Page 50 of Rope Burn

The heat of it spreads between us, slick and immediate, and I hold her hips pinned against me through every shuddering second because letting go isn't something my hands are capable of right now.

The last pulse drains the tension from my arms, my back, the muscles along my ribs that have been screaming since the corridor. The heat spreading between us is the first thing between us that carries no hidden purpose.

I lower her legs. She pulls herself fully onto the mattress, and I follow, settling beside her without touching.

Neither of us speaks. The air conditioner rattles beneath the window, and the motel blanket over the curtains blocks everything except the faint glow of the parking lot light at the edges.

The anger hasn't left. It's quieter now, settled into the spaces between my ribs alongside the ache, the warmth, the deep exhaustion that follows sex driven by something harder than desire. I don't pretend it's gone. She doesn't ask me to.

She stays on her side of the bed, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating from her skin, far enough that we're not touching. The distance is hers. I don't close it.

She sleeps before I do. Her breathing evens out, and the guarded posture she carries in the waking hours releases muscle by muscle into the mattress. I listen to it settle and let my thoughts move past her into the territory she used to occupy.

Clint buying a round at the competitor bar. The girl beside him who'd never seen the earring vendor's booth. The carrier with the S.H. authorization parked behind the Thornton trailers. Sandy's face in a photograph that sits inside my stock-supply catalog, tucked between routing codes I copied off Neil's sealed packets.

The phantom carriers. High Mesa Livestock and Sandoval Hauling. Both approved through the same compliance office, both absent from the FMCSA carrier database despite hauling livestock across state lines, both running routes that overlap with the circuit calendar and the disappearance pattern she mapped.

Morgan can't carry this anymore. She surrendered the tools, the access, the authority. What's left is mine to move or leave where it sits.

Clint bought a round. Same grin. Different girl. The corridor is still recruiting, and whoever signs the approvals sits inside APRA's compliance office, matching initials I've been staring at for months.

The girls being funneled through the corridor don't have time for me to decide whether I trust the woman next to me. They need the evidence I've been collecting in a stock-supply catalog and an encrypted email account, delivered to someone who can act on it.

By morning, I call Torres. I tell her the carrier information involves an immediate threat, and I begin the process of getting my evidence into the task force's hands without giving up my rights. The catalog. The photographs. The routing codes I copied myself. Material Morgan never had and never turned over. Whatever she and I are can wait. That girl beside Clint can't.

14

MORGAN

My phone vibrates against the nightstand while the gap around the blanket-covered window is still the color of wet slate. Slade's side of the bed is empty and already cool, the sheet thrown back in one hard fold.

It's Torres, who pulled me off her task force yesterday afternoon. I answer with sleep still in my voice.

"Carroll."

"I’m with an entry team inside a pole barn on leased grazing land south of Deming," Torres says. "Before you ask, this has nothing to do with Carrick, and nothing about this call puts you back on anything."

Radio traffic stutters behind her voice, and somebody on the channel calls a room clear in a bored cadence that still sounds wary of the next door. "Then why are you calling me?"

"Because my medics are working on a woman with no identification, and you saw Penny Jenner more times than anyone in my building. Stay on the line."

I'm on my feet by the time she finishes, dragging the first shirt my hand finds off the carpet. It's his, and it hangs halfway to my knees. A younger voice cuts across the radio behind Torres, pitched high with effort. "No radial. Checking carotid." A long burst of static follows. "Carotid's there. It's thready. Respirations are slow and shallow. Pushing naloxone."

I stand in a motel room in a borrowed shirt, the carpet gritty under my bare feet. Strangers are deciding whether a woman who might be Penny lives through the next few minutes, and all I can do is listen.

Torres stays on the line and lets the silence run. Boots scrape concrete somewhere near her. A generator coughs and dies, and a stall door slams loud enough to rattle the speaker.

The voice of the medic comes through again. "She's breathing on her own. She's moving. Get me a blanket and the stretcher."

"She's alive," Torres says, as though I might have missed it. "Now I need to know who she is. I'm not calling a family in Las Cruces on a guess. I'm sending a secure identification link. It expires when you close it."

The link comes through, and the image loads in slow bands from the top down. It shows a backboard under the white glare of a portable scene light. Beneath a clear oxygen mask, the skin around her mouth has gone the gray of old dishwater. The sun streaks in her hair have dulled into the dirt, and a zip tie has worn a raw groove around the wrist lying across her stomach.

One earlobe is torn and bare. From the other hangs a silver-and-turquoise drop, the stone the pale blue of a stock tank at noon. The artist in Gallup made six pairs, and Penny had the last two.

"That's her," I say. "That's Penny."

"You're certain."