Page 12 of Switch

I turned back to the chart before she could catch me watching and scooped the next bucket. Senior feed, two scoops, joint supplement. The grain hissed into the rubber.

Her boots stopped in the doorway.

“You fed?” she said.

“Most of them. Didn’t know what the gray gets.”

“Nothing till the vet’s been.” She came in and took the scoop out of my hand. She was careful to keep her fingers clear of mine. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Had to do something, and besides, it’s like muscle memory from back in the day.”

She looked at me then, standing in her barn at dawn with her handwriting on the feed board behind me. Color came up her throat. She turned away and went down the aisle with the feed cart, and I let her go, and I stood there with my hands empty feeling like the lowest son of a bitch in New Mexico.

Preacher and Deacon rode in before the heat got bad.

I met them at the hay barn and we stood in its shade where the road couldn’t see us. Preacher took his helmet off and looked at the place the way he looked at everything, like he was working out what it’d cost to hold it. Deacon was already talking before his kickstand was down.

“You’re going to love this.” He pulled a folded paper out of his cut. Rings on three fingers, all of them scuffed to hell. “Guy I know runs a salvage yard east of Deming. Owes me for a thing. Your plate came off a Silverado that got totaled on the interstate in March. Insurance wrote it off, yard was supposed to crush it and turn in the plates.”

“Somebody sold them out the back,” I said.

“Somebody sold about thirty of them out the back. My guy was real upset to find out. Real upset.” Deacon grinned. “He’ll be less upset once he’s found out who.”

Preacher kept his eyes on the back section. “So they rotate plates.”

“Rotate plates, rotate trucks, rotate men. Never the same combination twice.” Deacon tucked the paper away. “That road’s the one thing they can’t swap out.”

“Then we take the road.” Preacher’s voice was even. “Watch both ends. Next run, we stop it. Then we shut that culvert so nobody drives it again.”

“And until then?” Savannah said.

She’d come up behind us from the barn, quiet in the dirt. She had the lead rope for the gray looped over her shoulder.

“Until then you stay somewhere else,” I said.

It was out before I’d thought about it. Deacon studied the ground. Preacher turned his head and watched me, knowing that I was about to regret being so blunt.

Savannah just waited, like I might want to hear it back.

“Nine horses,” she said. “One of them can’t walk more than ten feet without it hurting him. Who’s feeding them? Who’s changing Deuce’s boot? Who’s catching colic at night? You?”

“I fed this morning.”

“You fed six out of nine and you didn’t know what the gray ate.” Her voice stayed low. “This is my place. I’m not leaving it.”

I’d heard my old man get ordered around in this yard my whole childhood. I’d sworn I’d never do it to anybody. And I’d just stood here and done it to her in front of my brothers.

“Fine,” I said. “Then you stay off the back section. You cancel your owners for the week. Nobody comes up that drive we don’t know about.”

She thought about it. Canceling was going to cost her.

“I’ll cancel today,” she said. “I’ll call and tell them the vet’s coming. After that we talk again.”

“Deal.”

Preacher’s mouth moved, not quite wanting to tell me I was fucking this up slowly. He put his helmet back on.

“Havoc’s on the county road tonight,” he said. “Gage takes the hill. You’ve got the house.”