Page 68 of Rope Burn

He peels the transmitter off my side and adds it to the rest. "Torres heard every word. The knife, the Jimmy line, and you asking about S.H." He presses the bag shut. "She heard you stop, too. She said to tell you that."

They walk Neil toward a van that's rolled up from nowhere with its lights off. He turns his head once as they put him in. Whatever was personal in his face is gone now, and what's left looks like a man working out how many of his coming years he can trade away. I don't watch him long enough to find out.

My ribs are on fire. The knife found my forearm after all, and a thin line of blood beads along the cut in my sleeve. An agent photographs the sleeve and the cut beneath it before the medic swabs the cut and closes it with strips. The shirt goes into an evidence bag.

The crew-cut agent digs an FBI sweatshirt out of the van and throws it at me. I pull it on over the tape and the bruises.

I leave the wash rack to the agents and walk back to the barn. The sorrel lifts his head when I come down the aisle. I stop at his stall and rest my forearms on the door, and my hands hang over the top rail in the aisle light.

They're the same hands, with the same scars across the knuckles. Tonight they opened when I told them to. The sorrel snorts at the antiseptic on my arm and goes back to his hay, unimpressed.

Dax Corbin sits on an upturned bucket outside the tack room across the aisle, working saddle soap into his rigging with his thumb. His eyes come up when I stop in front of him. They drop to the letters across the sweatshirt and come back up.

"Heard there was some excitement behind the wash rack," he says.

"There was."

"You start it?"

"I finished it." I nod at the sorrel down the aisle. "That horse belongs to a man who trusted me with him. He needs feed morning and night and somebody to check his left front. Can you keep him until I'm back?"

Dax sets the rigging down across his knees. "Back from where?"

"Albuquerque."

He studies me a long moment. Whatever he sees in my face, it settles something behind his own.

"You told me to find you when I was ready," I say. "I'm going in tonight."

He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a folded stack of pages with two prints on top, their corners soft from handling. It's the man at the Fort Worth pens and the same man at Las Cruces, different hat, same bones, with a timeline in Dax's handwriting underneath.

"Then these go in with you." He holds the stack out. "Those came out of the circuit's own photo archives. The Fort Worth shot is from the night Tyler Brennan died. The Las Cruces shot is from the night Grant went down. The timeline's mine. Put it on her table and tell her I'll give her a statement myself."

I take it. The paper is warm from his jacket. "She'll have it tonight."

"I'll take care of the horse," Dax says, and picks the rigging back up.

"If I'm not back, call his owner. The number's on the stall card."

Dax nods without looking up. His thumb keeps working the soap into the leather.

I carry his pages out to my truck and drive off the grounds. When Morgan called from the road this afternoon, I told her to stay away from the fairgrounds and wait at the truck stop past the interchange, nose out.

Her car sits at the dark end of the lot behind a row of idling semis. She's leaning against the fender with her arms crossed, and she straightens when my headlights find her.

I park two spaces down and get out. Under the sodium lights, she sees the FBI letters across the sweatshirt first. Then she reads my face, all at once and without apology, as she has since the ranch.

"Whose sweatshirt is that?"

"Evidence kept my shirt."

"Why would evidence need your shirt?" Her gaze drops to my left arm, held tight against my side. She doesn't step toward me. She's learned that much. "Are you hurt?"

"Neil's in a van," I tell her. "The knife's in a bag. I'm standing here."

Her breath goes out of her. Whatever she wants to ask about the wash rack, she keeps. Her arms stay folded tight.

I give her the next part as plainly as I'd call a steer's break to a hazer. "I'm going to Torres. Tonight."