Page 37 of The Fire Line

Navarro moved left, not too fast and not too far. The yearling saw the opening Harris had left and took it, trotting after the others through the pasture gate. The ranch hand slammed it behind them and looped a temporary chain through the latch.

The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

Harris stood with his hands on his hips while the dust settled. Navarro had dirt across one cheek and one hand braced against the truck bed. The camera remained in the open case exactly where he had left it.

“Need me anywhere?” he asked.

Harris checked the pen once more. “Nope.”

“Okay.”

Navarro closed the case, moved the truck out of the lane, and headed toward the lodge without turning thirty seconds of basic usefulness into a speech about how useful he had been.

Harris watched him go.

Anyone with sense would have helped. What Harris could not dismiss was how Navarro had done it. Three instructions followed immediately, without panic, argument, or an attempt to improve Harris’s plan before he understood what the plan was. Most surprising of all, there had been no joke at the wrong time.

He had simply trusted Harris to see the whole problem before he could.

Which should not have mattered as much as it did.

Harris trusted competence. He trusted it more than charm, intentions, enthusiasm, or almost anything else people offered when they wanted access to the ranch. Plenty of people claimed to know what they were doing until something went wrong, at which point Harris usually discovered he was responsible for fixing both the original problem and whatever they had added to it.

Navarro talked too much. He wandered. He asked questions in the middle of work and cared considerably more about the state of his clothes than anybody spending this much time on a ranch had a right to.

But when the gate broke, he listened.

The high-country access was still waiting on Harris’s answer. A careful load table proved Navarro could prepare. This was different. This proved that when preparation failed and somebody else needed to take control, he did not waste time protecting his pride.

That mattered on a ranch. It mattered even more in the high country.

Whether Navarro could manage the same thing from the back of a horse remained another question, but Harris could no longer pretend the answer was obviously no.

He found that mildly irritating.

The second piece arrived two hours later.

By then the broken gate had been temporarily chained and Harris was fitting a new latch near the equipment shed. Della had settled onto the lodge porch for another interview, close enough that he could hear without participating, which was where Harris preferred to be for most of the filming. Eli operated the camera while Navarro sat outside the frame with his headphones around his neck and a notebook balanced against one knee.

The interview was about Nell, but not her cancer.

That caught Harris’s attention.

Navarro asked about the first guest cabins, the north-pasture plans, and the water project Nell had started and never finished. He asked Della what Nell had been good at and what she had been terrible at, which made Della laugh before she answered. He asked what she had argued about with Walt and which project she had been proudest of.

Harris tightened the bolt beneath the new latch and kept listening.

Since Nell died, people had developed a habit of starting with the end. They asked how long she had been sick, whether she had known what was coming, how Della and Walt had managed those last months. Even people who meant well could reduce an entire life to the thing that ended it.

Navarro didn’t.

For twenty minutes under his guiding questions, Nell got to be stubborn again, funny again, alive again.

Della described the first guest cabin and the argument that had followed when Walt discovered Nell had already ordered the beds.

Navarro smiled. “So the discussion was largely ceremonial.”

“Oh, completely. Walt learned fairly quickly that Eleanor asking permission usually meant she’d already done whatever the thing was.”