Rufus barked at the mailman delivering another wave of hate mail. I scratched his ears. "Yeah, buddy. Nobody likes bills."
I woke at 3:00 in the morning to the sound of a truck engine idling on my property. Not close to the house—maybe a quarter-mile out, near the pipeline easement. The bedroom was dark as a cave, air conditioning humming, and for a second I thought I dreamed it. Then I heard gravel crunching under tires.
I grabbed my flashlight and shotgun, didn't load it. The sound of a pump-action racking a shell is usually enough to make people reconsider their choices.
Shauna stirred. "What's wrong?"
I said, "Stay inside," and slipped out into air so thick and hot it felt like breathing through a wet towel.
The truck was gone by the time I got there, but the damage wasn't: fifty feet of barbed-wire fence cut clean, three posts knocked over, wire snipped in six places with bolt cutters—the kind of precise cuts that said someone knew what they were doing. My cattle had wandered through the gap onto Ridgecrest's unfenced golf course, probably thinking they'd found bovine paradise. That grass gets watered twice a day; can't say I blamed them.
I was herding them back when headlights appeared: Ridgecrest security guard in a golf cart, radio already in hand. He'd called the sheriff before saying hello.
The deputy arrived, wrote his report with the enthusiasm of a man filling out tax forms. "Livestock at large, $500 fine, Mr. Brennan."
I showed him the cut fence, the fresh tire tracks in mud—treads that didn't match anything I owned. He took photos, nodded slowly. "You can file a counter-report for vandalism, but without witnesses..." He trailed off. We both knew how this worked: I'd be paying that fine.
I spent the next morning repairing fence in 90-degree heat: T-posts, wire, sweat-soaked shirts sticking to my back, thinking about Grandpa Emmett's line: A man who will cut your fence will cut your throat given the chance.
Time to stop playing defense.
I called Buck first. He met me at a diner off the highway, slid into the booth looking like he'd aged five years. "Cole, Veronica's lobbying for eminent domain. She wants the county to seize your land for public safety, then lease it to the HOA for golf expansion." He stirred coffee he wasn't drinking. "I voted against it twice, but she's not stopping."