Page 31 of Captive

“I said yes,” she says. “And then I turned the truck around.”

She looks at me for a long moment. For a second the anger in her face gives. Then it sets again.

I take the old brass line-camp key off my ring. It’s the only one that opens that bedroom door. I set it in her open palm and don’t close her fingers around it.

She looks down at it.

“Now there’s no lock in that building I can use on you,” I say. “I’ll sleep in the shed.”

I pick up my bedroll and walk to the cot by the supply cabinet, out where the tin roof holds the heat and the cow can wake me before she needs to. I don’t look back. I lie down with my boots on the floor under one hand.

Much later, the bedroom door opens and closes. I hear a key turn in it from the inside.

Then, a minute after that, I hear it turn again.

When I finally sit up and look, the cabin door is standing open. She’s walking out to check her cow with the brass key hanging from the blue tag on her belt, and she doesn’t look at me, and she doesn’t lock anything behind her.

Chapter 9

Sofia

By noon, the herd has a real hold order, and I have my name back.

Dr. Cho calls on the state satellite phone while I’m sitting on the cabin porch with my feet up on a feed bucket. The hold covers the twenty-one surviving cattle, the three carcasses, the black tank, the panels, the feed. It has an order number and a named authority and a page listing exactly who can release it, and none of those names are McCall.

It’s less dramatic than a painted sign on a gate. I could kiss it.

“And the certificate?” I ask.

“There’s no electronic record under your account for that load,” she says. “Not for the Oklahoma cattle, not for the line-camp paper. The numbers belong to real movements you made for other clients. Someone printed pictures of your work.”

I close my eyes. “Thank you.”

“Your office reported possible misuse before anyone touched your account. That helps. Your assistant is very good.”

“She is.”

Becca picks up on the first ring when I call from the same phone, and says my name twice before she remembers that panic doesn’t improve with repetition. Mrs. Alvarez and her imaginary mare are fine. The relief vets have today’s calls. Nobody has touched my computer. She called the state from the pharmacy phone.

“Are you coming home?” she asks.

I look across the yard at the shed. Cole is inside with 14C, measuring water into her tub, writing it down in block letters on a clipboard. He’s been doing it every two hours without being asked. He doesn’t look toward the porch. He hasn’t looked toward the porch all morning, not once, and I’ve been watching to see if he would.

“I’m not being held,” I tell Becca. “I’m deciding what the cow needs. That’s different.”

“Blue pencil stays on until you tell me in person.”

“Exactly.”

The afternoon is work. Examinations, water logs, a county technician who comes to photograph every tag without adding a mark to a single animal. Cole does everything I tell him and nothing I don’t. When I correct a word on his sheet, crossing out normal and writing no visible discoloration at distance, he says “Understood” and nothing else, and I’m angry about it without being able to say why.

* * *

At six, the western sky turns the color of old copper.

“That front’s moving faster than the radio said,” Cole says from the shed doorway. It’s the first thing he’s said to me without me speaking first.

“Is the south road passable?”