“Decker,” I said, keeping it neutral, not using names over an unsecured line.
“Carver,” the voice on the other end replied. “Your friend flew into Billings two days ago on a private charter. Gulfstream 550, tail number N550GH. He’s got at least two men with him—both ex-military, both carrying. They’re staying at the Ritz in town, but they’ve been making day trips—north toward Great Falls yesterday, west along the 90 today.”
The information landed with the weight of bad intel, the kind that changed your understanding of a situation completely. I stood still in the shadow of the barn, phone pressed to my ear, and ran the revised timeline.
Two days. Gerald had been in Montana for two days while I was still treating this as a problem with distance left in it. While I was still running assessments and making calls and thinking we had time to be smart about it.
“He hasn’t found the ranch yet,” Carver continued, correctly interpreting my silence. “But he’s got resources—people checking hotels, rental properties, hospitals. If your friend shows up on any kind of official record, they’ll find him.”
“I understand,” I said, voice even. “Keep me updated.”
“I’ll call when I know more,” Carver said, then hung up without elaboration—another man who understood the value of saying exactly what needed to be said and nothing more.
I stood for a moment in the shadow of the barn, phone still in my hand, and thought about what came next. Gerald Hughs was in Montana. He had people looking. And while he hadn’t foundthe ranch yet, the distance between “not yet” and “soon” was shrinking by the hour.
I needed to tell Jasper. Not soften it, not frame it as something we could manage with minor adjustments, but give him the truth—that the man who’d driven him from his job, then his hometown, then the state itself was now within fifty miles of where we stood.
I walked back to the farmhouse, boots leaving dark impressions in the wet grass. The afternoon light was taking on the flat quality that preceded sunset, shadows stretching long across the yard. From the east porch came the sound of a child’s voice—high and questioning—followed by a lower response I couldn’t quite make out.
I found Jasper on the porch steps, one of the ranch children—Ethan, Rawley’s son—settled in his lap. Jasper was reading something off his phone in a low voice while the kid leaned against his chest, small hands wrapped around Jasper’s wrist where it rested across his stomach.
They hadn’t seen me yet. Jasper’s free hand was turning pages on the screen with careful movements, his voice shifting into the animated tone adults use when reading to children—not performing excitement but actually finding it, getting caught up in the story’s momentum. Ethan’s face was turned up toward Jasper’s, eyes wide, lower lip caught between his teeth in concentration.
I stopped in the doorway for a beat, caught between what I was carrying and what I was looking at. Then I crossed the porch and sat down, not crowding but not keeping my distance either.
Jasper looked up, something moving behind his eyes—surprise, then recognition, then the careful neutral that appeared whenever he thought he might be in the way.
“Hey,” I said, keeping my voice casual. “Mind if I join you?”
He shook his head, then turned back to the story, but something in his posture had shifted—a slight tension in his shoulders, a more careful placement of his feet. He’d picked up on the change in my bearing, the alertness that came with new information.
Ethan sensed it too. He looked between us, then slid off Jasper’s lap with the decisiveness of small children. We watched him go, his small figure bouncing across the yard toward the barn where Rawley was working.
When he was out of earshot—when a child’s presence was no longer between us—I turned to Jasper.
“Gerald’s in Montana,” I said, keeping it simple. “He flew into Billings two days ago. He’s got at least two men with him, both armed, both ex-military.”
Jasper’s face went still in the way it did when he was processing something frightening and refusing to let it show. His eyes stayed on mine, but something behind them had closed—a door not quite shutting, but no longer fully open either.
“How close?” he asked, voice steady in a way that spoke of practice rather than calm.
“Close enough that we need to change how we’re moving around the ranch,” I said. “And I want you with someone when I’m not here. Not a guard—just company. Burke, or Carter, or Danny. Someone who knows what to look for.”
Jasper was quiet for a moment, eyes on the mountain to the west. The light was changing around us, afternoon giving way to evening, the air taking on the coolness that preceded night.
“I’m tired of being the reason people have to rearrange their lives,” he said finally, voice so low I had to lean forward slightly to catch the words.
“That’s not what this is,” I said, the words coming out with enough weight that Jasper didn’t argue.
But neither of us let it go entirely. We sat there as darkness gathered around us, not quite touching but not keeping our distance either, the problem between us named but not solved—a threat that had moved from theoretical to immediate in the space of a three-minute phone call.
That night, after dinner and dishes and the awkwardness of a house where everyone knew something had changed, but no one was quite sure how to address it, I did a slow perimeter walk of the farmhouse and outbuildings. The kind of check that was years of habit from operating in places where the perimeter was the difference between sleeping and not.
I started at the equipment barn—testing the new lock, checking the windows, making sure the motion sensors Burke had installed last month were functional. Then the fence line along the south pasture, where the property bordered the county road—walking its length with a flashlight, looking for signs of disturbance, places where the wire had been cut or the posts knocked loose.
The gap between the woodshed and the back of the house came next—the blind spot in the property’s sight lines, where someone could approach without being seen from the windows. I checked it twice, moving the stacked logs with careful hands, making sure nothing had been placed or taken since my last inspection.
The ranch was quiet, the kind of stillness that belonged to places far from cities—no traffic sounds, no neighbors’ voices, just the occasional creak of the house settling and the distant call of an owl from the stand of pines to the west. The Black Butte mountain was a dark mass against a sky packed with stars, its face turned away from the thin slice of moon visible along the eastern horizon.
