Not tonight.
"Jace," he says. His voice carries the last remnant of the easy charm, worn thin now.
"It's done, Colt," I tell him, stopping ten feet away. "Dusty's in custody.
The financial records are with the commission. Luke's draw sheets from the Caldwell circuit go to the investigators in the morning." I hold his gaze. "Every piece of it is in the right hands. All of it."
Something moves through his expression, a crack in the surface, there and gone.
"You don't have anything on me," he says.
"Garret Cole is on your payroll," I answer. "Has been for two years. Every gate that stuck this season, every rope that slipped, every move that was made on my family's property. It all runs through him and back to you."
The crack widens.
"That's circumstantial," he says, but the certainty behind it is thin.
"The phone records aren't," Quinn says from beside me, her voice carrying the particular authority of a woman in uniform who has been patient long enough.
"Forty seven calls between you and Cole in the past three weeks alone. Fourteen of them on the nights something went wrong atthis rodeo." She steps forward. "That's not circumstantial, Colt. That's a pattern."
He looks between us, something shifting in his posture that tells me he's running out of road and feeling the edge of it under his feet.
"I want a lawyer," he says.
"That's your right," Quinn answers. "But first you're going to stand right there while I make a call."
He doesn't move.
Neither do we.
Quinn makes her call on the radio. Sheriff Adams answers her.
It's short and precise, the kind of communication that happens between people who have already done the preparation and are now just executing the final step.
She tells Chief Adams 10-4 and she lowers the radio. She looks at Colt with the steady professional calm of a woman who has seen every version of this moment and isn't moved by any of them.
"Investigator is ten minutes out," she says.
Colt hasn't moved from his spot near the equipment shed. He's pulled himself back together somewhat. The visible rattling often minutes ago, replaced by something more controlled, more deliberate, the composure reasserting itself.
I've been watching him do it my whole career.
I just didn't know that's what I was watching.
"You want to know what I can't figure out," I say, and my voice comes out even, conversational almost, because this isn't anger anymore, it moved past anger somewhere around the time I understood the full scope of what he'd been building.
"I can't figure out why you kept going after the rodeos ended. You had the operation buried. You had the evidence on land nobody was watching. You had a clean reputation and a career that was going to carry you for another five years at least."
I look at him steadily. "Why come after me at all? Why not leave it alone and let the land sit?"
Something shifts in his expression.
Not the crack from before. Something different. Something that looks almost like he's been waiting for someone to ask that question and hasn't decided yet whether to answer it.
"Because you saw," he says finally.
"At Caldwell," I say.
