Page 41 of Branded

“No.”

He nods like that’s the first sensible thing anybody’s said all day. “He moved fast.”

“He always moves fast. That’s his whole problem.”

“Wasn’t a problem today.”

I look out the window. “I know.”

At the apartment I wash my hands for a long time. The water runs pink and then clear. I stand at the narrow sink with the tap still going and my palms braced on the counter, and I can’t stop seeing the hole in that chain.

An hour later, from a borrowed office at counsel’s firm, I watch Mercer inventory the feed sack over a secure video link, comparing each tag against Barbed Crown’s animal files.

The first tag belongs to a dormant consignor account. The second was never entered into the sale system at all. The third matches a heifer that passed through Barbed Crown eleven months ago under records that now disagree about who bought her.

The fourth is older. The printing is worn where some animal carried it for years.

Its number appears in Calvin McCall’s mortality-week inventory. Death recorded on the night Calvin himself died.

I sit back from the screen.

Then I pick up my phone and text my attorney that I’ll be staying at Barbed Crown tonight, in the guest suite, and that I want every term of the security memorandum confirmed in writing before I arrive.

I don’t let myself think too hard about why. I only know that I can still see a hole in a chain six inches from his head, and I can’t stand not being where I can see him.

Chapter 14

Garrett

The medic cuts yesterday’s bandage off my forearm at 8:12 and tells me the bullet missed everything important.

Tessa stands at the end of the infirmary counter and asks whether the splinter carried dirt into the wound, whether both fragments went to Mercer, whether my tetanus is current. She doesn’t tell me I was lucky. She reads the treatment record before I sign it.

Her care is practical enough to survive anger. That’s more than I’ve earned.

I don’t know why she came back last night. Her lawyer sent the notice at nine: the guest suite, the memorandum terms, no ranch staff on the stair. She arrived at ten in counsel’s car, carried her own case up, and locked both doors. I didn’t go near the wing. I lay awake and listened to the house and knew she was in it, and that was enough to let me sleep for the first time in three days.

We talk on the office porch because it’s open to the drive and nobody can mistake it for anything private. I set the restitution packet on the table between us.

The outside examiner’s report says every live copy of her work is gone from our systems. The new access rules take effect whether she ever comes back or not: nobody at Barbed Crown installs anything on an auditor’s device, copies her work, or tracks her location without a specific written request she can refuse. The board and our insurer were notified yesterday at 6:14 and 6:22, before the water-lot search. Before I knew whether she’d ever set foot here again.

She checks every line with her own lawyer instead of taking my word. I wait while she proves I told the truth.

When she’s finished, she sets the pages down. “The mortality file says that heifer died at 11:46 on the night your father died. Bloat. Rendered. But there’s no rendering pickup that matches.”

“The entry was made the next morning.”

Her eyes sharpen. “How do you know?”

“Because my father wasn’t in bed when that animal supposedly died.”

I haven’t said this out loud to anyone. It sits in my mouth like a stone.

“The family statement says he died in his sleep,” I say. “It was easier for the lenders and the buyers and the cousins than explaining why a man with a bad heart drove alone to closed pens after midnight.

“He got a call on the house line at 10:39. I heard him tell whoever it was to leave the animal where it was. At 10:52, the west service camera caught his truck. That’s the road on your map. The closed one.”

“Did you follow him?”