Colt glances at me. "You think an old rancher who's been hiding from the world for two months is going to open his door for a journalist?"
"I think an old rancher who's been hiding from the world for two months is lonely and scared and tired of having nobody totalk to. Isolation does that. People want to be heard, Colt. Even the ones who say they don't."
He's quiet for a beat. "And if he recognizes you?"
"As who? Nobody on this circuit knows me outside of my press credentials." The words taste like rust. I wasn't able to get to Grant's funeral in time. I was on assignment overseas when I got the call, and by the time I landed stateside, they'd already put my brother in the ground. I drove to the cemetery three days later and stood at a fresh grave with a borrowed bouquet and nobody to grieve with. "He'll see a journalist. That's all anyone sees."
"That's not all I see."
The words are quiet, almost offhand, and I don't think he meant to say them. His grip shifts on the steering wheel, and the muscle in his jaw tightens the way it does when he's said something that got past his own defenses. I let the silence absorb it because calling attention to it would make us both uncomfortable, and because the warmth it sends through me is a complication I can't afford right now.
The landscape shifts as we leave the highway. High desert gives way to scrubland, then to the piñon-studded foothills of the Jemez Mountains. Flint's ranch sits at the end of a dirt road that's more suggestion than infrastructure, and the mailbox at the turnoff is so faded the name is unreadable.
The property comes into view around a bend: a low adobe house with a metal roof, a stock barn that's seen better decades, and a round pen with weeds growing through the rails. A truck sits in the drive, mud-caked and dented, next to a horse trailer that hasn't been hitched in a while.
What catches my eye are the things that don't belong. A security camera is mounted over the front door, its wiring fresh and the bracket still silver. Another camera is angled toward thedriveway. The curtains are drawn on every window and not only because of the midday sun.
A shotgun leans against the wall inside the screen door, visible through the mesh.
This is a man who lives in fear.
"Stay in the truck," I tell Colt.
"The hell I will."
"You tried twice and got nothing. An angry bull rider on his porch is exactly what made him shut down before. Let me work."
His knuckles whiten on the steering wheel, and his whole body goes taut with the effort of not arguing. The man doesn't take orders. Not from stock contractors, not from circuit officials, and certainly not from a woman half his size who's been sleeping in his bed.
The fact that he's considering it tells me he knows I'm right.
"If you're not out in thirty minutes, I'm coming in," he says.
"If I'm not out in thirty minutes, you should."
That surprises him. The set of his shoulders loosens by a fraction. His expression shifts — reluctant respect or the particular brand of frustration he reserves for me. Could be either. With Colt, they look the same.
I grab my press bag, check my credentials, and walk up the gravel path to the front door. I feel Colt's eyes on my back the whole way, a steady weight between my shoulder blades that I've started recognizing as easily as a hand on my skin.
He'll be watching the house, the windows, the road. Running scenarios. Calculating how fast he can cover the distance between the truck and the door if something goes wrong.
The screen is closed but the inner door is open, which means Flint saw us pull in. He's already decided to answer. Whether he's decided to talk is a different question.
I knock three times, keeping it professional and not aggressive.
Silence follows. Then the slow creak of boots on a wood floor.
Flint fills the doorway like a man who used to fill arenas. He's in his late sixties, I'd guess, with the kind of face that's been carved by sun and wind into something beyond aging. He has white hair cropped short under a stained Resistol, broad shoulders that are still solid as fence posts, and eyes that are sharp and suspicious and tired in equal measure.
He's also the kind of man who was probably devastating in his prime, all hard angles and rough authority, and I file that observation under the heading of things I notice now that Colt has rewired whatever part of my brain processes dangerous men.
He looks at me through the screen and doesn't open it.
"Help you?"
"Mr. Flint? I'm Kenna McEnroe, freelance press. I'm working on a piece about the circuit's stock contractors for Southwest Sports Monthly. The retirement wave, the new generation coming in, how the business is changing. I'd love to get your perspective as someone who's lived it."
He studies me the way a man studies fence line for weak spots, taking his time and looking for where the lie might thin.
