Page 4 of Kid Gloves

The pipeline is currently asleep in a horse trailer on the Boone place, guarded by nine goats and a woman who thinks a certified letter is a declaration of war.

Her facility is ash. My contract requires a facility. There is exactly one compliant structure within sixty miles that isn't already full of dogs, and it is my guest house, and it sits thirty yards from my kitchen window, and I have now been staring at this paragraph long enough that the coffee's gone cold.

I drink it anyway. Discipline is doing the thing regardless of conditions.

My jaw aches. I unclench it.

The brothers take the news the way they take everything.

"She's moving in," Jake says.

"The program is relocating," I say. "Temporarily. Pending reconstruction of the Boone facility."

We're in the ops office, which smells like coffee and gun oil and the cheap dry-erase markers Jake keeps buying instead of the good ones. Cash is in the corner with a harness across his knees, doing more listening than a man should be able to do without saying anything. Grady's got one eye on the window, where his daughter is attempting to teach Sergeant to high-five through the glass. Beau left twenty minutes ago claiming errands, which means the diner, which nobody mentions. Dean's on speaker from the airfield — engine ticking somewhere behind him, present the way pilots are present — and whistles one long note when I get to the guest-house clause.

"The program," Jake repeats. "Which is puppies. Which come with a Delaney."

"It's a compliance decision."

"Sure." He leans back until his chair complains. "Question. When you jumped our fence at oh-two-hundred — was that compliance?"

"Fire threatening a shared fence line is a facility risk."

"You took the extinguisher from the truck."

"That's where extinguishers are."

"You were over that wire before I got my boots on." Jake spreads his hands, delighted, a man dealing himself a winning card. "I'm just saying. For the record."

"You're not on the record. You've never once been on the record."

Cash speaks from the corner, four words, the day's entire allocation: "Good dogs, that litter."

That, I can work with. "Best temperament spread we've had in three cycles. Her raise rates are the reason we won the renewal. The litter stays on schedule. That's the mission."

"The mission." Jake nods along, solemn as a deacon. "And she's staying in the guest house."

"The guest house is the compliant structure."

"Thirty yards from your kitchen."

"I'm aware of my own acreage."

"Twenty bucks says⁠—"

"Out."

He goes, grinning, and I hear him in the hall already working his phone, and I know exactly what's being born over at the Tin Roof tonight, chalked onto the ledger Wanda pretends she doesn't keep behind the register. I should care more than I do. I have a facility to configure, a fire report to wait on, and two calls to make that I've been not-making since sunrise.

The first call is to the contracting office, and it goes the way calls to the contracting office go: eleven minutes of hold music that sounds like a fax machine learning to love, then Whitaker's aide, then Whitaker.

"Mercer. Heard you had a fire."

"Contractor facility. Off-site. No loss of assets." Assets. Nine puppies and a woman with her eyebrows singed off. The word tastes like the desert. "I'm relocating early development to the main campus. All Section 8 standards maintained, chain of documentation unbroken. You'll have the amended facility plan by Thursday."

"You know I have to ask the ugly question."

"The timeline holds."