Page 16 of Rope Burn

SLADE

Idon’t bother making myself difficult to find. My truck is parked nose-out directly beneath the number stenciled beside my door, visible from the lot and the frontage road beyond it.

The motel is a single-story cinder-block rectangle with exterior rooms facing a strip of cracked asphalt. She’ll know where I’m staying. A woman who found Eldridge’s ranch off one conversation with Brenda doesn’t need directions to a motel, and I don’t think she has an ounce of bluff in her.

I've been sitting on the bed with my boots off and the stock-supply catalog open on the nightstand, running High Mesa's carrier number against the routing codes I copied off Neil's sealed packets. The numbers connect. High Mesa appears beside the same compliance designation—S.H.—that showed up on every approval I moved between venues. Whoever built that company built it inside the system, and whoever S.H. is, the trail runs through the same office that certifies every legitimate hauler on the Southwest Circuit.

I've known this for months. I've known it since the Deming library, since the SAFER database, since I pulled the federal registration and found a company that doesn't exist anywhere except APRA's approval records.

What I didn't have was someone to hand it to. Now I have Engel, and Engel has access to records I can't touch. Somewhere between the two of us, the carrier number that connects to Sandy Canutson sits inside a compliance file with a name attached to it.

Sandy's photograph is pressed between the catalog's pages. Her face looks up from the matte stock when I flip past the routing tables, and the image hasn't softened since the ranch.

I remember the bar in Lubbock. She was laughing. No one else saw her alive after that. The carrier that moved whatever cargo traveled the corridor that night was approved by the same office that approved High Mesa.

I close the catalog when headlights sweep across the parking lot. A vehicle pulls in slow, parks near the far end, and cuts its engine. A minute passes. Then a door opens and boots cross the concrete with the measured pace of a decision still being made.

The knock comes. Two hits, spaced, the controlled cadence of training visible in the pause between her knuckles and the door.

I make no effort to hide the catalog under the mattress. I turn the deadbolt and open the door. Engel is standing on the concrete with the lot lights behind her and her hands visible at her sides.

She's changed clothes since the competitor lot. Jeans, a fitted shirt, her hair down. The lanyard, the clipboard, the insurance cover are all somewhere else tonight.

She's off duty. Or she wants me to think she is.

"Is High Mesa Livestock one of the names you were going to give me? If so, it’s in APRA's compliance records," she says. "Approved, certified through the main office. The company doesn't exist in any federal database." She steps inside without being invited and sets her bag on the dresser. "The approval date on the High Mesa entry is early last season, months before Lubbock."

That information lands like a fist. High Mesa sat approved on APRA's books for months before Sandy walked into a bar and I introduced her to Clint Wilson.

"Show me," I say.

She pulls a printed page from her bag and spreads it on the bed beside the catalog. The approval column carries the S.H. compliance designation, and the date is right where she said it would be. I open the catalog to the routing codes and lay my page beside hers.

"Same designation," she says. "Same office. Your APRA's official carrier files use identical compliance codes."

The confirmation lands heavy. This isn't a test anymore. This is evidence, and the woman standing in my motel room with federal carrier data spread across my bed is the person who assembled it. The question of what she does with it next is the question that's been sitting between us since the ranch.

"The second carrier," she says. "I need the name."

"You haven't answered my question. Who told Neil about the Torres appointment?"

"I told you I don't know yet."

"Then we're still trading."

Her jaw tightens. She looks at the two pages side by side on the bed, her page and mine, and the frustration that crosses her face is professional, not personal.

She came here to advance the case. The case just ran into the wall I built around the second name.

"I'm running out of ways to justify being in this room," she says, and the sentence carries more weight than the words.

She meets my gaze. What I see behind the professional composure isn't uncertainty. It's awareness. She knows exactly what Bureau policy says about the line she's standing on.

She crosses it anyway.

Not because she found a loophole. Because the alternative was staying in her own room with the data, the dark, and the knowledge that the man who can connect those routing codes to a dead woman is in a cinder-block box a mile down the highway.

I know she's some kind of law enforcement. I'm here anyway.