Phantom looks at Cash. Cash looks at Roan. Roan looks at me.
"Plan still works," Phantom says. "We just take him sooner."
Roan nods. "Fifteen minutes earlier means his crew's still not here. We're clear."
"Then we move," Phantom says.
We walk in through the live oaks at the back of the property.
Dawn hasn’t hit us yet. The brush country is gray and the cicadas haven't started.
The only sound is our boots in the dust and Cash's brother peeling off east toward the house with two of Cash's other men.
The barn is a two-story metal structure with a corrugated roof and lights burning yellow through the slats of the back wall.
Phantom and I go to the front. Roan and Banshee around to the back.
Cash stays at the corner of the barn with a rifle on the door of the house in case Loretta comes out.
We pause at the front door. Phantom looks at me one time. He doesn't say anything.
I nod.
He pushes the door open and we walk inside.
Asher is leaning over a chute in the middle of his barn with a feed bucket in his hand, a Camel Wide in the corner of his mouth, and a rifle leaning against the chute next to him.
He looks up when we come in. He sees Phantom. He sees me. He sees the door at the back of the barn open.
I know what he’s doing. He’s looking for an escape route… but Roan and Banshee come in with their pistols already drawn.
The cigarette falls out of his mouth.
He goes for the rifle.
I'm faster than he is.
I cross the barn floor in three steps and put my hand on the rifle barrel before he can get his hand on the stock.
I sweep it off the chute and it clatters across the concrete.
He swings at me with the feed bucket.
I catch the swing and break his wrist over my knee.
He screams. The sound bounces off the corrugated roof of the barn, and the broncs in the back chutes start moving—shuffling, snorting, hooves on metal.
One of them whinnies high and panicked. Asher's good hand cradles the broken wrist against his chest and his face has gone the color of old paper under the yellow barn lights.
Banshee and Roan close the back door.
With the barn sealed, we can really begin.
Phantom walks across the floor slowly. His boots are loud on the concrete—deliberate steps, unhurried, the sound of a man who knows his man on the floor isn't going anywhere.
The barn is quiet around the sound of him walking. The broncs in the back chutes have stopped moving. Banshee and Roan have stopped breathing. Asher's eyes track him from the concrete with the kind of fear a man only has when he understands he's already dead.
He stops six feet from Asher.
