Page 81 of Rope Burn

"It's Morgan."

"Carroll, I can't talk to you."

"Then listen. Two men just tried to put me in a stock trailer at the fairgrounds. One had a pistol, and the other had a hot shot and my service weapon. One round went into the straw. I'm reporting the assault, and I'm reporting what was on the phone they used to set it up. The text says the High Mesa rigs are there to be followed. It says a rig marked C14 is already past Fort Sumner and headed for Texico. Clovis Livestock Transport is the only carrier I've tracked that fits. I think the load is on Clovis."

For a stretch, the only sound on the line is the road.

"Read it to me word for word," Torres says.

I read it. I tell her where Clovis sits in the task-force file: the pen-six intake, linked to the Thornton logs.

A radio breaks squelch behind her, a man's voice clipped and calm. "Lead unit, target vehicles are approaching the rest area. Units in position. Say go."

"All units, hold," Torres says, away from the phone and loud. "Hold, hold, hold. Nobody commits on the High Mesa rigs. Let them run. Put a couple of cars on them and pull everybody else. New target, eastbound on US-84 past Fort Sumner. Clovis Livestock Transport, unit one-four. Get state police moving from Fort Sumner and Clovis now. Get me air if anybody has it."

The radio erupts with voices stepping on each other. Torres comes back to me with the speaker so close to her mouth that I hear her breathe.

"Photograph everything," she says. "Touch nothing. A round fired on a fairground means deputies are about to fall on you, and they're going to ask who you are. You're the victim of an assault and a witness. That's all you are. Stay on the grounds."

"I understand."

"Carroll." The engine noise swells, and her voice pulls away from the phone. When it comes back, she's talking into another phone, and the words carry anyway. "Ostrander, pull every carrier on the route-exception filings in Carroll's files, everything that ever ran on a Director's exception, and put the whole list on every port of entry in the state. I want every certified rig on that list stopped and looked at." She's gone.

"Hendricks sent two men after the wrong woman," Slade says.

"They brought me the route, too. It seemed rude not to read it."

Deputies arrive within minutes. A fairground security guard follows on a golf cart, and contestants drift in from the rows with halters and coffee cups in their hands. I give the first deputy my name, my real one, and Torres's name in Albuquerque as the agent who will confirm it. Slade gives his, and his date of birth, without inflection.

The deputy writes both down, walks to his cruiser, and runs them. When he turns back, his face has changed. He makes a call standing beside his fender, keeps his eyes on Slade the whole time, and ends it with a short nod. He returns to the men on the ground and leaves Slade where he is.

Once the deputy is out of earshot, Slade speaks without turning his head. "I'll call Wyoming tonight. Tomorrow will be too late."

I don't argue with him. Every instinct I have wants another day with him before the law takes its share. I keep that instinct to myself, because the decision is his.

A medic from the arena ambulance lifts my shirt at the side. She presses cool gauze to a pair of small red burns low on my ribs, then to a second pair at the point of my hip. Slade stands over the medic through every inch of the work, a muscle ticking along his jaw, until the gauze is taped.

The ambulance crew splints the younger man's wrist and loads him with a deputy riding along. The Thornton hand folds into the back of a cruiser without a word. At the far end of the grounds, the PA keeps calling teams, because slack doesn't stop for anything short of a loose bull.

Beyond the last row of rigs, a pair of agents in windbreakers walk toward the team roping trailers. FBI runs across their backs in yellow, and a state police officer flanks each of them. They don't hurry. The contestants along the way stare after them without understanding yet, and then with a little more.

Clint is uncinching his sorrel beside Quinn's trailer, talking easy to whoever's in range, until the first windbreaker says his name.

He doesn't run. He looks at them over the saddle. Then he finishes pulling the cinch, slides the saddle off, and settles it on the trailer's rack like any roper at the end of a morning. He sets both hands flat against the side of Quinn's trailer and spreads his feet as if he's practiced the position in his head. One of the agents pulls his wrists behind him, and the cuffs close in full view of the whole roping string.

"I'll talk to you," Clint says, loud enough to carry. "I'll talk to whoever you want."

As they turn him toward the gate, Clint's eyes find Slade across the lot, and for the first time the grin has nowhere to go. Slade holds his gaze without moving until Clint looks away first.

Quinn stands rooted a few yards away with the bay gelding's lead rope in his hand. His face goes from confusion to a colder, older look as the agents walk his partner away.

An agent asks Quinn to take the sorrel. He ties the bay, takes the reins, and tracks Clint's back the whole way out.

At the open end of the barn, facing the trailer rows, Dax stands with his rigging bag over his shoulder while the cuffs go by. When the agents pass, he lifts his chin to Slade once and turns back into the barn.

Slade and I sit on the tailgate of his truck and wait. A deputy stands a respectful distance away, pretending not to listen. The sun climbs, and the shade of the flatbed next to us slides off the tailgate and leaves us in the full glare. Neither of us moves out of it.

Slade's phone rings in my hand more than an hour after Torres hung up on me. I answer before the first ring finishes.