Page 77 of Rope Burn

I've been awake long enough that the dashboard has started to swim. I don't sleep. Somewhere on the I-40 corridor, a line of trailers is running down a road my lag put on a wall in Las Cruces. I can't stop running it with them.

Delilah scratched the days into plywood with her thumbnail until the number frightened the new girls. Sandy made every woman in that room say her own name out loud at night.

I built a chart with a gray bar for Sandy and for every woman whose file I could find. Delilah never had a file, and none of the bars told me what the plywood smelled like.

"Say it," Slade says.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Whatever you're chewing on. You're about to crack a molar."

"I'm recused. I don't chew on anything."

"You're chewing on Torres's convoy."

"I'm chewing on a chart," I tell him. "I drew the route they'd take. If I drew it wrong, those women cross a state line and vanish on my mistake."

He lets the fear ride in the cab with us for a mile and leaves it alone.

"Tomorrow I call Wyoming," he says.

It takes me a moment to follow him out of my own head. "What will you tell them?"

"I'll tell them where to find me."

The road hums under the tires. I keep my eyes on the windshield. If I look at him, I'll say something that belongs to the part of me that learned procedure at Quantico. Nothing in a procedure changes what he's decided.

"Okay," I say.

His left hand takes the wheel, and his right settles at the back of my neck. His thumb presses below my ear, steady and deliberate, until my shoulders drop. Then he takes the hand back and drives.

A few miles later, the question I've been holding since the lobby comes loose. "You know they'll be waiting at the fairgrounds. Neil knew your truck. A Thornton hand watched you in the sorting alley, and a pickup tailed you onto the interstate the same night."

"They know the sorrel's in that barn, too." His eyes stay on the road. "Dax left a message while I was upstairs. The sorrel's left front leg went from warm to hot after dark, and the owner's hauling his own string out of state and can't get here for days. Torres has a warrant team headed to the fairgrounds for Clint. We go in daylight, stay where people are, load the horse, and get out before they get there."

"Where does that leave me?"

"Beside me." He cuts around a cattle hauler close enough to read its mud flaps. "You stay where I can see you."

It's dangerous. It's also the one destination on our road where law enforcement is already moving. I check the Glock at my hip and settle back in the seat.

The fairgrounds sit at the edge of town behind a chain-link fence and a row of cottonwoods gone gold at the tips. By the time we pull in, the morning slack is underway.

The PA crackles out a header and heeler I don't recognize, then a time, then the announcer's opinion of the time. The grandstand is mostly empty, a few families in the shade under the press box and a scatter of contestants' wives with coolers at their feet. Dust hangs over the arena in a fine tan haze.

Slade parks in the contestant lot nose out, between a living-quarters gooseneck and a flatbed stacked with round bales. He sits with the engine ticking and reads the lot before he opens his door.

The barn is cooler than the lot and smells of cedar shavings and alfalfa. I push my sunglasses up into my hair against the shade. Dax Corbin sits on an upturned bucket outside the tack room with the look of a man who's been there all night and intends to die there. The borrowed sorrel hangs his head over the stall door and nickers at Slade.

Dax looks at me, then at Slade. "Neil Vogt left in a van."

"I heard," I say.

"Everybody heard." Dax stands and stretches his back. "He ate. He drank. The sorrel's left front is still hot. I've been cold-hosing it since daylight."

Slade goes into the stall and runs his hand down the sorrel's leg, then lifts the hoof between his knees and studies it with the attention he gives parking lots.

I stand in the aisle and let myself look at him, the wide back bent over the hoof and the thick forearm with its ladder of tape. His scarred hand moves down the leg as if it's reading the bone, precise despite the ribs he's favoring.