"You're bossy in the morning."
"I'm bossy all the time. You just notice it more before caffeine."
The day burns down in preparation. We drive the fairground perimeter twice, mapping entrances, exits, and sight lines.
The storage yard is a fenced lot behind the main exhibition hall, chain-link on three sides, open on the fourth where it meets a gravel access road. One overhead light mounted on a pole near the gate. Livestock trailers parked along the fence line.
I study the layout through the windshield. One exit unless you go over the fence. Cover on three sides. Livestock trailers parked along the fence line giving anyone with bad intentions plenty of places to hide.
"This is a terrible place to meet someone you don't trust," Kenna says.
"It's a great place if Thornton's telling the truth. Isolated, no cameras, no witnesses. A scared man picks a place where nobody's watching."
"And if he's not telling the truth?"
"Then it's a great place for the other thing too." I turn to her. "If something goes wrong, I'll text you one word. You see it, you call Torres and you drive."
"What word?"
"Grant."
The name sits between us, heavy with everything it carries. She holds my gaze for a beat that lasts longer than it should.
"Grant," she repeats softly. "Okay."
At nine o'clock, the desert dark has settled thick and warm. I've parked my truck inside the fence with the nose pointed at the gate, key fob in my pocket with the remote start ready, and I'm standing just outside the yellow circle of the overhead light where I can see the gate without making myself a target, waiting for a man who might be trying to save himself or trying to get me killed.
Nine twelve. Headlights bounce down the access road. A white dually pulls through the gate, and Dale Thornton steps out looking like a man who hasn't slept in a week. His shirt is wrinkled. His hands are shaking. His eyes sweep the yard in quick, furtive arcs before they find me.
"Holloway."
"Thornton."
He glances past me, scanning the yard. "Anyone else here?"
"Just us. Talk."
"That's what I need to talk about." His voice is low and fast. "Merrick is going to cut me loose. His lawyers have been calling my lawyers, and the questions they're asking are the kind you ask when you're building a defense that involves blaming someone else."
"So you want to flip."
"I want to survive." He wipes his palms on his jeans. "I'll give the FBI everything. Dates, accounts, the communication chain.But I need someone to make the introduction. Someone the FBI trusts."
I study him the way I study a bull in the chute—looking for the tell, the indicator, the thing that signals which direction he's going to break.
Thornton's tell is in his feet. He keeps shifting his weight, ready to bolt, and a man planning an ambush doesn't position himself for escape.
"Talk," I say.
"Merrick didn't just skim prize money and drug bulls. That was the surface operation."
Thornton glances at the gate, at the fence line, at the dark shapes of the trailers. The yard is quiet. Too quiet. I can hear the gravel shift under his boots.
"The circuit moves livestock across four states every season. Trucks, trailers, stock pens at every venue. Inspections are cursory. Nobody checks what's in a livestock trailer besides livestock."
"Smuggling."
"The livestock transports have been carrying product for years. I don't know what. Merrick kept me on the money side. The cargo was handled by a different crew, people who showed up at loading docks after the stock was loaded and added containers to the trailers."
