Page 65 of Broken Ride

They walk him past her on the way to the transport, the wash being too narrow for any other route, and he stops. The agents let him have one second, maybe out of humanity, maybe for the recording.

"Delaney." He says it soft and certain, a man leaving a porch light on. "This isn't finished, honey."

She looks at him the way she'd look at a lab result that finally came back conclusive.

"It was finished in a courthouse years ago," she says. "You're just the last man in Oklahoma to get the paperwork."

They take him up the bank. He doesn't get another word, because the transport door closing on a man is the last word there is.

The medics come to her with a blanket and she lets them work. She answers their questions in that steady clinical voice and holds out her wrists for the photographs.

Then she points an agent at the truck’s cab and walks him through it. Her kit is behind the seat and it travels under chain of custody. The tray lifts out, the lockbox moves, and the pages underneath it are the ones Torres wants. Torres, halfway through the same sentence into her radio, stops and looks at her across the wash.

"Dr. Brooks," Torres says, "when this is over, we should talk about your résumé."

"Dr. Prescott," Laney says. "It's on the license."

An agent tops the bank carrying her kit with gloves on, and behind him the radio is already talking about the scale house. I watch the operation change weight where I stand, a rescue turning into a case, her paper trail pulling the whole corridor in after it like a header dallied to something big.

The sky is getting lighter. The pines are turning from black to green, agents stringing tape, steam lifting off the crippled truck. I'm still standing at Torres's fender where my word put me, because the last promise I made this woman was that nothing moves until she says it moves, and I'm not breaking that one in front of the federal government.

Laney hands the blanket back to a medic who tells her to keep it. She keeps it. She turns and finds me across the wash like she's known where I was the whole time, and knowing her, she has.

Then she crosses to me, boots in the gravel, blanket over one shoulder like a saddle pad, wearing that man's keeping like weather she rode through. She stops close enough that I can see the raw ring the tie left on her wrists, and every drink I didn't take pays out at once.

"You look like hell, cowboy," she says. Her voice has road wear in it and the wit is still sitting up front where she keeps it. "Somebody ought to check your card. Did you draw the worst ride out here or did I?"

"Judges gave it to you on degree of difficulty." My voice comes out lower than I planned.

There's a tally I've been keeping since the cell, hours dry, miles driven, words held. All of it was always for this one line, so I give it to her straight. "I'm sober since the cell, Laney, and I'm counting it in hours. It's ugly and I'm not promising you a thing except the next one. I figured you'd rather have the truth than a speech."

"I've had a lifetime of speeches. The truth's the only currency that spends."

Her eyes go over me, the professional sweep, pricing what the dry hours cost, and whatever she finds doesn't scare her off. Heat climbs under the exhaustion in her face, slow and sure of itself, the look that's been mine since a truck outside Amarillo. "The next hour, then. I'll take delivery."

She reaches for me first.

Her hand closes in my jacket front, rope-burned knuckles and all, and she pulls, and I come off that fender like it was never holding me. I fold her in with the cold and the whole federal government watching. She's shaking now, finally, in the one place she'd permit it. I stand there and hold what I nearly drank away, and I don't say a word.

Her voice comes up off my collar, quiet enough that the federal government doesn't get a share. "I want to go. I want to be anywhere but here. I want to go someplace with a door I don't have to watch, cowboy."

"Statements tomorrow, both of you," Torres says, coming up with her radio still going, a woman whose day is starting instead of ending. She watches the kit ride into an evidence van in gloved hands.

"Voss is the smallest name in that folder. The pages Dr. Prescott pulled out of that scale house marry his paycheck to the shell companies, and the shells marry the freight. Warrants go out this week, and the list reads like a sale bill." She looks north past the ridgeline, toward nothing either of us can see. "The man who signs the approval column isn't wearing cuffs yet."

The want is still in the back seat, waiting on the ride home. It can get in line behind the war.

The smallest name went into custody this morning. The rest of that sale bill comes due, and the woman with her hand still wrapped in my jacket is the one holding the paper.

19

LANEY

The room Wade finds us sits at the top of an outside stair in Flagstaff, pines crowding the walkway rail and a door I don't have to watch. I know where the door is. Knowing where a door stands and standing guard on it are two different disciplines, and tonight, for the first time in over a year, I only practice the first.

I sleep like a patient coming off the table, deep, dreamless, gone.

Somewhere in the next few hours I surface enough to find him in the chair by the window with his hat on his knee, keeping a watch nobody assigned him, and I say his name once. He looks over. I pat the blankets back on the empty side of the bed, and after a moment he sets the hat on the dresser and stretches out on top of the covers with his boots off and his eyes still open.