Page 54

"I've been living out of motel rooms for most of a year," I tell her. "Home is a strong word."

Torres gives me a long look that carries the disclosure, the recusal, and whose motel room I've been sleeping in. "Then go wherever you've been going," she says, and walks to her car.

The drive back runs into the sunset, the Organ Mountains going red in the mirror until the dark takes them. The fairground is lit when I pull in, the arena lights haloed with bugs and dust, the grandstand half-full and loud.

I park at the edge of the competitor lot and take the route that keeps the stock pens and a row of trailers between me and the livestock intake office. Neil burned my cover. I'm not strolling past the man I now believe built the corridor. The only person I've come to see is the one who told me to find him after his run.

The precaution comes too late to matter. A gap between two trailers opens onto the portable office, where Hendricks stands in the doorway laughing with a stock contractor. His gaze drifts across the lot and finds me in that gap. It rests there a beat, and then he lifts two fingers in a small, courteous greeting.

I can't tell whether it's the wave he'd give Ms. Engel from Western Range Mutual or the one he'd give the federal agent Neil Vogt unmasked. His face remains pleasant and closed, as it always has. I nod back and keep walking, and the back of my neck stays cold until the grandstand is between us.

The steer wrestling is loading when I reach the rail. Slade mounts the borrowed sorrel and backs him into the box on the left while the hazer settles into position on the right. He's sitting a little crooked in the saddle, favoring the left side, and I doubt anyone else in the grandstand catches it.

He nods. The steer drifts left out of the chute. The hazer presses in from the right and straightens the animal while the sorrel closes in a few long strides. Slade leaves the saddle a fraction late, and the catch jars through him so badly that I flinch. The steer drags him through the dirt longer than it should, and the torque he puts into the turn costs him everything from the ribs down.

The animal goes over anyway, four legs pointing the same direction, and the flag drops on a respectable time that won't place. He stands, slaps the dirt off his thigh, and walks out of the arena without a glance at the scoreboard or the stands.

The team roping follows. Clint backs his sorrel into the heading box with an easy slouch, and Quinn settles his bay into the heeling box on the other side of the chute.

The steer breaks, and Clint's loop sails out flat and drops over both horns. He dallies and turns the steer left. Quinn's heel loop sweeps underneath the animal's hind legs and scoops both feet. When the flagger's arm comes down, the crowd roars for a time that will move them up the standings. Clint rides out grinning, and when someone in the front row whistles through her fingers, he tips his hat to her.

Slade is standing at the out-gate. He doesn't step aside, and Clint has to rein his sorrel around him. Clint's smile never slips, but his gaze tracks Slade until the alley swallows them both.

Torres could have Clint in cuffs before he unsaddles. If she's letting him ride, and I'd bet my credentials she is, it's because a free man under surveillance might lead her to Delilah and the women moved before the raid. A man in a holding cell leads nowhere.

What unsettles me is how easy Clint looks. Either word of the raid on the barn hasn't reached him yet, or somebody has told him to rope like nothing happened. Penny drank his coffee and woke up on plywood in the dark. Now he's riding out of the arena to applause.

I applaud with everyone else, because anyone sitting on her hands through a run that clean gets noticed. My palms burn the entire time.

When the roping crowd drifts toward the concession stands, I find Slade at the tailgate of his truck behind the stock trailers, peeling tape off his wrists. He speaks before I've stopped walking.

"Hendricks watched you cross the lot."

"He waves at everybody."

"He doesn't wave at me." He strips another length of tape free. "You watched, too."

"You were late off the horse."

"I was sore off the horse."

"It showed."

"To you." He wads the tape into a ball and flicks it into the bed of the truck. "Nobody else was looking that close."

Slade leans a forearm on the tailgate and waits. He has never filled a silence to make someone else comfortable, and he's not starting tonight.

"I owe you an apology," I say. "I'd like to give it without an argument attached."

"Then say it straight. Don't dress it up."

"I'm sorry. I lied to you about my name, my job, and my reason for showing up at the ranch where you were working. I’m sorry I kept up the lie through everything that followed." My voice stays level because I've decided it will. "The operation might have required it, but I'm the one who chose to do it to you."

Slade looks at me for a long time. The security light on the pole above us buzzes, throwing half his face into shadow.

"The badge I figured out at the ranch," he says finally. "I can live with the badge." He holds my eyes and makes me take the rest. "I don't tell the Cheyenne story, Morgan. Not like I told it to you. I told it to you because I picked you to hear it. You already had it memorized."

"Yes."