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“Somebody forged my name on one.”

“I know.” Cole’s voice is low. “I’m sorry I made you think the sheet was always right. It’s only right when somebody honest writes it.”

Nate is quiet a moment. Then he puts one hand on Cole’s shoulder, briefly, the way men who work cattle do instead of saying anything, and walks back to his truck.

* * *

At two-sixteen, investigators send a Vale equipment schedule. One mobile cold cabinet, VHR-C4, is still active. Its next job is a breeding load of nineteen cattle due in sixty-nine hours, first booked to a rival outfit that’s been circling Barbed Crown for a year. At one fifty-eight this afternoon, someone changed the destination to the Barbed Crown main receiving code.

Nineteen. Same number as the permit request with my name on it.

Dr. Cho looks at me through the screen. “Who could change it?”

“The account tells us a login,” the investigator says. “Not the hands.”

I read it again because the first time felt too much like recognition and not enough like evidence.

Somebody just redirected a load of doped cattle into Barbed Crown’s main gate, and did it with my name on the permit.

I walk out of the trailer and across the gravel and stop at the rail in front of Cole’s chair. He looks up at me. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He waits.

“They’re sending the next load to Barbed Crown,” I say. “Main gate. Three days.”

His whole body changes. His hands close on the arms of the chair. I watch him want to stand up and get in a truck and go stop it himself, and I watch him not do it.

“What do you need from me?” he says.

It’s the question he’s been asking since the pens. It means something different now.

“Nothing yet,” I say. “Stay in the chair.”

“I’m in the chair.”

I look at him a moment longer. Then, because nobody’s watching, I reach over the rail and put my hand on the back of his neck, just for a second, and he goes still under it the way the cow does when you find exactly the right place to scratch.

Then I take my hand back and go to work.

Chapter 18

Cole

At five-thirty, Garrett initials Sofia’s refusal of the nineteen cattle without arguing about the eighty-one thousand dollars it costs, and I sign a page that lets me help plan from a chair for forty-five minutes at a time and nothing else.

At six-twenty, ordinary work interrupts the conspiracy.

A two-year-old heifer in the east barn had a hard assisted birth. The calf is up and nursing, but the heifer has a tear that keeps bleeding when she stands. Her owner is a man named Martin Eaves, and he’s been calling the office every hour.

Sofia changes into clean boots and coveralls before she goes in. The state hold hasn’t made every other animal on earth stop needing her.

The operations chief drives me out in a cart and sets up a chair where I can see the calving pen without setting foot in it.

My phone rings. “Barbed Crown office.”

“This is Eaves. I want my heifer on a trailer as soon as that calf nurses again.”

“She’s being examined.”

“I didn’t authorize Rios to hold her.”