Page 79 of Rope Burn

Everybody in these rows is minding their own horse, because slack runs at the other end of the grounds. This is when the network works, when every hand is busy with its own stock and nobody is counting anyone else's.

Halfway down the third row, a white pickup sits hitched to a bumper-pull stock trailer. Under the white, an old logo ghosts through the paint on the driver's door, the arc of a T and a line of lettering somebody rolled over with a cheap brush. I've watched that logo roll through the east gate on footage from every stop where a rig on my chart arrived late.

The trailer's rear gate stands open against the side. Somebody has thrown fresh straw over the floor.

I've read the medical examiner's paragraph about Sandy's wrists. I've sat at the other end of a sofa from Penny while she talked about the plywood. It never occurred to me, in all those files, to wonder what the inside of the trailer looked like. It looks like this. It looks clean.

A phone buzzes in the younger man's left hand. He glances at it. It buzzes again. He thumbs a reply one-handed, and the muzzle drifts a fraction of an inch off my ribs while he types.

"Step up," the older man says.

I put one boot on the trailer's rear step and grab the gate frame with my right hand, the way any woman climbing into a stock trailer would. The younger man shifts in behind me to push.

Then I turn into him. I pivot on the step and come down on his gun arm with both hands. The pistol goes off into the straw with a crack that slaps back at us from the aluminum walls. I drive his wrist into the gate's slam latch with everything my hips can give me. Bone meets steel. Steel wins. His fingers spring open, and the pistol drops between my boots.

He comes forward, and my elbow comes back. It catches him flush across the nose. The feed-store cap flies off, and he folds against the trailer's side with both hands over his face and blood pouring through his fingers.

The hot shot finds me before I can turn around.

The prod snaps against my ribs. Pain punches through me, white and immediate, and my right leg jerks hard enough to knock my boot off the step. My knee hits the lip of the trailer floor before I can catch myself.

The prongs strike again near my hip. My thigh kicks under me, useless for one brutal second, and my teeth close on the inside of my cheek.

The older man's free hand reaches back for the gun in his waistband, and I grab the fiberglass shaft. He's stronger than I am, but he doesn't expect me to pull. I yank the shaft across my body and slam it against the gate frame, and his grip slips. I wrench the handle free, reverse it, and drive the prongs into his forearm. My thumb finds the button. The prod snaps, and he yells and jerks away with his hand empty.

I roll into the trailer, and the prod clatters off the step behind me. Loose straw scratches under my shoulder and burned powder hangs in the enclosed space beside the bright gouge the bullet left in the aluminum floor.

I sweep one hand through the straw and close my fingers around the younger man's pistol. I come up on my knees in the dim box with the gun in both hands and the sights on the older man's shirt.

At the back of the trailer, he's scooped the hot shot off the step. It dangles from one hand while his other hand hovers at his back. His eyes are pale and unblinking, measuring me against the distance to the gun. Behind him, the younger man is slumped against the pickup's rear tire, cradling his wrist and breathing wet through his mouth.

"That shot's bringing half the grounds," the older man says. "You won't fire again with people running this way."

"Then you'd better decide how much you trust that."

His eyes narrow.

I keep the gun steady.

"Because I'm not the one who has to cross the distance between us."

My right side is still twitching, and the muscles in my thigh keep firing in small hot bursts. The pistol doesn't move. I've qualified on worse days and with less reason to hit what I aimed at.

His hand stays where it is another second. It comes forward slowly, fingers spread, and the hot shot drops at his feet.

"On your knees," I say. "Hands on your head."

He goes down. He's glaring at me when a shadow lengthens across the gravel behind him.

Slade comes around the nose of the next gooseneck at a dead run with my sunglasses in his fist. He sees the pistol in my hands and the man on his knees, and he slows to a walk that eats the last few yards of ground.

The older man hears Slade too late and turns his head. A boot lands between his shoulder blades and shoves, and the man goes face-first into the dirt. Slade drops a knee into his back and pins his wrist to the gravel, a hand's width from the Glock in his waistband.

He leaves the gun where it is. A man on parole keeps his hands off firearms, mine included, today included.

"That's the Thornton hand from the sorting alley," he says.

"He brought a friend."