Page 55

"You watched me hand you the worst night of my life and checked it against your notes."

"Yes. That too." He gives me no reprieve, and I want none.

"What I feel for you was real then," I tell him, “And it's real now. It doesn't buy anything back."

His jaw works once before he answers. "I knew you weren't insurance the day you got out of that truck. I figured you for law. I never had your real name, or how much of me you'd already read. I opened the door anyway. I put my hands on you because I wanted to, and I told myself I was the one keeping score."

"You guessed at a badge," I say. "I had your whole file. Those will never weigh the same."

"No," Slade says. "They won't."

Neither of us moves to close the space between the tailgate and the wheel well. Somewhere past the stock pens, a horse calls to another horse, and a trailer ramp drops with a clang.

"Torres wants me in a room," he says. "She keeps saying the word counsel like I've got one riding around in my glove box. She'll get me when I've got it all in one place."

Quantico trained an answer to that into me, and I hold it silently. He watches me do it and lets the silence stand.

"There's a girl," he says. "Clint worked her at the competitor bar a few nights back. I sent him off on a wild goose chase and steered her to her friend. This afternoon she was at his trailer." His voice flattens. "Her friend wasn't with her this time. I walked up before she got in his truck and asked Clint whether he ever sorted out that draw-sheet problem. She got bored with the two of us and drove off alone, and I stood there till her taillights hit the highway."

He pulls his phone from his back pocket and thumbs the screen awake. "I've got pictures of the two of them and the plate on the truck she rode in with. It's all right here, time-stamped..."

"Stop."

He stops talking. He doesn't lower the phone. The screen glows, turned toward me with the first photograph already open, and he waits to see whether I'll look.

I look at him instead.

"Don't show me," I say. "Don't hand me a license plate number or a single photograph. Anything you have goes to Torres, straight from you. I won't carry it, and I won't tell you when to call her or what to say. I'm not your channel to the government anymore. I will never be in that position again."

"You want it."

"More than I've wanted anything in months."

"And you won't take it."

"No."

Slade studies me with the same flat, total attention he gives a steer in the box, reading for the lean, the hesitation, the moment the animal commits. Whatever he finds, he keeps it off his face.

He pushes off the tailgate, digs his keys out of his jeans, and presses them into my palm. "Get in the cab and lock it. I'll be where I can see it."

I could argue. I've worked this circuit alone for most of a year with a lanyard and a clipboard, and I drove out to the ranch where he was working with nothing but a photograph. Hendricks's two-fingered wave is still riding the back of my neck, though, so I close my hand around the keys.

"I'm calling Torres tonight," he says. "She gets the plate number, the photographs, and everything tied to that girl. Then she and I set the meeting, and the catalog goes from my hands to hers."

He walks to the corner of the stock pens and stops where the security light still reaches the truck, angled so the cab stays in his line of sight. Then he puts the phone to his ear.

I lock myself in. The cab smells like dust and saddle leather, and the arena roars beyond the glass. Clint's laugh carries from the direction of the competitor bar, warm and easy, the laugh of a man who believes he's everybody's favorite part of the joke. Hendricks is somewhere behind the pens with the signature that sent Sandy past a gate nobody opened.

The introduction at Lubbock put Slade beside Clint. The sealed packets put Hendricks's initials in his hands. Of everyone who has stood that close to both men, he's the one who might say so in a federal office. He stands at the edge of the light with his back to the pens and his eyes on me, talking to Torres in a voice too low to carry.

Every question I want to call through the glass would make me his channel again. I sit in his locked truck with my mouth shut and my hand on the keys, and I let him make the call alone.

15

SLADE

For the first time in my life, I'm looking for trouble on purpose. Last night, Torres gave me permission for a good deal less.