Page 2 of Rope Burn

I'm ten more days from Torres's office. "Tonight," I say.

The party is in a bar off the Lubbock fairgrounds with neon over the door and a gravel lot packed with stock trailers. It smells like spilled beer and boot leather, and nobody's checking IDs after dark. I drop the envelope in the gooseneck compartment of Clint's trailer on the way in, and the contraband side of the night is done.

Sandy Canutson is easier to spot than I expected. She's leaning against the counter, talking to a barrel racer whose name I can't place, and the laugh that carries over the jukebox is warm and uncomplicated. Her hair is pulled back, and she's wearing a denim jacket with pins on the collar. She looks like she's having the best night of her week.

I buy her a drink because that's how the introduction starts. She thanks me with a smile that has no edges to it and asks if I'm the steer wrestler who posted the fastest time.

"Got lucky," I tell her.

"Luck doesn't throw steers," she says, and I can tell she means it.

"Glenna explained everything?"

Sandy gives me a look that says the question is insulting and names the fee before I can. "I know who Clint is. I know what the weekend pays, and I know Glenna takes too big a cut of it. I've done this before."

I believe her because believing her lets me finish the job.

Clint comes in with Quinn beside him. Quinn heads for the pool tables before I've finished talking. Clint chatting up a woman at a party is nothing Quinn hasn't seen a hundred times.

I step back. Clint turns on the grin, the one I've seen him use on sponsors, buckle bunnies, stock contractors' daughters, anyone he wants something from. Sandy tilts closer to hear him over the music. They look like any other two people meeting at a rodeo bar on a Saturday night.

I stay close, nursing a bottle I don't taste, and watch Clint's hand settle on the small of Sandy's back. She shifts into his palm, and the two of them drift toward a booth in the back where the lighting is worse and the music is louder.

It looks like flirting. Sandy is laughing.

When Clint gets up, Sandy rises with him. His arm goes around her waist as they head for the door. Sandy pauses at the threshold and lifts two fingers in a wave. She's smiling. Nothing about her says help me. Nothing about her says anything except goodnight.

Neil watches from across the room. His eyes follow Sandy, not Clint, not me. He tracks her until the door closes, and only then does he look away.

I notice it, and I don't know what it means.

The jukebox keeps playing. Somebody breaks at the pool table behind me. I sit there and tell myself ten more days. Sandy said she knew the terms. She looked like she meant it.

The run pays in seconds. Everything else collects in years.

1

SLADE

Present Day

Red's head comes up before I hear the engine. Both ears lock north, toward the dirt road that curves around the low mesa and dead ends at Eldridge's gate. The gelding stops chewing with a strand of hay hanging from his mouth and holds still, nostrils working at whatever the wind is carrying that I haven't caught yet.

I set down the wire stretcher, step onto the truck bumper, and shade my eyes against the late-afternoon glare. The fence line runs along the south boundary where the scrub gives way to open desert, and the only thing I should be seeing out here is flat brown nothing all the way northeast to the Florida Mountains which, oddly enough, are in Texas. Instead, a plume of dust rises where the road meets the sky, pale against the brown hills, climbing into the still air because there's no wind to scatter it. I count one vehicle, no escort, no second plume behind it. The speed is too slow for a raid and too visible for how Neil usually works, but neither is safe enough to dismiss. The driver isn't lost. A lost driver turns around before the road gets this rough.

The vehicle disappears behind the mesa. When it comes around the far side, it's a straight shot to the cattle guard.

My keys are in the ignition. The south ridge drops into a drainage that connects to a county road, and from there I can reach Deming, Columbus, or the border before dark. I've mapped the route every day since I arrived, the same way I used to map the exit from an arena box: know your line before you need it.

My competition saddle is still in Prescott, left with a friend after the circuit finals, the last night I competed, because I wasn't planning a return. I sold the horse and the trailer in Lordsburg on the way south, and everything else I own fits behind the truck seat. If I leave before the vehicle reaches the cattle guard, I can be gone in minutes.

I step off the bumper and close Red's gate instead. The gelding watches me with both ears still pointed north. I drop the latch and test it twice. If this goes wrong, he'll run the fence until the wire opens him, and I owe Eldridge better than a dead horse.

Eldridge owns the horse, the land, and every fence post I've set since I showed up. He pays cash, doesn't ask questions, and hasn't maintained his fences since his son moved to Tucson. The bunkhouse has a cot, a propane stove, and a roof that leaks in two places I've patched with roofing tar. Eldridge brings supplies from town every few days. For the better part of a year now, I've fenced, fed, hauled water, and kept my head down while the arenas, the announcers, and the crowds belong to a life that stopped including me. The routine has a shape that leaves little room for bad decisions. Out here the consequences of a mistake are a crooked post or a broken strand. On the circuit, the consequences followed me home. The arrangement gives me what I need and nothing I might mistake for a life.

I call the gelding Red because the rancher never bothered to name him and because it requires exactly the amount of creativity I have left. He's a ranch horse, thick through the barrel and built for rough country, not the arena speed my body still expects. I've ridden him once since I got here. Neither of us enjoyed it.

I go inside for the catalog.