Cole had learned to read those pauses in his first year. There were two things in Red Rock worth understanding. The first was the land itself, good grazing territory in the right season, scarce water that made men desperate and desperate men dangerous in ways that didn't always look like danger until it was too late. The kind of terrain that broke people who weren't paying attention. Red Rock formations to the north that caught the sunset and turned the whole sky the color of something burning.
Dry grass that could go from gold to fire in the wrong conditions. Beautiful in a way that had teeth. Cole paid attention to the land. It rewarded him for it. The second thing worth understanding was Holt Greer.
Greer didn't own Red Rock the way a man owned a horse or a piece of property. He owned it the way water owned the shape of a riverbed, invisibly, completely through the slow patient pressure of being present everywhere all the time. He had land holdings spread across four counties. He had contracts with the railroad. He had relationships with the kind of men in the capital whose names appeared in newspapers and whose decisions rippled outward across hundreds of miles without anyone in Red Rock being able to trace the connection back to its source.
Mostly he had Judge Aldrick Main. Aldrick was 62 years old and had been on the Red Rock bench for 15 of those years. He wore pressed vests in colors that suggested he'd once had opinions about such things and had since given up updating them. He sat outside the courthouse on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings with a cup of coffee and the careful practiced expression of a man who was thinking about nothing in particular. His eyes moved across the street without ever quite landing on anything directly.
Conversations with him had a way of ending before they'd actually begun. Questions directed at him had a way of getting answered with other questions or with silence or with a slight shift in topic so smooth you didn't notice it had happened until you were halfway down the block wondering what you'd originally meant to ask. The whole town knew what Aldrick was. Nobody said it out loud because saying it out loud meant acknowledging what was behind it and what was behind it was Greer and Greer was the kind of problem that got worse the more directly you looked at it. Cole had noticed Aldrick on his first week in Red Rock nine years ago, had watched the way people moved around him not avoiding him, nothing that obvious, just the slight unconscious adjustment of trajectory that people made near things they'd decided not to think too hard about.
Cole had filed the information away in the part of his mind where he kept things that weren't his problem and left it there. Greer wasn't his problem. The land was his problem. The water lines, the fencing, the cattle prices in a bad season. Those were his problems and they were enough.
That was what he told himself. He'd been telling himself that right up until the evening everything stopped being simple. Thomas Harlan had been the better of the two brothers. Cole would have said that to anyone who asked and meant it without bitterness though nobody ever asked. Thomas was two years older and a head taller and he laughed at things that didn't particularly deserve laughing at which Cole had spent years finding irritating and now found unbearable to remember because the irritation had been a kind of love and he hadn't recognized it as such until it was gone.
Thomas had settled his land five miles east of Cole's down the ridge toward the creek. They'd had dinner together every Sunday for the first three years and argued about whether the north pasture needed reseeding and whether the creek water was good enough to run through the south line and whether the price of beef was going to hold through winter. All of it had been the kind of argument you had when you weren't really arguing about anything except the pleasure of having someone to disagree with. It had been good. Then the water rights dispute started.
Greer's people showed up on Thomas's eastern boundary with surveying equipment and folded maps and phrases like historical precedent and prior appropriation and the smooth reasonable tones of men who did this professionally, who had learned exactly how to make legal violence sound like paperwork. Thomas had stood on his porch with his arms crossed and told them to leave. They left. They came back with more papers. He told them to leave again.
Cole had heard about it. The way you heard about things in was sharp or complicated. He'd meant to ride over, talk to Thomas, sit with him on that porch and just be there while Thomas worked through what it meant. He'd meant to do that. He kept not going.
There was always something. A water line issue, a sick calf. The kind of small urgent problems that filled up a day if you let them and Cole let them because somewhere underneath the routine, he understood what going to Thomas actually meant. It meant getting involved. It meant being seen getting involved.
It meant that the slow turning attention of Greer's operation would eventually swing in his direction. He wasn't ready for that. He was never ready for that. Thomas died on a Tuesday in late October alone in his kitchen. Heart gave out, which was what the official record said and maybe that was true.