now sleep. We're both stupid tired."

The want for a drink arrives ten minutes after she's well and truly out, the same collector at the same door, working a day like this one for everything it's owed.

I lie in the dark and count it the way I've been counting it, promising nothing. The ledger stays open and unpaid one more night, and the weight of her sleeping on me makes the balance come out different than it used to. Not solved. Different.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand past midnight. Kenna. I ease out from under Laney and take it by the window, and Kenna doesn't bother with hello any more than Torres does.

"Torres ran your plate inside the hour and sent me the name," she says, and there's a wire in her voice pulled tight. "Because the name meant nothing to her and she figured it might mean something to me. It's registered to a company called Cross Iron Land and Cattle. Tell me if it means anything to you."

"Sounds like a ranch gate."

"That's because it's built to. Cross Iron doesn't own land and it doesn't own cattle. It's paper, Wade. A shell. I've been staring at that name for weeks in Thornton's books, money coming in on one page and washing out on the next." Papers move on her end, fast. "Whoever followed you tonight is driving corridor paper."

The window gives me back my own reflection over the dark parking lot, and behind the reflection, Laney sleeps in the low light with her boots by the door.

I stand there and count the day out: a deputy close enough to see a county cruiser and read a parking job, a corridor rig patient enough to hold a half mile for eighty of them, roses in the office, a note on her truck, a camera inside the fence, and no way in hell to prove any of it shook hands with the rest.

The working theory since Amarillo is two wars, and we've been splitting the watch accordingly, one eye on the badge, one eye on the money.

I stay at that window a long time, listening to Laney breathe, and I can't make the columns stay in their columns anymore. I can't prove they're the same animal. I just can't find the seam between them tonight, and a man who can't find the seam has no business betting there is one.

The watch just got harder to split.

The phone buzzes again in my hand. No name. No number I know. Five words, same count as the note, and the sender doesn't need a signature.

Tell her good night, Wade.

I read it twice, standing very still in the dark of a room he should have no way of seeing in, with the deadbolt thrown and her boots aimed at the door and every rule of the protocol holding exactly none of the weight it held an hour ago.

Then I pull the chair to the window and keep the watch.

15

LANEY

The chair is the first thing my eyes find when the alarm drags me up, and the man in it is the second. Wade sits by the window with the curtain cracked an inch, hat off, boots on, watching the parking lot the way I used to watch parking lots. The set of his shoulders tells me the chair has held him all night.

"You didn't sleep." My voice comes out rusted.

"Slept plenty." He doesn't turn from the window. "In shifts. Me and the ice machine traded off."

I sit up, and the sheet pools at my waist. Even now, even wrung out and lying, he glances over and lets me watch him lose the thread for a second.

Then he picks his phone up off the sill and crosses the room and puts it in my hand, screen already lit, because the deal we made cuts in every direction and the man pays his debts.

Five words. No name, no number, the same schoolboy economy as the note under my wiper.

Tell her good night, Wade.

The cold arrives the way it always arrives, from the inside, radiating out from a point just under the sternum.

Fourteen months of practice means my hands stay level while I read it twice, and my voice finds its clinical register on the first try.

"Timestamp puts it past midnight. After the rig turned off. After the deadbolt." I hand the phone back. "He wanted you awake for it. Congratulations, cowboy. You gave him exactly what he paid for."