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It doesn’t tip. Burning pages lift over the rim and drift down onto the records.

An officer hits it with the extinguisher. White powder covers the paper, the dirt, and Mott’s boots. Another officer walks him back from the shed.

The cattle reach the open catch pen in a slow, uneven line. A black heifer turns broadside under the pen camera. Left-ear notch. Small white mark above the right rear hoof.

“Possible match to the rancher’s missing heifer,” I say. “The tattoo isn’t confirmed.”

Mott looks straight at the camera. “They’re McCall cattle. Every one of them. Every head through my ring paid for land that family kept. I took the share Calvin never put on paper.”

“That’s a claim,” I tell the recording.

I call Nora on the clean channel. She puts all six red canary heifers on camera without moving them. Every one is still at Barbed Crown under verified ownership. None of them is here.

The senior hand eases the black heifer into the narrow exam pen with two quiet gate moves. When she lifts her head, the camera catches the inside of her right ear.

The tattoo matches the rancher’s breeding sheet.

“Right-ear tattoo observed,” I say. “With the notch, the coat, the white marking, her age, and her tag history, that’s his heifer.”

I think of a chipped coffee mug and a man saying you can’t pay one bill with cattle that aren’t standing on your ground.

Movement beside the shed.

The deputy comes around the county unit, right hand empty, left hand holding the back door. He’s stripped off his uniform shirt but kept his vest and belt. An officer shouts at him to stop. He doesn’t even look. He walks straight at me.

“You need to identify what’s in the unit,” he says.

“I’ll look at anything lawfully presented after the scene’s secure.”

“Now.”

He crosses the marked line. I step into the pocket between the trailer and the car and leave the gate open beside me. His hand closes on the back of my field vest and he turns toward his car and pulls.

This isn’t an interview. It’s an attempt to put me in the back of a car.

I drop my weight toward the hinge, grab the gate rail with both hands, and swing it across the gap I kept clear. The trailer stops it exactly where the sketch said it would. Steel between us. His grip tears loose before the rail closes, and he’s on the car side, and I’m inside the pocket.

He grabs the top bar and yanks. The lower pin drops into its receiver under the gate’s own weight. I keep my hands away from the gap and my eyes on his, and I don’t let him see that my knees have turned to water.

Mercer reaches him from behind and takes his arms. Another officer takes his gun.

Across the pens, Mott runs.

He breaks from the officer by the drum before anyone gets cuffs on him and cuts between the shed and the east sorting alley. Straight toward the outer hinge.

Straight toward Garrett.

“Stop,” Garrett says.

Mott rips a steel pry bar off the shed wall and swings it at Garrett’s head.

Everything in me stops.

I can’t get there. I’m behind a locked gate forty feet away. I watch the bar come around in a flat hard arc at the one-armed man I love, and I can’t breathe, and I can’t move, and every careful sentence I’ve ever built goes out of me like water through a split seam.

Garrett doesn’t charge. He steps behind the solid gate and pulls it with his left hand.

The bar hits the panel so hard it rings through every pen on the place. Mott swings again through the narrowing gap, overreaches, and puts one boot inside the gate’s arc.