Page 61 of Forbidden Protector

EIGHTEEN

MACKENZIE

The airstrip comes up grey in the scope of my headlights, and Holt is already out of the truck before it's stopped rolling.

I've stopped telling him not to do that.

Dawn hasn't committed to anything yet, and the sky is doing that flat pewter thing it does before it decides whether to be blue or bad.

Out past the wind sock a Cessna sits under a tarp somebody didn't bother pulling all the way taut. Sloppy. A man in a hurry left it that way, and a man in a hurry is a man who thinks he's already won.

Holt reads the hangar door, the tarp, the tire ruts in the frost, in about the time it takes me to get my own door open.

"Two exits," he says, not turning around. "Man door on the east side, hangar door big enough to roll a plane into on the west. He'll run for the hangar door. Bigger, faster, dumber."

"You don't know that."

"I know men who think a bigger door means a faster way out." He's already moving toward the west side, sidearm drawn and held low along his leg, quiet on frozen ground, which should not be possible for someone his size. "Cover the small one anyway."

I cover the small one.

Wade Calloway. Twenty-two years on Blackwater payroll, feedlot manager and assistant foreman under Jacob. The man Gideon trusted enough to run half the county's cattle contracts through Shelby.

Every wire that funded Jacob's death, my flue, a Ford with one broken headlight, all of it eventually finds his signature.

He isn't a mastermind. He's a man who got greedy sometime in the nineties and never stopped, and somewhere along the way somebody bigger found the greed and put a leash on it.

Knox has the road end, a quarter mile back where the county line goes to gravel, two of Aldridge's deputies with him because even Aldridge couldn't sit on this once Knox handed him a name with numbers attached. Federal warrant, county muscle, and me at a man door at five-forty in the morning with my weapon drawn and my heart running slower than the occasion calls for.

The hangar door goes up on a chain motor loud enough to wake the whole valley. Holt is already through it before the echo finishes.

I hear one voice. Then two. Then a chair going over.

By the time I'm inside, Holt has Calloway against the Cessna's wing strut with one forearm across his throat, not choking, just there, immovable as a fence post.

His other hand is still at Calloway's jaw, fingers dug in hard enough to bruise, the grip of a man who tried to pry a mouth open a beat too late and hasn't let go yet out of sheer refusal to accept it.

A duffel bag sits half packed on the workbench behind him, cash banded in stacks, a passport that isn't the one on file with the county assessor, and a small silver case lying open and empty on the concrete by his boot.

"He's already swallowed it." Holt doesn't look away from Calloway's face. "I got a hand on his jaw a half second too late. Whatever's coming for him is already coming. We've got minutes, not questions."

No preamble. No time for one. "Who pays you, Wade? Not McKenna. Whoever sits above McKenna."

"I don't know what you're⁠—"

"You don't have time to lie to me twice. Give me a name."

Calloway's mouth works, but nothing useful comes out of it. I watch a man who spent two decades running a family's books decide, in real time, that the family he actually works for isn't the kind that lets a man like him retire.

"The room number," I say. "Riverview, Room 6. You knew it before the front desk had it in the system."

"I don't know anything about a motel."

"You called it in yourself. Ten fifty-one at night, from the pay phone outside the Cenex, and you couldn't make yourself finish the sentence you were supposed to say." I watch it land. Watch the exact second his face stops being a man denying something and starts being a man who's run out of road. "You didn't want me dead, Wade. You just didn't have the spine to say no to the man who does."

"The cabin," Holt says. "Somebody had a photograph of Knox and Maren there before there was any reason to be watching them."

"I don't⁠—"