Page 1 of Forbidden Protector

ONE

MACKENZIE

The truck idles at the curb outside Great Falls International, black on black, mud to the wheel wells, the bull's skull beneath the lettering stenciled in white.

The name on the truck door says BLACKWATER RANCH.

Of course it's black. You do not build a name on other men's graves and then drive something cheerful. And you do not send a man ninety minutes each way to fetch a federal agent unless you want her to understand, from the first mile, that there is no arriving in this county without the family knowing the hour.

I think about a coffin.

Not a figure of speech. An actual coffin, pine and cheap, the kind a county buries a man in when the family that put him in the ground has already paid the sheriff not to look too hard.

I grew up with the photograph of one, kept in my father's desk drawer and then in a box in the garage. Then it became mine along with everything else he'd spent thirty-five years and two wives failing to let go of.

The glare off the snow put me in my sunglasses before I cleared the terminal doors, and I'm glad of them now, standing at the curb with a whole county's worth of light coming off that black paint.

"You Agent Tatum?"

The window is down. I didn't see it come down.

I read the file on the flight. Read it for the ninth time, if I'm honest, which I try to be about most things and have entirely given up being about this one.

Five months. I requested this posting in September and wasn't handed it until February. I put the delay down to budget season, Montana, and the fact that nobody cares about financial crimes in a county of four thousand people. Put it where you put the thing you don't want to look at directly, in the drawer, under the photograph.

"That's right," I say.

"Get in. Gideon sent me."

Gideon. The king himself, extending a courtesy.

A ninety-minute ride in a February that has the roads glazed and the light going amber at three in the afternoon, a courtesy that puts me in a Blackwater vehicle for the entire distance between the airport and the only motel in Rimrock.

How thoughtful. How exactly like a family that wants to know precisely where I am, from the first hour, before I've so much as found the room.

I think about refusing the ride, the same doomed impulse as not scratching a bite. Then I open the door, because the alternative is standing in a wind that comes straight down off the Continental Divide with nothing to slow it but me.

And also because I want to see one of them up close.

The cab is dim after two hours of snow glare. I take the sunglasses off and hook them in my collar, and that's the first mistake, because now there's nothing between my eyes and him.

I got the biggest one.

That's my first thought, wholly involuntary, and I resent it on arrival.

The cab of the F-350 is not a small space, but he makes it one. He’s folded behind the wheel the way tall men fold, knees wide, one wrist draped over the top of it. I'm five-ten and I've spent my life being the tallest woman in the room; I know the math of a body that has to negotiate the world. He has it worse. He has it, I think, like a loaded thing has weight.

I catalogue him because I can't not. It's the job, and it's older than the job.

Under the black hat his hair is long, shoulder-length and straight and true black, worn down and tucked behind the ear I can see. His mother's hair. A line in his blood older than the whole ugly ranch. A jaw that hasn't been shaved and doesn't plan to apologize for it. And down the inside of his right forearm, where the sheepskin sleeve has ridden up on the wheel, there is a scar: old, white, the clean straight kind that doesn't come from ranch work, because ranch work tears. That one was cut.

I catalogue that too, and move on to the next thing before I can ask myself why a scar on a stranger's arm should make my stomach drop at all.

The earring makes no sense whatsoever. A small dark hoop, high in that right ear, nothing about it fitting the man attached to it. Nothing in the file, which gave me only Holt Blackwater, 29, honorable discharge, Army, no priors, nothing on record. A man so absent from the paper trail that the absence is the loudest fact about him.

He pulls out and drives the way he sits. Economical, both hands available, a stillness to him that is not calm. I watch his eyes go to the mirror. Then, thirty seconds later, again. Then again. Not the nervous flick of a man watching for a tail. It’s the slow, complete rotation of a man who decided, once, somewhere, that the mirror is where the bullet comes from, and has never once since been persuaded otherwise.

Somewhere in the third or fourth rotation his eyes cross mine instead of the mirror, just for a second, just long enough for me to understand he's clocked me watching him watch the road. I look away first. I never look away first.