"That's not what I asked."
"It's all I've got right now." I cover her hands with mine and press them harder against my chest, and my heartbeat is still running fast enough that she can feel every thud under her fingers. "You were two hundred yards from a shooting. Are you okay?"
"I'm standing too." The corner of her mouth lifts, barely, the ghost of the smile she gives me when the world is falling apart and the only thing holding is the two of us.
"We match."
I look at her in the gas station light, with the desert dark behind her and the adrenaline still singing through both of us, and the thing I want to say is three words long and too important to waste on a parking lot next to a man with a flask and a truck with a shattered window.
So I say something else. "We should go."
"We should go," she agrees.
She doesn't move her hands. I don't move mine.
For a beat that lasts longer than either of us intends, we stand there with our pulses synced and the night pressing in and the gravity between us pulling with the same relentless, inevitable force it's been pulling since a bar in Fort Worth where a woman told me her fake name and I believed it because I wanted to.
We drive in convoy to a motel forty miles south. Two trucks and a sedan in a line on a dark highway.
I'm in the lead, Kenna's sedan behind me, Wade bringing up the rear. I watch her headlights in my mirror like they're the only fixed point in a world that keeps shifting underfoot.
Thornton is dead because he waited too long to find his conscience. The smuggling corridor is still running. The conspiracy goes deeper than murder and fraud, deeper than anything Grant suspected.
We pull into the motel lot forty miles south and park side by side. Before I cut the engine, my phone buzzes. Kenna, two parking spaces over, her face lit by her phone screen.
Torres is sending agents from the Tucson field office. 8 AM. Be ready to give them everything Thornton told you. Every word.
I look through my window at her. She looks back through hers. I type one line.
Every word.
Thornton is dead. But the dead man talked first, and what he said is going to blow the doors off the Southwest Circuit. Merrick just lost his operation manager, his buffer, and his best chance at controlling the narrative.
He just doesn't know it yet.
17
KENNA
The debrief with Torres takes most of the morning. The FBI agents from the Tucson field office arrive early, two men in dark suits stepping out of a black sedan in a motel parking lot that hasn't seen anything this official since the health inspector gave up on the place. Torres joins by video from Albuquerque, her face filling a laptop the agents prop on the dresser.
Colt and I sit on the edge of a bed that smells like industrial detergent and give them every word Thornton said before the bullets found him. Colt is still wearing last night's shirt, the sleeves pushed to his elbows, his forearms braced on his thighs. He looks like exactly what he is. A man who survived a shooting the night before and hasn't slept and is holding himself together through sheer physical discipline.
He delivers the facts the way he delivers everything. Blunt. Stripped down. No editorial. The smuggling corridor. The livestock transports. Tyler at the Fort Worth loading dock. Grant at Las Cruces, riding a bull that was supposed to hurt him, not kill him. The handler who went too far.
Torres watches from the screen. Her face doesn't change, but her pen moves faster with every new piece of information.
When Colt gets to the part about the dose being wrong, about Grant's death being miscalculation rather than intent, his voice stays level. His hand finds my knee beside him on the mattress, and the pressure of his grip tells me what his voice won't.
The agents ask me about the financial trail. I walk them through the shell companies, the ghost competitors, the prize money that disappeared into accounts registered to businesses that don't exist. Torres listens through the video feed, directing follow-up questions when the agents miss a thread. The sharpness of her questions tells me she's already connecting Thornton's revelations to the financial patterns I mapped months ago.
Beside me, Colt sits through my portion of the testimony without moving. His jaw works. His shoulders fill the space next to me in a way that makes the two agents on the other side of the room look like they're built from lesser materials.
Torres's last words on the video call are that she has what she needs for the arrest warrants. Stay on the circuit, stay visible, stay together. She'll be in touch.
The agents pack their recorder and laptop into a case and leave. The door closes behind them, and the motel room is just a motel room again.
I look at Colt, who is sitting on the edge of a bed in a motel, with a morning of federal testimony behind him and the exhaustion of a man who just relived his best friend's murder in clinical detail for a recording device.
