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"Sandy Canutson's death is the reason the task force exists. Her case is what put me on the circuit." My hands are still in my lap. "I showed you her photograph because I needed to read your reaction. Your face told me you recognized her and felt responsible for what happened. It didn't prove your role. But it gave me a reason to keep testing the theory that you were a coerced witness rather than a willing participant. I used your guilt to build rapport."

Silence stretches until the highway fills it. Somewhere on the frontage road, a truck shifts gears and the sound climbs through the still air.

"Everything before you ever met me," he says. "You had all of it."

"Yes."

"The ranch. The motel. Tonight. Every time you let me put my hands on you, you already knew what those hands did in Cheyenne."

"Yes."

His hat comes off the dresser and onto his head in a single clean motion. His gaze passes through the room without stopping on the wrappers, the paper bag, or the pillow that still carries the shape of where I lay.

Everything in it has already been written off.

"Don't follow me."

He opens the door. Lot light falls across the carpet in a rectangle that narrows as he walks through it. His boots hit concrete outside at a pace that doesn't hurry and doesn't hesitate.

A truck door opens and closes. The engine turns over, catches, settles into a low idle. Headlights sweep across the curtain, the wall, the ceiling, and swing toward the highway.

The engine fades and the lot goes still. The rectangle of light from the open door lies across the floor with nothing in it.

I close the door and the room reassembles itself around me. Wrappers on the bedspread. A pen on the nightstand. The impression his body left on the mattress beside me, already cooling.

The air conditioner labors against a silence that has weight, and the space where he was sitting is the loudest thing in the building.

My phone sits where I left it. Torres is one touch away. My ASAC's line is live. Every piece of the operational infrastructure that put me in this room, this cover, this man's bed is intact and functioning exactly as designed.

The witness at the center of it no longer trusts me.

I reach for the phone and call Torres.

11

SLADE

The highway runs north through country so flat the road holds straight to the horizon before the dark takes it. My hands sit at ten and two on the wheel because muscle memory holds when everything else goes loose. The white lane markers feed under the truck at a speed that puts distance between me and the motel without putting it behind me.

Morgan Carroll. Not Engel. Carroll, the name on a badge she never showed me, attached to a file she memorized before she memorized the route to Eldridge's ranch.

I told Kenna Corbin she didn't know what I was carrying. That was over a year ago, behind the stock pens in Tucson, while she pressed me about Las Cruces.

The weight has doubled since then, and the woman who added to it was building a federal case against the people I was already trying to bring down.

The photograph sat on my phone for days before Neil sent the second message. I ran the number through every public reverse search I could access, went back to the motel and reconstructed the camera angle, then checked the vehicles I remembered from the lot against the ones following the circuit. I wanted to know which direction the threat was moving before I showed my hand.

I should have told her. The searches bought me nothing, and the delay cost her the lead time she needed to protect her cover.

The steer wrestling at the next event is the only conversation I'm prepared to have with anyone. The arena doesn't care who I slept with or who lied about it. Five hundred pounds of running livestock and a man built to bring it down, and the transaction is honest every time.

The fairground sits in a valley where the heat collects between the grandstands and the stock pens. Dust from the loading alleys hangs in the lot light, and the smell of roasted corn from the concession trailers mixes with diesel and livestock. Barrel racers warm up in the overflow arena while the evening card loads.

I draw a steer with a left-breaking tendency and a low head carriage that suits my reach. The hazer pushes alongside, keeping the animal straight, and I leave the saddle at a full sprint. The catch is clean. My hands lock onto the horns, my boots hit dirt, and the torque rolls through my shoulders into the steer's neck until its legs leave the ground.

The flagman's arm drops. The board posts a time worth keeping, and the grandstand noise rolls past without registering. My shoulder has been charging interest on every impact for years. The knee settles into its familiar grind.

The steer rolls to its feet and trots toward the catch pen, already forgetting. Livestock doesn't carry grudges. Livestock doesn't lie about its name.