The thermos of coffee is sweating on the dash.
The cicadas have started up in the cedar behind me.
A red-shouldered hawk is making lazy passes over the western pasture.
Eleven-oh-seven.
Eleven-twenty-three.
Eleven-thirty-eight.
At eleven-forty-one, a black Ford Explorer slows on the county road and turns into my gate.
The driver pulls in past the cattle skull pillars and stops on the gravel.
Sits there for a second, then opens the door and gets out.
I take one last drink from the thermos, screw the lid back on, and step out of my truck.
I walk down the gravel toward him without hurrying.
The white hat is pulled low. My sleeves are rolled to the elbow. The Shotgun Saints tattoo on my left forearm is the first thing he sees.
I make sure of it.
He watches me come.
He's mid-thirties. Soft around the middle, the kind of soft you get from sitting at a desk for ten years.
Clean-shaven, sandy hair parted on the side, the kind of pressed jeans a man buys when he wants to look like Texas without actually owning a horse.
He's wearing a button-down with the sleeves rolled clumsily, the way a man rolls them when he saw somebody else do it and thought it looked good.
He's holding a bouquet of sunflowers wrapped in grocery-store plastic.
On the passenger seat of the Explorer, propped against the dash so it won't fall over, is a framed photograph in a cheap wood frame. I can see it through the open driver's-side door.
It's a wedding photo.
Of him and Garrett.
He's the best man.
He brought a wedding photo of himself and another man as a gift for that man's widow? Either that, or this guy is seriously fucked in the head.
Actually, I know he has to be fucked in the head.
I stop about six feet from him on the gravel.
I don't say anything.
He tries a smile. "Hey there. I'm here to see Hadley Cross."
"And you are?"
He extends a hand. "Todd Whitley. I'm an old friend of the family. Used to be best friends with Garrett, her husband. May he rest."
I look at the hand.