Page 20 of Switch

I dropped my gun hand an inch. The kid’s gaze dropped to it. His grip on the knife eased a hair.

“Back,” Savannah said.

Clear and calm, like she was standing in that stall with a muck fork on any other morning.

Deuce heard the word and did the one thing she’d spent all those weeks teaching him. He rocked onto his hind end and backed up. Two steps, fast. Twelve hundred pounds of horse drove straight into the kid’s spine.

It threw him forward like he’d been hit by a truck. The knife came off her throat. Savannah dropped straight down out of his arm, dead weight, and he was standing there alone, wide open, stumbling.

I fired.

The round took him high in the chest and spun him into the stall front. The lighter flew out of his hand and went skittering across the wet mats, lid open.

Savannah was on it before it stopped moving. She scrambled across the aisle on her hands and knees and closed her fist around it and snapped the lid shut. Then she knelt there in the gasoline with it clutched in her fist, breathing like she’d run a mile.

The kid was on the floor by the stall door. He was bleeding out through his shirt, and his hand was crawling across the mat toward the knife.

“Leave it,” I said.

His fingers closed on the handle.

I shot him again.

His hand fell open on the mat, and that was the end of it.

Deuce was blowing hard, but he was standing square, boot and all. Savannah had her hands on him before I’d got my gun down. She ran her palms down his face, his neck, his shoulder, talking to him low the whole time. Easy, handsome. Easy. You did good. You did so good.

He dropped his nose to her shirt pocket, looking for a carrot, like the whole thing had been her idea.

Then she turned around, and her knees gave out as the enormity of it all suddenly hit her.

I caught her before she hit the mats. I got my arms around her and held on, and she held on back, and I could feel every breath she took shudder against me.

“Show me,” I said. My voice was shot.

She tipped her head back. The cut was long and shallow, running under the line of her jaw. It was bleeding the way shallow cuts do, too much and all at once. I pressed my thumb beside it, and my hand was shaking so bad I had to stop.

“It’s not deep,” she said. “Switch. It’s not deep.”

“You said you’d stay in the house.”

“He was going to burn my barn and I couldn’t let Deuce down.”

There was nothing I could say to that. It was the truest thing anybody had ever said to me. I put my face in her hair and held on until my hands quit.

Shade came in at a jog with his bag. His eyes went over the body on the floor, the soaked mats, her neck. He saw how close this had come to going completely sideways.

Preacher came up from the wash with Gage behind him. He stood in the barn door a long time with the gas stink rolling out past him and took it all in. The gas shining down the aisle. The guy on the mats and Savannah with her neck wound.

He made a call to some fixers we used. Twenty minutes later a truck came up the drive with no lights, and two men I knew from the garage got out with a tarp and a roll of plastic. Nobody said much. By the time they drove away, there was nothing left in Savannah’s barn but hosed-down mats and a smell that would take a month to go.

That’s what we were. That’s what I was part of. She watched every minute of it.

It was near dawn when I found her back in Deuce’s stall. She’d gone over every inch of him twice, found nothing but a sweat mark, and fed him a flake of alfalfa he had no business getting, and now she was sitting in the bedding in the corner with her knees up and her back against the wall, watching him eat.

I sat down next to her. The shavings were damp. Neither of us cared.

“So this is it,” she said after a while. Her eyes stayed on the horse. “This is what you thought I couldn’t live with.”