Chapter 3

The afternoon sun had swung past the mountain ridge, and the shadows had stretched sideways across the asphalt when Pruitt finally came out of the range shack. He had a brown folder under his arm, the kind that held range orders and personnel manifests, and he walked across the gate apron with his boots landing fast, like he'd spent the last hour building a case so airtight it could survive vacuum.

He stopped ten feet from the cart. His pale blue eyes flicked once at the line, once at Whitfield, and settled on Hector with the flat stare of a man who'd decided he was going to be the only person in this conversation.

"Specialist Whitfield," he said. "You're off armory detail. This gate is being handled by my office until the qualification is complete. Turn the book over to Sergeant Reyes."

Whitfield's hand went to her pocket. The card was still there, a square of greased paper that had become, over the last four hours, the heaviest thing she'd ever carried. She looked at Reyes, who had moved from the line to the edge of the rack, arms crossed the same way she'd crossed them before.

Reyes said nothing. She held Whitfield's gaze for a long moment, and then she looked at Pruitt, and the silence between the three of them was thick enough to carve.

"Sarge," Reyes said, and her voice was flatter than the Montana plain, "you want the book, it comes with the armorer. That's how the property system works. The person who signs for it carries it."

"I don't want the book, Reyes. I want the inventory reconciled before we lose the light." Pruitt's jaw worked. "There's an irregularity in the rack — I saw it from the window. A serial mismatch between the book and the rifle. That's a flag-level discrepancy, and it's mine to investigate as the officer on the gate."

"Your flag-level discrepancy," Reyes said, "was sitting in that rack for nine weeks. Before you got here this morning. Before any of us got here. And the one man on this post who could've caught it by memory is standing behind a hot dog cart." She looked at Hector. "How long did you know?"

Hector flipped the sizzling sausage on the grill. "Since March. Day the snow broke. I saw the tag when the rack came out of the armory for pre-qualification inspection."

"And you didn't say anything?" Reyes's voice hardened. "The unit's holding a rifle that doesn't belong to it, and you sat on it for three months?"

"I said it." Hector set the tongs down and wiped his hands on the apron. Slow, unhurried, a man who'd spent twenty years answering harder questions than that. "I said it to the armory office the same day I saw it. I called the duty number and left a message, plain as I could make it: 'There's a serial on the rack that doesn't match the book. You should check it before the next drill.'"