Page 62 of Forbidden Protector

"Aldridge's response time on the timber road." Holt's voice drops. It isn't loud, it's worse than loud, the same register he used standing over Jacob's tracks in the snow. The one that means he's already decided what happens next. "You knew how long you had before Aldridge showed up, and you used every minute of it."

His gaze drops to the tarp, the plane, and the thirty minutes of runway he isn't getting back.

For one second I think he's going to give it to us. The whole architecture. The name that would close every leak in this county at once.

Then he doesn't. His jaw works instead, and a sheen comes up along his hairline. His weight goes strange against Holt's arm. Less like a man holding still and more like a man being held up.

"Wade." I step closer. "You're sweating through your collar in a forty-degree hangar. Talk to me."

"I don't feel—" His words come slurred at the edges, and his knees buckle half an inch before Holt catches the weight of it. "Something's wrong."

"Something's been wrong since you swallowed it." Holt eases him down to the concrete instead of holding him up, fast, controlled, no gentleness in it and no cruelty either. Just a man managing a collapse he already understood was coming. "How long ago, Wade?"

"I don't—" His breathing goes fast and shallow, his eyes going somewhere far away. I've seen that look on a dozen men across a dozen interview tables. This is the first time the clock underneath it was real.

"Wade." I get down on the concrete beside him, checking his pulse, already knowing what I'm going to find. "Wade, look at me."

He doesn't look at anyone again.

Knox comes through the man door thirty seconds later with two deputies behind him. He stops at the sight of a man on the ground with foam at the corner of his mouth and a hundred and ten thousand dollars sitting untouched on a workbench.

"He talk?"

"No." I sit back on my heels. My hands are steady, and I notice that they are, because six months ago they wouldn't have been. "Pill case. Cyanide, probably. Somebody handed him an exit strategy a long time before this morning."

"McKenna doesn't leave prints." Knox says it to the room, to nobody. "Guess that includes the ones carrying the paperwork."

Holt hasn't moved off the strut. He's looking down at Calloway with the flat exhaustion of a man who watched a puzzle piece disappear right as his hand closed around it.

"Twenty-two years," he says. "My father trusted this man with half the county's cattle contracts."

"Your father trusts a lot of people who turn out to be liabilities."

His gaze cuts to mine, exhausted and frustrated in equal measure. "That's not comforting, Tatum."

"Wasn't supposed to be."

It gets a rough sound out of him, half a laugh, all gravel.

Six feet of cold concrete sit between us, and for one second it doesn't feel like distance either of us is choosing. It feels earned, the way trust gets earned in this county, in inches, over dead men.

"You're staring, Blackwater."

"You're bossy for a woman standing over a corpse."

"I'm always bossy. You've just started noticing."

He steps in, close enough that his mouth is near my ear, quiet enough that it doesn't carry past the two of us. "I've been noticing for ten days straight. Haven't had a night yet where your face wasn't the last thing in my head before I went under."

A warm pull low in my stomach that has no business showing up over a dead man's boots. Ten days ago it was a truck out of the airport. I hate how little it takes.

"Not the time, Blackwater."

"Never is." He pulls back just enough to look at me and doesn't look away first. "Didn't say it was."

I holster my weapon. He's still less than a foot away, and I don't move to fix that.

"You're not the only one who hasn't slept right." I say it before I can stop myself, and I watch it land on him same as his line landed on me. "Don't make it a thing, Blackwater."