Page 76 of Rope Burn

She hasn't moved, as far as I can tell. Her hands are on her knees, and her jacket is buttoned to her chin against the air conditioning. When the turnstile clicks, she comes to her feet. She doesn't cross the space between us. She waits for me to cross it, and I do.

"I couldn't do it for you," she says. "But I didn't leave."

The fear from the truck stop is still in her face, and something steadier sits beside it now. "You went in to Torres's people this morning," I say. "You knew she needed me today."

She answers straight. "Since this morning."

"And you let me get here myself."

"It had to be yours." Her chin comes up. "If it came from me, none of it would have been."

I've had people lie to me for my own good my whole life. Nobody's ever kept her mouth shut for it.

I put my hand at the back of her neck and pull her against me, and she comes. I hold her there in front of the security glass with my ribs screaming and my face in her hair. Her fingers knot in the borrowed sweatshirt and don't let go.

Outside the lobby doors, the city is still more dark than light. The interstate hums somewhere past the buildings, carrying freight, stock trailers, and everything else that runs at night.

The warrants are signed. Somewhere on the I-40 corridor, a convoy is moving women down a road my testimony just put on a map.

Torres has thrown everyone she has at it. That leaves me between Morgan and whoever Hendricks sends to clean up what's left, and he's had all night to decide she's part of the mess.

I steer her out into the first of the dawn, my hand at the back of her neck and my eyes on the street. Any car out there could be his.

18

MORGAN

The convoy is moving, and every agent Torres can spare is moving with it. Slade tells me so in the lot behind the field office, in the level voice he saves for weather and cracked ribs. Over the mountains east of the city, the sky thins from charcoal to the color of weak tea.

The trailers rolled out of the yard at dusk. Torres's team is trying to stay on them, and nobody is left over to stay on me.

"So you volunteered," I say.

"I told her." He opens the truck's back door and drags his bag across the seat. "She called Wyoming while I was upstairs. They agreed the warrant stays live, but they put a temporary coordination instruction on it. Anybody who runs my name calls her before they execute it."

It's a leash with a longer lead, and he knows it better than I do.

He changes out of the FBI sweatshirt in the open lot, his back to the building and his eyes on the street. The tape on his ribs has gone gray at the edges. A ladder of white strips closes the cut on his forearm, and the skin around it is swollen and pink. He buttons a clean shirt one-handed from the bag behind his seat and never once looks down at the buttons.

My sedan sits a few spaces away, beaded with dew. I dig my keys out of my jacket, and his hand closes over mine before they clear the pocket.

"Get in the truck," he says.

"My car is parked right there."

"Neil has your plates. Whatever Neil had, assume Hendricks has." He takes the keys out of my fingers and drops them into his own pocket. "It sits here, behind a federal building. You ride with me."

"You just pocketed my car keys. In some jurisdictions that's called theft."

"Report me."

"To whom? You spent the whole night confessing to everybody I know."

The corner of his mouth moves. He opens the passenger door and stands in the gap until I climb in, and then he shuts it with more care than the hinge deserves.

The city falls away behind us in a spill of warehouses and billboards. Past the last exit, the land opens into long brown rolls of grama grass with the sun coming up hard across them.

Slade drives with his left arm tucked tight against his side and his right wrist hooked over the wheel. His gaze returns to the mirror every few seconds with the regularity of a pulse.