Page 17 of Kid Gloves

"Atlas, down means down, don't you dare."

Delaney. Over the fence — over my fence, it's becoming her signature move — walking into the blast radius like weather doesn't apply to her, eyes not on the goats but on the dog, and she's right: Atlas's grip is getting sticky, stress climbing his spine paw by paw, half a second from breaking the out command in front of the United States government. Grady sees it the same moment she does. She doesn't take the dog. She takes the picture apart and rebuilds it: one hand signal to Grady — re-cue, now — one boot planted on the tug she scoops off the grass, and her voice dropping into that stock-tip register that every animal on this ranch has decided is the voice of God.

Atlas outs. Clean. Sits, vibrating, professional, while a goat walks under his chin.

You could hear a pin drop, if the pin weren't being eaten.

"Major." Delaney straightens up, breathless, hair escaping in every direction, my jacket on her shoulders, and addresses the United States Air Force like she's been on the schedule all along. "Question. Where do you actually deploy these dogs — parade grounds, or the real world?"

Duarte looks at her. Looks at Atlas, holding his sit inside a petting zoo. "Real world."

"Airfields with vehicles and panicked civilians. Markets with livestock. Kids, chickens, chaos." She ticks them off on her fingers, and I watch Whitaker's face go from crisis to calculation, because he's been in those markets. "Anybody can show you a dog that performs on mowed grass with the gates locked. You just watched a nine-year-old dog hold his out while his environment fell apart, because his training's deeper than his adrenaline. That—" she points at Atlas, then at the goat currently attempting to unionize the decoy—"is the most honest demonstration you'll see this year. We ran it goats and all."

Silence. Waffle Iron swallows the last of the schedule.

"We," I hear myself say, "have found unpredictability training improves outcomes."

Duarte types for a long time. Then she lowers the tablet, and the woman with the handshake like a form does something Whitaker will swear to at the Tin Roof for years: she kneels, holds out the stump of her agenda to Brisket, and grins like a kid at a fair.

"The committee," she says, "is going to want video."

It comes out of me in the office afterward, and I'm the last to know.

Whitaker's signing the extension paperwork — eighteen months, the puppy pipeline written in by name, Duarte already drafting her memo in the truck, and he says, dry as the county in August, "Only outfit in the industry with a livestock red team," and Jake says "you should see our rooster," and something gives way in my chest like a strap letting go.

I laugh.

Not the exhale. The whole thing — bent over the desk, undignified, tears at the edges of it, nine years and a burned barn and a goat eating the government's agenda, laughing until my ribs hurt while my brothers stare at me like I've pulled a knife.

"Holy hell," Jake says, reverent. "It has a laugh."

"Heard it once before," Grady says. "2019. The county fair incident."

"That was a cough."

"It was a laugh, and you know it, and the pig knew it." Grady's already got his phone out, texting — the family thread, no doubt, possibly the church Facebook. Within the hour my mother will call the office line, ask nothing, and be audibly smiling. I should mind. The strap that let go in my chest appears to have been load-bearing for minding things.

Through the window, across the yard, Delaney's watching from the puppy pen with her hand over her mouth, and even at forty yards I can see she's doing the thing where she files a moment away to examine later in private, and I find I don't mind being the moment. That's new. I'll examine that later in private.

Whitaker leaves with a handshake and one last line delivered quietly, for me: "Cheaper bid's not going to love losing this one. Halloran's boys lowballed it by a third." A beat. "Watch your flank, Mercer. Twice now you've cost that man real money."

I file it. The file's getting thick.

The breach investigation takes until 1700 and concludes at a hole under the southwest post of pasture three, excavated over what the soil says was multiple nights, positioned in the one spot the yard light doesn't reach, and concealed, I am writing this in a federal-adjacent document, concealed under a sheet of plywood that someone dragged over it between digs.

Grady crouches at the hole a long time, hat pushed back.

"They dug in shifts," he says. "Look at the spoil. That's four different hoof sizes."

"Planned it. Staged it. Waited for the day we'd all be occupied." I look across the pasture at the goats, who are watching us examine their work with the modest silence of professionals. Brisket stands slightly apart, downwind, gazing at the middle distance.

"You want me to fill it in?"

"Document it first." He looks at me. "For the file," I say, and Grady grins and takes the picture on his phone, and doesn't say what he's thinking, which is that eight weeks ago I'd have poured concrete by sundown, and tonight I'm commissioning goat forensics because a woman is going to want to see the photo.

She's going to want to see the photo.

I find her at dusk behind Kennel B, sitting on an overturned water trough with Biscuit asleep in her lap, and the adrenaline's gone out of the day and left something quieter in its place.