I nod. Putting rounds downrange is as good a way as any to quiet a mind that won't stop running.
Raven heads for the door without another word, and I let her go. Some things a person has to process alone, and she's earned that space.
The cartel's tightening surveillance on Devil's Acre means they're building toward an operation. The question is whether they've identified the redhead from the Pritchard ranch as Raven Bishop, and whether they've connected her to me yet.
Through the window, I watch her set up targets along the tree line, using fallen branches to prop water bottles and pieces of cardboard at varying distances. When she's satisfied with the arrangement, she steps back, drops into a shooting stance, and puts rounds center mass through the first target.
Her form is textbook. Feet shoulder-width apart, weight forward, the rifle tucked tight against her shoulder. But the fourth shot pulls left. So does the seventh. She's compensating for recoil anticipation, fighting her own body instead of working with it.
My phone rings before I can head outside to correct her. Carmichael's name on the screen stops me mid-step.
I answer immediately. "Talk to me."
"Javier Alvarez arrived in Fredericksburg yesterday." Carmichael doesn't waste a syllable. "My team spotted him at a warehouse meet with known cartel enforcers. Photos confirmed his identity this morning."
Alvarez. Here. Raven's supervisor at the ATF. If he's in Fredericksburg meeting with cartel enforcers, the implications collapse into a single, ugly conclusion that unravels everything we thought we understood about how Raven's cover got blown.
"You have proof he's dirty?"
"Surveillance photos from the warehouse meet are clear shots from multiple angles. He's not being careful anymore." Carmichael lets that sit for a beat. "The surveillance team also caught him meeting with Sheriff Harlan at a roadside diner later that afternoon. They looked comfortable together. Familiar."
Sheriff Harlan. The sheriff who ruled every rancher death in the county accidental. The man who's been asking around town about a redhead.
"Send me everything."
"Already encrypted and on its way." Keys click in the background. "Jesse, Alvarez being here changes the tactical picture entirely. He knows Raven's face, her operational patterns, the way she thinks. Morrison was the trigger man. Alvarez has been running her."
Not supervising her as an agent. Running her as an asset. The distinction lands like a blade between the ribs.
"Do you want her to know he's here?"
"That's your call to make." Carmichael's voice drops half a register. "Alvarez is coordinating the pipeline through Harlan and the local cartel operation. But Jesse, if he knows Raven is in Fredericksburg, he's moving to finish what Morrison started."
The line goes dead.
Through the window, Raven is still shooting, working through another magazine with the kind of focused repetition that tells me she's trying to outrun her own thoughts. She needs to know Alvarez is in Fredericksburg. She deserves to hear it from me before the situation forces my hand.
I pull up the encrypted file on my phone. Carmichael's team doesn't waste bandwidth, and the photos download fast, loading one after another. Alvarez at the warehouse, shoulder to shoulder with known cartel enforcers. Alvarez at the diner across from a man in a Gillespie County sheriff's uniform, leaning in like they've had this conversation a hundred times before.
I pocket the phone and head outside.
Rifle reports echo across the clearing in measured intervals as I cross the grass toward her position. Raven doesn't acknowledge my approach. She keeps firing, each shot precise and deliberate. Water bottles burst apart. Cardboard shreds and flutters. She works through the magazine, drops it, reloads, and starts again without breaking rhythm.
I wait until she's emptied another magazine before I speak.
"You're pulling left."
Raven glances at me, and the rawness in her expression has nothing to do with shooting.
"I know." She ejects the empty magazine and reaches for another. "I’m working on it."
The fresh mag slides home and she chambers a round, then pauses with the rifle angled toward the ground. "You didn't come out here to critique my form."
There's no gentle way to deliver intel that's going to detonate no matter how I frame it. But Raven has never needed gentle, and I'm not going to insult her by pretending otherwise.
"We need to talk. Your uncle sent me files."
Raven thumbs the safety on and lowers the rifle, turning to face me fully. The shift from target shooter to operative happens in the span of a breath. "About?"
