I turn back to the window.
We stop for gas outside Santa Rosa. Colt fills the tank while I buy coffee and a bag of beef jerky from the station attached to a diner with a broken neon cactus sign.
When I come back, he's on his phone, his back to me, his voice low.
"Torres. Call me back." He hangs up. Sees me watching. "FBI," he says. "She's still not answering."
"She will."
"Your overconfidence is going to get you killed."
"It's not overconfidence. It's stubbornness. There's a difference."
His mouth does something that might be the ghost of a smile before he catches it. We get back on the road, and by the time we reach the outskirts of Albuquerque, the sun is sitting on the Sandia Mountains like a coin balanced on a shelf, turning the whole valley gold and orange.
The circuit event doesn't start until tomorrow, which means tonight is logistics: hotel, food, a plan for the morning.
Colt pulls into a motel on the outskirts of town, the kind with outdoor corridors and a neon sign missing half its letters.
He goes inside to the front desk while I wait by the truck, stretching out the stiffness from hours of sitting too close to a man who generates heat like a wood-burning stove.
He comes back with one key card.
"I got us a room," he says.
I look at the key card. Look at him.
"Us. One room."
"We're investigating a man who's killed two people." His voice is flat, matter of fact. "You're not sleeping down the hall where I can't put myself between you and whatever comes through the door trying to get you."
"I didn't realize personal security was part of our arrangement."
"It is now." He holds out the key card. "You can have the bed. I'll take the floor."
"You've been driving for four hours."
"I've done worse."
I take the key card because arguing about sleeping arrangements with Colt is a fight I'm not going to win, and the logic underneath the possessiveness isn't wrong. We are investigating a man who's killed at least two people—one of whom was my brother. Splitting up in a town we don't know is stupid, and I'm not about to let him watch me be stupid.
The room is exactly what you'd expect from a motel off a New Mexico interstate: brown carpet, floral bedspread, a window unit AC that sounds like it's powered by hamsters. One king bed. One bathroom. A desk with a Bible in the drawer and a chair that's seen better decades.
Colt drops his gear bag by the door and goes straight to the desk, spreading out the printed financial records I gave him alongside his own notes, a battered spiral notebook filled with names, dates, license plates, and sketches of stock pen layouts.
"We need to find Rainey," he says, not looking up. "Grant said she has everything. Without whatever she's holding, the financial data is circumstantial."
"Agreed. But we also need Flint. Even if he won't come forward publicly, he might know where Rainey went. If he's the one who got her out of Las Cruces, he's our best lead to finding her."
"I told you. I've been to his ranch twice. He won't talk."
"Maybe we try a different approach."
"Like what?"
"Like not showing up at his door looking like a man with nothing to lose."
I pull the desk chair out and sit across from him.
