Page 5 of Kid Gloves

"The timeline holds." He repeats it in that tone senior officers use, the one that means I'm writing this down and it has your name on it. "The renewal committee meets in the fall, Wade. Sixteen weeks, certified and clean. This program's the reason your outfit gets the contract instead of the cheaper bid. You know there's a cheaper bid."

I know. Everyone in this industry knows the cheaper bid. They've underbid us four times in two years, and they staff like a temp agency and train like a car wash, and twice now clients have brought us their dogs to fix.

"You'll have the plan Thursday," I say, and Whitaker says get it done, and that's the whole conversation, and when I set the phone down my jaw's aching again.

The second call I don't get to make, because the phone rings first, and the screen says MOM, and there is no protocol on earth for that.

"Wade Allen Mercer." My mother has never once needed more than a name to conduct an interrogation. "I hear there's a girl living in your guest house."

"There's a federal puppy program living in my guest house. It comes with a contractor. How do you already⁠—"

"Loretta." Of course Loretta. The fire trucks probably weren't back in the bay before the county had a briefing packet. "Delaney Boone. Ellie Boone's granddaughter. I sold her grandmother eggs for twenty years, that woman could make a fence post grow tomatoes. Sunday dinner. Bring her."

"Mom."

"That wasn't a question, sweetheart. Your father wants to look at her goats. He's been talking about goats." A pause, freighted. "It's good, what you did. Don't ruin it by explaining it to her as a spreadsheet."

She hangs up on me. Sixty-one years old and she hangs up like a Bond villain.

The north end, is the thing.

She said the fire started at the north end. Feed room. Old wiring — plausible. Barns her barn's age burn every summer in this county, and the wiring theory has the advantage of requiring nothing further from anybody.

But I stood in her yard at 0300 with my boots in wet ash, and the burn pattern on that north wall was low and fast and hungry, and old wiring fails high, at the box, at the junctions. I've written enough incident reports to know the difference between what I can prove and what I noticed. So it goes in the file the way I was trained to file it: observation, no conclusion.

Doesn't stop it itching.

She answers her door in a Texas A&M sweatshirt with a puppy in the crook of her arm and war in her eyes, which means she's already guessed why I'm here.

"No," she says.

"You don't know what I'm offering."

"You have your contract face on."

I do not have a contract face. I make a note to ask Callie whether I have a contract face. "The litter needs Section 8-compliant housing by end of week or the program goes into breach. The guest house qualifies. Whelping room's already plumbed. You'd have full access, full authority over the pups, and the run of the training campus."

"And I'd be living on your ranch."

"The compliant structure includes living quarters. Section 8 wants a certified handler within fifty feet of the whelping room overnight, and I am short exactly one of those. It would be inefficient not to use them."

"Inefficient," she repeats, like the word bit her. The puppy in her arm, the big male with the crooked ear, gnaws her sleeve with his whole tiny heart. Behind her, the horse trailer is arranged into what I can only call a command post: crate towers, feed bins, a whiteboard of her own with the imprinting schedule in marker that survived the fire because she keeps it in her truck. She rebuilt her operation in a horse trailer in six hours.

I look at that whiteboard longer than I mean to.

"I don't take charity," she says. "I know how this goes. You do the big rescue, and then it's your barn, your rules, your dogs really, and I'm the sad case renting a corner of someone else's life. I've been the sad case. I'd rather be the disaster."

There's a version of this conversation where I tell her what I actually thought at 0300, watching her count puppies with burned-off eyebrows and a voice steady enough to give me a timeline. That version of me got left in a desert somewhere with his career. What's left says:

"It's not charity. It's compliance. You'd be doing me a favor — a breach on this contract costs me more than your mortgage." Fact. Deployed tactically, but fact. "And they're not my dogs. Clause 12." They're hers until sixteen weeks. I nod at the puppy destroying her sleeve. "I just hold the paper."

She stares at me a long moment. The rooster crows from the coop roof. It is 9:40 in the morning.

"Your rooster's broken," I say.

"Gary is recovering from trauma." A pause. Her mouth does something at one corner, against her will, first light through a fence board. "Full authority over my pups."

"In writing."