need help with taking ear-tag inventory—he could easily handle Frank’s metal clipboard himself—and he doubted he would get much. But making waves didn’t suit his purpose. Neither did ignoring Brad, as much as he wanted to. They both knew how many steers were missing. Brad didn’t know or care which ones they were. But Frank cared, and that was another good sign.
Sign. Just a piece of information. Connections, Fox. That’s all you’re looking for.
“This works out better,” Brad called out from the pickup.
Del slowed to a walk. “What does?”
“Letting Frank be the one to deal with the sheriff. I had a few run-ins with Hartley back when I was a kid, young and dumb. But I’ve stayed away from him since then. I need to keep it that way.”
“I hear you.” And hearing was enough. He kept his eyes on the view. Clear blue sky and rolling hills. The grand scheme. “Cops have tunnel vision. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“You know it. I didn’t count, but I figure there was probably a hundred head of steers in that pasture. Frank won’t be satisfied until he has ear-tag numbers. There’s no way around it.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
Brad came to a stop and toyed with the accelerator. Power. Play. Del spun his horse and let him prance a little in response.
“But you can’t fake it,” Brad warned. “He still keeps records.”
“He seems pretty sharp.”
“He’s slipping. A year or two ago he wouldn’t trust me to count the eggs in the fridge. So you got this?”
Del spun again, enjoying the buckskin’s responsiveness, but a hint of something black lying in the shade of a chokecherry bush caught his eye. He urged his mount to trot ahead.
Brad shouted out to him and then followed, but he had to slow down for rutted terrain. By the time he reached the copse of bushes, Del had dismounted, dropped a knee to the ground and greeted the little corpse by name. Only the soft black hair moved, ruffled by the breeze.
“You got something I can wrap him up in?” Del asked when the sound of footsteps interrupted his thoughts. This wasn’t the way you wanted to find the friend of a friend.
“Just leave him. I’ll tell her there wasn’t much left.”
Del got up and craned his neck for a look in the pickup bed. “A plastic bag or something? When we get back to the barn I’ll find something better to put him in.”
“It’s a dead dog, for God’s sake. Coyotes should’ve made short work of the thing by now.”
“They didn’t.” Del pulled his hat brim down to block out the sun. Or, far more irritating, the sight of Brad Benson. “She said she wants him back no matter what. It’s a small thing to ask.”
“Throw it in the back of the pickup. What’s the use of having coyotes around if they don’t do their part?” Brad gave him a look, half suspicious, half mocking. “Fox, huh? Maybe you’re the coyote.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
* * *
It bothered him all afternoon. He worked around the steers as quickly as he could, taking care not to disturb them too much while he took inventory, but he thought about that dog the whole time. Thought about Lila. Thought about the fact that her damn stepbrother had no respect for anything that mattered, and that her affection for her dog mattered in a way that not much else in Del’s own world did.
Except the job. His real job. Starting out, the job had meant freedom. It had meant reporting only to one person instead of a dozen. It had meant eating what he wanted, going to bed when he felt like it. It had meant out with the old and in with the new. He wasn’t going to miss any of the old, and the new was yet to be discovered. But affection hadn’t figured in anywhere. His father was gone, and Del couldn’t help but think he’d died of a broken heart, that his affection for his son had become such a heavy burden that his big heart had cracked. And with his father’s death a chunk of Del’s own life had been removed, like some kind of surgical amputation. What he had—what there was for him to build on—was a strange and unexpected job.
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