"How long until the warrants are signed?"
"If the judge approves them, we move quickly. I'm requesting warrants for Merrick's offices, his personal residence, and the Thornton Livestock facilities. Financial records, communications, everything."
"And Merrick himself?"
"When we move, we move on all of it. I don't do this halfway."
I open my eyes. Colt is watching me from across the bed, the container of green chili balanced on his knee, his eyes reading my face the way he reads a bull's body language before the gate opens.
"Warrants?" he asks.
"Warrants."
He sets the food down. I watch him process this with the slow, thorough deliberation of a man who has been waiting for this moment since the night he arrived too late to save his best friend from dying in an arena.
Then he reaches across the bed and takes my hand. His grip is warm and calloused and certain.
The gears are turning now. The witnesses are talking. Torres is moving. The story did what I built it to do, and the pressure is compounding faster than Merrick's lawyers can absorb it.
I hold Colt's hand and look at the mountains through the motel window, and the distance between where we started and where we're standing feels like something Grant would be proud of.
We're not done. We're not close to done. But the ground beneath Merrick's feet is shifting, and tonight, for the first time, I can feel it moving under mine too.
16
COLT
Kenna is still asleep when I ease out of bed at six in the morning, and for a few seconds I stand in the dim motel room and watch her breathe.
She sleeps the way she does everything else, with total commitment. One arm tucked under the pillow, her hair fanned across the white cotton, her mouth soft and slightly open in a way she'd deny if I told her about it. The sheet is tangled around her waist, and the early light coming through the curtain gap catches the freckles on her shoulder and the curve of her collarbone, and the want that moves through me is so steady and so constant that it barely registers anymore. Just the baseline hum of being in a room with Kenna.
Last night, she held my hand while we watched the mountains through the window and talked about the story breaking, about Torres moving, about the ground shifting under Merrick's feet. Her voice was calm and certain in a way that made me believe, for the first time since that last phone call with Grant, that the ending of this thing might not require my funeral.
I pull on my boots and step outside for coffee, and the morning air is dry and sharp, and the motel parking lot is emptyexcept for my truck and Kenna’s rental car and the vending machine humming against the wall.
That's when I see it.
Someone has taken a knife or a key to the driver's side of my truck. The paint is gouged deep, metal showing through in silver streaks, and the word they carved is one I've seen before.
HANDLED.
The same word Thornton used in the ledger. The same column where Grant's name appeared, dated the week after Las Cruces.
I stand in the parking lot with my hands at my sides and my jaw locked so tight my back teeth grind, and the rage that moves through my body is immediate and physical, a hot wire running from my chest to my fists. Underneath the word, scratched smaller but just as deliberate, is a second line: a phone number. Kenna's phone number.
They’re making the point they know where she is and that they can reach her. This is the second time in two days someone has gotten close.
Last night, before she came to bed, Kenna told me a dark sedan followed her from the arena to the motel. Tinted windows. Engine running in the lot for twenty minutes before the driver pulled away, slow and deliberate, making sure she knew he'd been there.
She described it calmly, the way she reports everything dangerous, like facts are a shield. I spent the rest of that night awake beside her with my hand on my phone, listening to the lot and wanting to put my fist through something.
I should have checked the truck before I let myself sleep. Should have walked the perimeter. Should have done any of the things a man does when his instincts are screaming that the darkness outside is closer than it looks.
The door opens behind me. I hear her boots on the concrete, then the pause.
"Colt, I just got off the phone with Sylvia and she says the follow-up piece is—" The words die. She's seen it. "That's the ledger term."
"Yeah."
