Page 7 of Forbidden Protector

"And your accounts, Mr. Sullivan? The feedlot paper, the transfers. Does the open door reach that far?"

"All of it. It's nothing."

"It's four hundred thousand in feedlot transfers, a Calgary routing number, and your foreman's cousin on my witness list." I set my cup down untouched. "So it isn't nothing. You're offering me everything so I'll notice the offering instead of the paper, and when I subpoena you in three weeks, you'll be able to say you cooperated from the first day. It's a good play, Mr. Sullivan. I'd have made it."

The fire pops. Declan's smile stays exactly where it is, and behind it a man does some fast arithmetic.

I lose my place. Two seconds, maybe three, because I can feel Holt behind my right shoulder taking all of this down. I have to reach for the next question like a woman who left it in another coat.

I find it. Nobody in the room lets on that I dropped it, which is not the same as nobody noticing.

"Kathleen said you'd be like this," he adds.

"Does Kathleen usually get told before I arrive?"

"Kathleen is usually the one telling."

He laughs. I don't. Across the room, Holt Blackwater shifts his weight for the first time in an hour, and when I glance over, he's already looking at me.

Nobody has looked at me that way in an interview. It is the way you look at a thing you'd assumed was one size and just found out is another.

He drops his eyes first. Which, I'd bet the case, he has never once done in this house.

The light's going by the time we're back in the truck. The mountains are turning that blue that isn't a color so much as a temperature.

I have my notebook open on my knee, writing survey / half-second / not that ground, because if I don't write it, I'll talk about it.

"You didn't blink," he says.

Three words.

"At which one?"

"Either."

"Should I have?"

He drives. The heater's been running since Sullivan's and the cab has gone warm and close. I notice that he does not smell like a ranch.

He smells expensive. Dark, smoky, deliberate. A man who stood in front of a mirror this morning and chose it.

Nothing in the file accounts for it. I've been breathing it since the airport.

"People blink," he responds.

"Is that admiration, Blackwater?"

"It's information."

"You've collected a lot of that today."

"So have you." Two fingers come off the wheel at a truck going the other way. He knows the truck, and there was a time I would have too. "You baited my father on purpose. One word."

My pen stops.

He doesn't look over. He doesn't have to.

He watched me bait a man nobody in three counties would bait, and he hasn't decided yet what to do with it.