Page 67 of Rope Burn

"You were always my dog." He takes a step into the light. "Your parole was my collar. Your file was my leash. And the people I answer to have spent weeks asking why my dog keeps biting their business."

"Then give them their answer. Tell them you lost."

He laughs, and there's nothing in it. "I've got orders to be halfway across the state tonight. I'm standing in cow piss talking to you instead. You should be flattered."

"I'm not."

"No. You're not much of anything anymore." He drops the envelope between us, just outside my reach. "Pick it up and leave."

I don't move. Neil watches me not move, and the last of the professional drains out of his face. His right hand goes behind his hip. When it comes back, a folding knife flicks open in it with a small, oiled click, and the blade catches the light.

Out past the floodlight, agents are already moving, but steel and concrete work faster than men crossing a stock lot. Neil comes in low and fast, like a man who's done it before.

I turn my left side away from the blade on instinct and pay for it. My ribs light up white and hot, and the breath tears out of me. The knife slashes across the sleeve of my shirt and doesn't find skin.

I catch his wrist on the second pass. It's thinner than I expected, all tendon and bone. I bend it back against the joint until his fingers open, and the knife clatters down and spins toward the drain. His free fist catches me under the bruise, and for one blind second the world narrows to a ringing red point.

Then every steer I've ever thrown takes over. I've taken five hundred pounds of running steer to the ground with a twist of the horns and a drop of my hip. Neil weighs a fraction of that, and he has no idea how to fall.

I hook his neck, plant my boot, and turn him over my hip. He hits the wash rack flat on his back. The back of his head cracks against the concrete, and the sound goes straight through me.

I'm on him before he can roll. My knee pins his chest to the slab. My left hand fists in that pressed collar, and my right hand draws back on its own, knuckles closed, the white scars across them lit up under the flood.

Neil blinks up at me through the pain. His lip is split, and there's blood on his teeth. He knows where he is. He knows what I am. He smiles.

"Go on," he says. "Jimmy Whitfield only took one. Show me how it's done."

My fist hangs over his face, and every angle of it is the same. Concrete sits under his skull. The man on his back asked for it, and my right hand is cocked at the height it held in Cheyenne. At twenty-two I didn't know what one punch could do. I know now.

The knife lies by the drain, and Neil's hands lie empty at his sides. At twenty-two, nobody was coming. Tonight Torres's people are already running. Neil doesn't need to be stopped. He's already stopped. I open my fist, and every muscle from my knuckles to my shoulder locks around the blow I don't deliver.

"No," I tell him.

Neil's smile slips. For the first time since I've known him, he looks at me as if he doesn't know what I'm about to do. I'll take that look over the punch.

The shadows beyond the floodlight come apart. Flashlights sweep across the wash rack from three directions at once, and voices shout over each other. "FBI! Hands! Let me see your hands!"

I raise both of mine and keep my knee where it is. The crew-cut agent drops beside me and takes Neil's wrists.

"We've got him, Carrick. Off. Slow."

I get off slow. The agent rolls Neil onto his stomach, and the cuffs ratchet closed. A medic kneels beside him and shines a penlight into his eyes before anyone stands him up.

Another agent kicks the knife farther from the drain and crouches over it with a gloved hand. A third lifts the manila envelope by one corner and slides it into a clear evidence bag.

In the bag, the envelope's flap has come loose. The corner of the motel photograph shows through the plastic: a dresser, a curtain, and my scarred hand against Morgan's bare skin.

Under it sits a small carbon-copy receipt, too small to read from where I stand. I don't need to read it. I signed it in Lubbock the night I dropped Neil's envelope in Clint's trailer and walked into the bar where I introduced Sandy to Clint.

Neil's phone buzzes one more time as the crew-cut agent lifts it from his shirt pocket. The screen lights before he can seal it away, and the lock screen shows two notifications stacked one above the other. The first is a missed call from CLINT W. The second is a text preview from a number with no name.

Where the hell are you? It all moves tonight. Director's call, not mine.

"Don't touch the screen," the agent says. "Read what you can see."

I read both notifications aloud while another agent photographs the display. The crew-cut agent seals the phone into its own bag and writes on the label. "Torres drove back to Albuquerque this afternoon to write paper. She's in her office. She said to tell you the door's open, and she said you'd know what that meant."

I know what it means. I also know why the door's open tonight instead of next week. It all moves tonight.