Page 63 of Rope Burn

The logic is sound, and this time someone besides me is covering him. I let it stand.

"When you're inside the building, you text me."

"I'll text you when I'm inside the building because I was already planning to."

"Then we agree."

"We coincide. That isn't the same thing."

His hand comes up and settles on the back of my neck, the calluses rough and warm, his thumb finding the hinge of my jaw. He presses once, a quiet correction, and tips my face up to his.

He takes my mouth slowly and thoroughly, like a man who has already decided what happens next. His fingers spread at my nape and angle my head where he wants it. His tongue strokes against mine, unhurried and deep, and he tastes of black coffee and the cold morning.

My fingers hook into his belt loops. He answers by crowding me back against the door frame until the metal edge presses through my shirt and the heat of him runs the length of my body. When he deepens it, the slow drag pulls the breath out of me. He holds me there, pinned between steel and muscle, until my knees lose interest in their job. The motel and the highway noise go somewhere far away.

When he lets me go, he stays in the doorframe a beat longer. His gaze moves over my face, then past me to the road, taking stock of both.

"Drive like somebody's behind you," he says.

"I've driven like that for a year."

"Today somebody is."

He shuts my door, raps the roof once, and walks to his truck. He lets the engine idle while he checks the lot and the frontage road one more time.

Then his truck rolls out and turns toward the fairgrounds, away from the on-ramp, and a minute later the road is empty. I give him the time he asked for, with the mirrors full of an empty lot. Nothing pulls out after me when I finally leave.

Interstate 10 runs straight east out of the desert with the sun full in my windshield. The people trailing me stay with me the whole way, rolling in a loose convoy of chrome and aluminum.

I spend the miles lining up the week behind Torres's phrase until it points at one decision. I keep seeing two fingers lifted in a courteous wave across a fairground lot.

At Las Cruces I take the exit, and the circuit trailers roll on toward the next stop without me. Slade's truck is on this same road, ahead of me or behind. The mountains stand up ahead of me with their spires sharp against a hard blue sky, close enough now to show the shadow in every fold.

The resident agency occupies the second floor of a beige office building near the university. Torres must have run the Jenner recovery from here, a short drive from the stucco house with oleander crowding its walk. A title company and a dental practice share the ground floor, and a receptionist behind the practice's window is already laughing into a headset when I cross the lobby.

Upstairs, the glass door requires a card. My credentials are still in my pocket, but my building access was suspended the day the review opened, so I press the buzzer like a delivery driver.

Torres opens the door herself. She hands me a laminated badge on a lanyard, and the word printed across it is VISITOR.

"Wear it where people can see it," she says.

"You enjoy this."

"I haven't enjoyed anything since the barn."

I hang the lanyard around my neck. It rests against my collarbone where Morgan Engel's used to ride, and I hate how familiar the weight feels. Then I pull out my phone in the hallway and type the only thing I'm permitted to give him.

Inside.

His answer arrives before I reach the conference room.

Good.

The conference room is small and windowless, with a whiteboard across one wall and a projector humming on a cart. A woman about my age sits at the table behind a laptop and a legal pad crowded margin to margin with tiny, upright print. She rises when I come in and offers her hand.

"Leigh Ostrander," she says. "I inherited your files."

"My condolences."