Page 56 of Rope Burn

I stood at the corner of the stock pens with my phone against my ear and Morgan locked in my truck, close enough to the security light that I could see the cab over the rails. The light buzzed the whole time I talked. I gave Torres the plate number, a description of the girl, and what I'd seen at Clint's trailer. She didn't interrupt once. When I finished, the line went quiet long enough that I checked the screen to see whether the call had dropped.

"Send the photographs through the link I'm texting you," she said. "Then you stop."

"Stop what?"

"Whatever you're about to do. You bring me what you already have, all of it, to one room in Albuquerque. We set the date when you can put everything on my table at once. Until then, you compete and you keep your head down."

"And if something walks past me?"

"Then you write down what time it walked past." She let that sit. "Carrick. I can't protect a witness who's running his own case."

Then the line went dead, and I walked back to the truck with the link already lighting up my screen.

Everything means more than I have right now. Torres told me to bring her what I already had. She didn't tell me to crawl behind feed bunks with a camera, and if this goes wrong, I won't be able to pretend I misunderstood her.

Morgan is still asleep on her side of my bed when I leave the room. She set my keys on the nightstand last night with a small, deliberate click, and I take them and let her sleep.

The blanket stays wedged across the curtains. I check the lot before I step out, and I check it again before I start the truck.

The fairground wakes up in stages. Stock hands move feed through the alleys in the half-dark, and a pickup drags the arena while a tractor idles behind it.

The draw sheet taped inside the office window has Clint and Quinn near the top of the morning slack. That means the team ropers who didn't make a performance will run for an empty grandstand while every hand on the grounds is busy at the chutes.

Neil never moved anything during a performance. He moved it during slack, when nobody was watching the lots because everybody was working. I carried his envelopes through enough of those mornings to know which gate opens and who stands beside it.

I take a halter off my hook and walk the back side of the pens like a man looking for a loose horse. Nobody looks twice at a steer wrestler carrying a halter.

The barrier releases, and Clint's loop is over both horns before the steer reaches the center of the arena. Quinn catches both feet, and the flag drops on a run that will keep them in the average.

Instead of stripping his saddle, Clint hands his sorrel to a kid from the roping string and walks toward the east loading chute. The portable compliance office sits at the head of that chute, a white trailer with an APRA placard and a folding step. I've watched enough loads clear a trailer like that to know nothing leaves the chute until the paperwork does. Hendricks walked into one just like it with his reading glasses on his forehead, and that was the first time the letters in my head found somewhere to land.

A rig is backed up to the chute with its ramp down, its vented aluminum sides dull in the early light and its doors latched. The tractor is Thornton's, the company's old logo still ghosting through the paint on the driver's door. The removable placard hung on the trailer's side panel reads HIGH MESA LIVESTOCK. The APRA compliance sticker on the bumper matches the one I watched back into the staging lane behind Clint's truck.

I work my way into the alley between two sorting pens and crouch behind a feed bunk. Steers shift around me, restless and warm, and their hooves grind the dirt. I ease the phone out of my shirt pocket.

A clerk in an APRA polo steps out of the compliance trailer with a padded envelope. He hands it to the driver, and Clint stands at the driver's shoulder with a hand on his back, laughing at a joke I'm too far away to catch.

The flap carries a green seal. There's a stamp in the upper corner.

I know that envelope. I know its weight in a man's hand and how the seal cracks if you bend it wrong. I carried more of them for Neil than I can count, and every one of them had two letters in that corner.

I zoom in and take the picture anyway, then a few more. The stamp comes out a blur at this distance, and I let it stay a blur.

Torres doesn't need me to tell her what it says. She needs me to tell her what I carried.

The driver climbs into the cab. Clint slaps the door, easy and friendly, and the rig pulls out through the east gate.

The trailer rides silent, and no hoof shifts on its aluminum floor. It could be running empty. It could be carrying something that knows better than to kick the walls. I photograph the plate as it passes the gatepost and let Torres decide which.

Then I turn the lens on the clerk while he stands on the folding step checking his clipboard. I get his face sharp and full.

Boots crunch behind me.

"Carrick."

The stock hand coming down the alley is one of the older Thornton men, sun-cured and quiet, with a hot shot hooked on his belt. He stops a few feet away and looks at the halter in my hand, then at the phone.

"Loose sorrel," I tell him. "Got out of the string this morning."