“But we don’t know that. We just know Bailey knows where Mattingly was headed.”

“Maybe. Also, you’ve got trackers in your blood, remember.”

“Maybe your brother will throw them off-line again.”

“I don’t know. He and Cole are pretty tight these days. Kind of one of those if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em things.”

“Your brother’s not a joiner.”

“I’m talking about Cole,” Luke says.

“Yeah, well, maybe they’ll work together and give us some time.”

Luke says, “Babe, honestly. I’m not following. I’m pretty sure we just pissed them off. Royally. Why would they help us get to Amarillo?”

“Because Cole lied.”

“Yeah, he lies all the time.”

“No. He lied to the people who were listening in just now, not to me.”

“About what?” he asks.

“The story about his father and what happened to him as a kid. You only know the first half, but I know the whole thing.”

“OK . . .”

“Cole’s father didn’t forgive those boys. He poisoned them.”

Luke just stares at her. When it comes to mere shock value, she assumed this piece of news would have a hard time competing with the crates of snakes and rats and the madman inside the truck. But at the end of this night, hopefully, they can leave those things behind. Cole they’re stuck with for the foreseeable future, and with him, this dark secret from his past. She gives Luke the moment he needs to take that fact on board.

“Woah,” he finally says.

“Yeah.”

“So he’s telling us to keep going. That’s good.”

“Sort of. But the code thing means he’s either working against his business partners, or they’re working against him.”

Luke swallows this like an intact gumball. The only thing more fearsome than Cole Graydon are the people he does business with; men and women they’ve never met, for whom Charley is little more than a lab rat. Men and women with a vested interest in keeping their funding of this operation a secret and stopping it before it darkens their doors. Men and women to whom the potential victims of Mattingly’s so-called others might be little more than an inconvenience, easily forgotten, easily swept aside.

She has to save those women.

“Let’s get to work,” she says.

18

Cyrus Mattingly is no stranger to pain. He learned how to endure it when he was a kid, back when his father sent him to the ranch. His third day there, some dickhead counselor—Floyd Hickins, a real hayseed asshole who used to go around with a piece of straw in his damn teeth like he was on the cover of a Zane Grey novel—knocked him off his horse because Cyrus gave him lip. There’d been a dizzying moment of realizing he’d left the saddle. Then the thundering agony of his leg snapping as it broke his fall. Determined not to cry, he forced himself to squint up at the guy’s big silver belt buckle, sure he could focus the tears away just by trying to make sense of the designs stamped on it even as the bright sun overhead turned the man into an imposing backlit shadow. Cyrus was right, and it was a lesson he never forgot.

That was before Mother got to him and made the ranch a better place. But it was one of his earliest and best lessons on how you could throw your mind past pain, keeping it just so far ahead that it sometimes had trouble catching up. That’s part of what he tries to teach his seedlings. Your mind is more powerful than your nerves.

But he’ll never have that chance again, according to the evil bitch who’s turned this night into a royal clusterfuck.

Should he believe her? They all lie. Mother’s taught him this. If law enforcement gets you for any reason, don’t say a word, because everything they say back is an attempt to trick you into confirming what they already believe.

That was one of her many lessons, but most of what Mother’s given them are rules. Very strict rules. And he knows damn well he’s followed most of them down to the last detail. When it comes to their family reunions, at least. Which begs the question, how in the Sam Hill did this bitch get him?

There’ve been no emails, no phone calls. Not even burner phones. Just a single piece of paper, typed by Mother, which he shredded to bits as soon as he read it. Mother mailed it to him three months ago; a few sentences in a code only her boys could recognize. The code was just filler, a greeting of sorts. The only important detail was the date at the top. The countdown notification.

It was never a huge surprise when the letter arrived. Mother typically picked the same time of year: early fall, when the summer thunderstorms weren’t quite so frequent, before the roads iced up in winter.

She’d used the same system for years now. The next run always took place on the first weekend three months from the date at the top of the letter. Upon receipt, his first two orders of business were to clear his schedule for two weeks starting on the run date and to start looking for an affordable truck that could be disposed of when he was done. In the beginning, truck prep would take longer. But they’ve been at this for so many years now, that part’s become a cinch. And now most of the months leading up to the run he spends in delicious anticipation of what lies ahead, their annual ritual. Their family reunion.

There’d be no further communication until they were well on their way. Once they were within hours of her place with a seedling in tow, they were to call from a pay phone, if they could find one. Or any sort of landline. She liked to lecture them that only dyed-in-the-wool city folk thought pay phones a thing of the past. True, they weren’t on every corner anymore, but they could still be found throughout remote areas likes the ones they were all crossing tonight, places where cell phone coverage was spotty. In her retirement, Mother subsisted off a steady diet of true crime shows and podcasts; a master class in how to protect her boys, she called them. They’d rendered her constantly afraid of digital surveillance in this new age, so afraid that Cyrus was pretty sure if one of them ever dared to show up at her place with a cell phone anywhere on his person, she might coldcock him worse than Floyd did him all those years ago.

But nobody, nobody had seen that damn letter except for him. They would have literally had to be standing over his shoulder when he opened it.

Kind of like this bitch was when you were at those movie theaters . . .

The effort needed to banish this thought allows the pain of his broken arm to punch through his consciousness. And with it, an even worse thought.

What if they got to Mother first?

But if that’s the case, how come the bitch is so desperate to find out where he was headed? Is she just trying to get a confession out of him?

She’s got to be law enforcement. Maybe a fed or something more than a local cop, and that was why she felt comfortable making those crazy threats against him, going on and on about how he didn’t know what she really was. And now she’s falling back a little and talking with her partner because she knows she went too far by breaking his arm.

Who knows? Maybe that’ll get everything against him thrown out, and he’ll even come out of this a richer man after his big lawsuit against . . . against . . . the FBI?

“How’s your arm?”

She pulls the blindfold free. He blinks a few times, sees her standing at the foot of the gurney. And she doesn’t look remotely remorseful about breaking his arm.