Page 93 of Forbidden Protector

TWENTY-NINE

MACKENZIE

Gus is already at the window, hair up and growling. Trane screams again from the corral, high and wrong. That's not weather. That's a warning.

"Get down." Holt's voice, already flat. Now he's nothing but function, a shape moving low past the window.

"Talk to me."

"West fence. Same line as the tape." He's at the gun safe, working the combination one-handed, fast, no fumbling. "No engine. Gus would've caught an engine. This one walked in."

"Voss."

"Voss." He says the name like a verdict.

The rifle comes out and he sets it on the counter between us. For one full second he just looks at it.

"My hand won't hold zero." Flat. No self-pity in it, which is worse than if there had been. "Yours will have to."

"Holt."

"We don't have time for the version where you argue with me." He looks up, and there's nothing soft in his face, nothing that remembers a kitchen chair. This is the man from the timber road. The man who read Jacob's death in four seconds. "You've got steadier hands than mine right now. That's not a compliment. It's a fact, and we're going to use it."

I take the rifle.

It's heavier than I expect and exactly as balanced as I don't expect. Some part of me that learned to shoot on a fence rail in Choteau before this county ever took anything from me settles into the stock like it never forgot how.

"Loft window," he says. "West glass, highest ground we've got, and it's already sighted for that distance. Move."

We go up together, him behind me because his balance beats his grip and we both know it. The loft's glass wall used to hold nothing but a mountain. Tonight it holds a black pasture, a scream still hanging in it from Trane, and a shape past the fence line that isn't a fence post.

"Sill." Holt's already moving, dragging the ottoman under the window with his boot, and I get the fore-end down on the cracked-open sash before he has to tell me twice.

He comes in behind me, close, his chest against my back, his good hand braced flat on the sill beside mine so the whole weight of him is holding the angle steady instead of just me, his bad hand tucked against his own ribs, out of the way.

"There." All gravel, right at my ear, the register I have heard exactly once before, through an earpiece at the grain elevator. "Nine o'clock, tree line, two hundred yards. He's using the dark like I taught men to use it. Don't look for a shape. Look for the wrongness in the shapes that are already there."

I find it. A stillness where the pines don't hold still, a vertical line where everything else sways in the wind.

"I've got him."

"Wind's coming off the Front, northwest, call it eight miles an hour. Elevation's climbing the whole way out toward the mountains, you'll want to hold high." His hand shifts off the sill to my shoulder, not steadying me, just there, same as mine sat over his heart three weeks ago doing nothing but existing. "Breathe out. Let it go slow. Don't chase the shot. Let it arrive."

"That's very zen for a man who used to do this professionally."

"Do I look like I'm joking, Tatum?"

"You called me Tatum."

"I'll apologize for the noun after you don't die." His voice doesn't crack on it, but something under it does. One thread pulled loose in a rope that's held for three weeks straight. "Range."

"Two hundred yards and you're already writing my eulogy. Bold strategy, Blackwater."

"Range, Tatum."

"Two hundred. Confirmed." I ranged it myself off his own rangefinder, sitting on the sill where he set it down.

"Hold two mils high. Wait for him to clear the deadfall. He'll want a clean angle on our window, and getting it means stepping into ours first."