Page 5

Faded jeans. Old boots. A man’s work shirt with the sleeves shoved to her elbows and her hair twisted up off her neck, already coming loose in the heat. She put her back into the barrow like it owed her money. There was hay stuck to her ass.

Three years, and I still wanted her so bad it was a physical thing, a fist sitting under my ribs.

I’d had her for one night. I’d had her laughing into my shoulder and saying my name in the dark like she’d been saving it. Then I got up and left without a word, and I’d known what she’d make of that, and I went anyway.

I had my reasons. They’d been good ones. They still were.

What she thought of me for it, I’d earned. I’d decided a long time ago to let her keep thinking it. Easier on both of us.

Easier. Yeah. That was why I was standing on her porch at sunup with my jaw aching from clenching it.

Gage rolled in once the sun was up, with four trail cameras bungeed on the back of his bike.

He parked where I pointed, behind the hay barn, and took his time getting off. Gage took his time with everything. It was one of the reasons men who owed the people he used to collect for had paid up fast. You watched Gage move slow and started wondering what he’d look like moving quick.

“Preacher says the far end,” he said. “Havoc’s sitting on the county road tonight. Deacon’s asking around about those trucks.”

“Good.”

Savannah came across the yard with two mugs. She handed one to Gage.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Savannah.”

“Savannah.” He took a sip and nodded like it met his standards. She went back to the barn.

Gage looked at the mug in his hand. Then at my empty one. Then at me.

“She brought me coffee.”

“She did.”

“She treating you this well too?”

“No.” I looked at the barn as she disappeared back inside.

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing.”

He gave me a long, flat stare, the one he saved for men right before he found out what they were hiding.

“Bullshit,” he said, and drank his coffee.

She insisted on driving there.

I’d figured she would. Her ranch, her road. Gage folded himself into the bed in back with the cameras across his knees, and I took the passenger seat and kept my hands to myself and my eyes on the ground ahead.

It was rough going. The mine road came out of the hills in a set of washboard switchbacks, dropped across her back section and crossed the wash on a rusted steel culvert before it climbed out the far side toward the county road. We put the first camera on a fence post by her gate, facing the chain. The second went up the switchbacks where the road came off the hill. I picked a juniper for it with a clear view of the last bend, high enough that a man in a truck would have to be looking for it.

“How’d you know that tree was there?” Savannah said.

“Been there a while.”

She looked at me and let it go.

The third went on the culvert. It was the one point the whole road had to squeeze through, the one place nobody could go around. Gage strapped the camera to a cottonwood that had no business being alive out here and angled it on the crossing.