Rainey leads us to the back room. A small table, two mismatched chairs, and a filing cabinet that she opens with a key from a chain around her neck. She tells us everything.
The photographs. The financial documents Grant traced. Vic's confession that was recorded on Grant's phone before the recording disappeared. The evidence package she and Flint assembled in the weeks before Las Cruces, copied three times, distributed between her van, Flint's safe, and a safety deposit box in Albuquerque.
"The van copies were destroyed," Rainey says. "My van was trashed at a fairgrounds before Las Cruces. Someone smashed the windows, slashed the tires, and took everything inside. Grant and I left it behind and traveled in his truck after that. Then Flint drove me north the morning of the Las Cruces event, before Grant rode." Her voice cracks on the wordrode. "After Grant died, Merrick's people came looking for me. They found themotel where Flint and I had been staying, tossed the room, left messages. I ran and kept running."
"What about Flint's copies?"
"I don't know. He stopped answering my calls weeks ago. I called once from a burner phone, and he picked up, told me he was scared, told me to stay hidden. I haven't heard from him since."
"We talked to Flint," I say. "He's alive. He's scared, but he's alive. He confirmed the FBI contact, Agent Torres in Albuquerque, and he told us to find you."
Rainey absorbs this. Her eyes close for a moment, and the relief on her face is so stark it borders on physical collapse.
"So of the three copies, the van is gone and Flint is a question mark," Colt says. "What about the third?"
"A safety deposit box in Albuquerque. I haven't touched it. The key is at a separate location. I keep it in a sealed envelope in my post office box here, under my cover name." Rainey looks at both of us. "Everything Grant built is in that safety deposit box. Photos of Vic with the animals. Photos of Merrick meeting with Thornton at events. Financial documents tracking shell company payments. Copies of altered prize records. Screenshots of text messages between Thornton and an unknown number discussing which riders to target."
The inventory settles into my bones. This is the evidence Colt has been chasing since Grant died. The case Grant built with his life. The ammunition the FBI needs to put Merrick away.
"Will you give it to us?" I ask.
Rainey looks at the filing cabinet. At the window. At the mountains beyond the glass.
"I'll give you the key and the box number. I'll sign whatever authorization you need to access it." She pauses. "I won't testify. Not publicly. Not unless the FBI can guarantee my safety. Merrick's people found me once. I spent days hiding ina campground bathroom in the San Juans before I found this town. I sleep with the deadbolts thrown, the security system armed, and a loaded .38 on the nightstand."
"That's fair," Colt says. "We're not asking you to put yourself at risk. We're asking for the evidence."
"You sound like Grant." Rainey's voice fractures. "He always made it sound simple. Just get the evidence. Just point the camera. And then he rode a drugged bull at Las Cruces because he thought the footage would be enough to take Merrick down."
The silence in the back room is heavy with the shape of a man who isn't there.
Colt moves for the first time since we sat down. He crouches beside Rainey's chair, and the size of him in that small space makes everything else shrink. His hand covers hers where it rests on her knee, and the gentleness of the gesture from a man built for violence does something to my chest that I am absolutely not prepared for.
This is the Colt that Grant knew. The one behind the fury and the fists and the death wish. The one who holds a crying woman's hand and means it with the same intensity he brings to an eight-second ride. Watching him be tender is more disarming than watching him be dangerous, and the combination of the two is making it very hard to remember that he's barely speaking to me.
"Grant loved you," he says to Rainey. "His dying words, the ones the kid relayed to me on the phone, included your name. He said'Rainey has everything.'He trusted you to be the person who finished this. And I know you're scared. I know you've been hiding because hiding is how you stay alive." His voice drops, raw and rough and scraped down to the studs. "I'm telling you that what you built with Grant, the evidence, the photos, all of it, is going to put the man who killed him in a cage for the rest ofhis life. That's what Grant wanted. That's what you both risked everything for."
Rainey stares at him. Tears track silently down her cheeks, and she doesn't wipe them away. Then she reaches into the filing cabinet and pulls out a smaller envelope from beneath a stack of prints. Inside is a post office box key and an index card with an address and box number in Albuquerque. She hands both to Colt.
"That's everything," she says. "When you open that box, you'll have Grant's entire case in your hands."
I hold the key and feel the weight of it, tiny and absolute. "Thank you," I say.
Rainey looks at me with Grant's grief written across her face, and for a moment we are two women standing on opposite sides of the same loss, connected by a man whose absence fills every room he used to occupy.
"Find who killed him," she says. "And when you do, make sure the whole world knows his name. Grant deserved better than an accident report."
"He's going to get it," Colt says. "I promise you that."
We pull out of the Creede post office with the safety deposit box key in my jacket pocket and the town shrinking in the side mirror. Colt's hand is on the gear shift. My hand is in my lap. The space between them is roughly six inches, and I am aware of every single one, the way you're aware of the distance between your skin and an open flame.
The road drops into the valley ahead of us, and the silence in the cab is different from the silence on the way up. Warmer. More dangerous. The silence of two people who just watched each other grieve and can't unknow what they saw.
I press my palm against the key in my pocket and feel the teeth of it bite into my skin. I let the small pain anchor me to the work ahead, because the alternative is reaching across theconsole and touching a man who isn't ready to be touched by someone whose lies still have teeth of their own.
12
COLT
