The sound of electric clippers reached me before I saw my daughter.

By midnight, Dr. Kerr had set Buster’s leg in a white fiberglass cast and given him a shot of morphine. The dog lay asleep on an old quilt behind the kitchen stove, his breathing slow and heavy.

Owen, Mae, Tessa, and I sat around the kitchen table under the harsh yellow glare of the overhead bulb. The Pelican case sat in the center of the linoleum, untouched.

Tessa had called a state police contact in Oklahoma City thirty minutes prior. "The liquid in those vials," she said, her voice trembling slightly as she held her phone, "is a concentrated organophosphate defoliant. If that had been dumped into the spring head, it would have leached into the water table within six hours. Every cow, horse, and child drinking from this well would have been poisoned before morning."

The air in the room felt suddenly unbreathable, thick as lead.

"Vivian is in a cell," I said, my voice dead and hollow. "Who was in that truck, Tessa?"

Tessa looked at the window, where the dark glass reflected our pale, exhausted faces. "Barnes resigned from the county commission this afternoon. He boarded a private flight out of Wiley Post Airport at four o'clock. But he left people behind. People who invested millions in those land contracts and stand to lose everything if this ranch stays intact."

Outside, the wind began to rise, whistling through the eaves of the old house.

Then, the power died.

The kitchen went pitch black in a single instant. The hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the electric clock, the soft hum of the porch light—all extinguished into absolute silence.

Ellie’s bedroom door creaked open down the hall. "Mom?" she called out, her voice small and trembling in the dark. "The lights went out."

"Stay there, Ellie," I said, standing up silently and feeling my way toward the kitchen counter where the Remington lay.

I clicked the shotgun’s safety off. The click was tiny, but it sounded like a hammer blow in the dark room.

Owen stood up, his boots quiet on the floorboards, raising his rifle toward the back door.

Then, from the front porch, came a sound that made every drop of blood in my body freeze into ice.

It wasn't a footstep.

It wasn't a knock.

It was the steady, low, mechanical buzzing of a pair of heavy electric clippers—running on a battery pack—scraping slowly back and forth across the screen of the front door.