Page 69 of Rope Burn

Every piece of her locks. The truck stop keeps going around us, reefer units humming, air brakes hissing at the pumps, a radio playing too loud from an open cab.

Morgan looks at me, and I watch the fear come up in her face and sit there. She lets me see it, and she leaves the choice where it is.

"Okay," she says.

It's one word. Her jaw is set hard enough to crack, and her knuckles have gone white against her sleeves. She's trained to talk me through every trap in that building, and she doesn't say one word of it. It's the first thing between us that nobody arranged.

"Whatever I say in there, Wyoming hears too," I tell her. "The violations are real. I crossed state lines. I missed my reports. I carried for a man I believe killed the last witness who talked. They can put me back inside for any of it."

"I know."

"You didn't ask why tonight."

Her mouth tightens. "Is that a question?"

"No." I close the distance and take her face in my hands, careful with the left arm, not careful with anything else. Her skin is cool from standing out here in the dark. I tip her head back until she has to look straight up at me. "You're following me up. You're not sitting in a motel alone while Hendricks's people clean house."

"I was already coming."

"Then you'll drive behind me, and you'll keep my taillights in your windshield the whole way."

The corner of her mouth moves. "You're giving me orders on the way to confess to the federal government."

"Somebody has to be in charge of something tonight."

She lets out a sound that's almost a laugh and puts her hand flat over mine on her jaw. She holds it there. She doesn't look away, and whatever she's afraid of, she's decided to carry it up the road with me.

Sandy is in that Lubbock doorway again, lifting two fingers. I'm moving now. I kiss Morgan once, hard enough to hold until Albuquerque, and I walk to my truck.

The drive to Albuquerque takes hours. Her headlights sit in my mirror mile after mile, at the distance I told her to keep, and I check them at every straightaway. They stay where I put them.

Dax's pages ride on the seat beside me on top of the stock-supply catalog. The catalog's inside cover is black with my own handwriting, routing codes copied from Neil's envelopes and carrier numbers from the Deming library. Sandy's photograph is tucked between the pages where it always rides.

The Albuquerque field office is a multi-story block of sandstone and brown brick lit up against the dark. The lobby has a row of hard chairs on the public side of a security wall made of thick glass with a turnstile in the middle. A guard sits behind a desk.

Morgan stops at the chairs. She doesn't reach for the turnstile, and she doesn't explain why. She sits. She puts her hands on her knees and looks up at me.

"I'll be here," she says.

Torres comes down to the turnstile herself. She looks worse than her voice sounded this morning, with shadows under her eyes and her sleeves shoved up to the elbow. Her gaze moves to Morgan in the chair, holds there for one beat, and comes back to me without comment.

"Carrick. Let's go upstairs."

The turnstile clicks. I walk through it alone and don't look back. If I look back, I'll see Morgan's face, and I need everything I have for the room.

Upstairs, the room is small, carpeted, and too bright. The AUSA is a lean man with his tie pulled loose and a legal pad already half-full in front of him. Torres sits beside him. I sit across from both of them and set the catalog and Dax's pages on the table between us.

Torres goes through it all before anybody asks me a single question. She tells me I should talk to a lawyer before I say a word. Nobody has charged me federally, and I walked in on my own. No court-appointed lawyer is waiting downstairs. If they arrest and charge me, a judge can appoint one at my first appearance. Right now, my choices are to stop and find counsel or to go on without it.

Then the AUSA explains the letter. If I tell the truth, the government won't use my statements directly in its case-in-chief against me. It can follow every lead I give it. It can use what I say if I lie, if I contradict myself later, or if I break the agreement. The letter binds this U.S. Attorney's Office. It doesn't bind Wyoming, and it doesn't bind my parole officer.

"You understand that," Torres says. It isn't quite a question.

"Tomorrow's too late."

"That isn't what I asked."

"I understand. I'm going on without one." I pull the letter across the table and sign it. The pen is cheap and skips on the loop of the C. "Write that down, too."