Page 57 of Rope Burn

"Ain't in here."

"Then I'll keep looking."

He holds his ground in the alley. I let him. I stand up to my full height, and the alley gets smaller for both of us.

After a long moment, he turns sideways and lets me pass. When I glance back from the end of the pens, he's still standing there, watching the path I took, with his phone already out.

That's the price of looking for trouble. Somebody sees you find it.

I spend the afternoon doing what a competitor does. I clean the arena dirt out of the borrowed saddle, check the sorrel's shoes, and wrap my ribs tight enough to breathe around.

The bruising has gone from purple to a sick green at the edges. The ache has settled deep enough that I can compete through it if I don't think about it.

The steer wrestling loads under the lights that night. I back the sorrel into the box and let him feel my weight settle. The hazer nods from the other box.

I nod, and the chute gate bangs open. The steer takes its head start with its horns low, and the barrier cord pops loose across the sorrel's chest as we leave the box. The sorrel drives hard and flat across the dirt. On the far side, the hazer's horse runs stride for stride with us, pinning the steer between the two horses so it can't duck off its line. Arena dust stings my eyes, and the grandstand blurs into one long roar.

The steer's head comes back even with my stirrup. I lean down and hook my right arm around its right horn, lay my left hand on the other, and let the sorrel run out from under me. For one long stride I hang over a running animal with nothing beneath me but ground coming up fast.

My heels hit. The arena rips at my boot heels, and they plow the dirt behind us. The steer's full weight slams into my shoulder. My ribs light up. I set my weight against the pain anyway and ride the drag until the animal starts to slow.

It fights the stop. I twist its head up and around, drop my hip into its neck, and use its own momentum against it. The steer tips, hangs for a breath, and crashes onto its side in a burst of dust. The flag snaps down before I've let go of the horns, and the time on the board puts me back in the money.

Nobody in the grandstand knows what that run cost. I know what it's worth.

After the performance, I sit in my truck with the dome light off and the stock-supply catalog open across the steering wheel. The routing codes I copied off Neil's sealed packets fill the inside cover in my own cramped handwriting. Sandy's photograph is tucked between the pages where it always is. Under the High Mesa entry, I add today's date, the east chute, the trailer plate, and Clint's name, then draw a line from the carrier number to the compliance trailer.

I lay the day beside the years. The night of Lubbock, Neil handed me a padded envelope in the shadow between two trailers and said, "Clint's trailer. Route exception's already approved." S.H. sat in the corner of that envelope, where it sat on every envelope. I delivered it. Then I walked into a bar and introduced Sandy to Clint.

A few months before that, outside a sale barn in Prescott, Neil held his phone in front of my face for a few seconds and pulled it back. He wanted me to understand how far up the protection went.

A green bar ran across the top of that screen, and it meant nothing to me then. The green seal on this morning's envelope drags it back. Only pieces come with it.

Route exception approved… High Mesa… S.H.

I read it then as proof that Neil's people owned somebody at the compliance office. Now the initials read like a name. The Director's name is posted on the compliance office wall at every stop on this circuit.

Before her recusal, Morgan spread a High Mesa approval page across my bed, and the S.H. designation sat in its approval column with a date months before Lubbock. Wade brought me Kenna's finding, and it put an S. Hendricks on a shell company's consulting payments. This morning a clerk carried the same envelope out of the compliance trailer and handed it across while Clint laughed.

I can't prove what the letters mean. Kenna's records and Torres's subpoenas will have to do that. I can put my hand on a Bible and swear to what I carried, what Neil showed me as far as I remember it, who stood beside the trailers, and which gate opened. That's testimony. The rest is somebody else's job.

When I pull out of the lot, a pair of headlights picks me up a couple of turns out of the fairground. It holds a steady distance behind me on the frontage road. Judging by the height of the lights, it's a pickup.

I pass the motel without slowing, take the on-ramp, and drive a few miles of interstate at the limit with my eyes on the mirror. At the next exit I leave the highway with no signal and swing into a truck stop. I nose in between a pair of idling semis, and my truck disappears into their shadows.

The pickup comes down the ramp a minute later. It rolls slowly through the fuel islands, its driver a shape without a face behind the glare. Then it pulls back onto the frontage road and heads east.

I wait until the diesel fumes and the hum of the reefers are the only company I have. Then I drive back to the motel the long way, on county roads with no lights, and I park on the far side of the building from the room.

Morgan's car sits in the front row of the motel lot. Lamplight edges the blanket over our window.

The door opens as I reach it. She reads my face as fast and completely as she read it at the ranch the first day, with no pretense that she's doing anything else.

"Somebody saw you," she says, and it isn't a question.

"A Thornton hand. He had his phone out before I cleared the pens."

She steps back to let me in and locks the door behind me herself. I set the phone on the dresser and turn the screen toward her. She keeps her eyes on my face.