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A minute later I was on the walkway with Torres on the line. She listened all the way through, without a sound on her end.

"He's offering you your own leverage back," she said when I finished. "Why?"

"Because me gone is safer than me leashed."

"Or he wants you alone in the dark behind a cattle pen." Paper rustled near her phone. "Go. Let him talk. My people will be closer than you'll like and farther than he'll see. You don't touch him unless he gives you no choice."

"And if he gives me no choice?"

"Then you stop the second you have one."

The line went dead. That was this morning. Now the sun is down behind a row of livestock haulers. The new fairgrounds smells like wet concrete and the diesel of stock contractors backing rigs to the unloading chutes. The borrowed sorrel is fed and watered in a stall at the end of the barn aisle.

I took the long way into town with a gray sedan two turns behind me for most of the afternoon, and I'd bet my saddle it belonged to Torres. Nothing else followed.

At dusk, a heavyset agent with a gray crew cut met me inside an empty stock trailer at the back of the lot. He taped a transmitter under my shirt, against the side that isn't bruised, and held his phone up while Torres's voice came through it.

"Every word goes to my team and to me," she said. "If you want them in early, say you're done. Otherwise they move the second they see steel." Then he slipped out the side door and was gone between the rigs.

The wash rack sits at the far edge of the stock lot, a slab of concrete with a drain in the center and a pipe rail on three sides. One floodlight on a pole throws a hard white circle across it.

Beyond the circle, trailers stand in rows, and the gaps between them are black. Neil will come out of one of those gaps. He always does.

The transmitter presses under my shirt when I breathe. Out past the rigs, Torres's people are listening to the silence with me.

A bull bawls in the holding pens behind me. Hooves ring on a ramp. A gate chain rattles and drops.

"You came alone."

His voice arrives from the left, from the dark between a gooseneck and a stock trailer. Then Neil steps into the edge of the light, halfway in and halfway out. He's wearing the pressed shirt and the clean boots.

His face is the forgettable arrangement of features the circuit has never bothered to remember, but something is wrong with it now. The skin around his eyes is tight, and his mouth has thinned to a line.

"You said alone."

"I say a lot of things. You used to listen." He holds up a manila envelope, not padded, the flap tucked. "The picture. The receipt. That's everything I have with your name on it."

"That's everything you brought."

His mouth twitches. "Terms are simple. You leave and drive south tonight. You go back to mending some rancher's fence at the end of a dirt road, and you never say one word to anybody about envelopes. You do that, and Wyoming never sees your name on the Lubbock delivery."

"And Clint never has to explain where Sandy went after she waved goodbye."

Neil goes still. In his shirt pocket, a phone buzzes against the fabric, stops, and buzzes again. He doesn't reach for it.

"Your phone wants you," I say.

"My phone can wait."

"Somebody up the line doesn't think so." I keep my voice easy for the wire under my shirt. "Who signs off on your route exceptions these days, Neil? Still S.H.?"

"You never did learn which questions to ask."

The buzzing starts a third time. Neil's hand twitches toward his pocket and stops. Whatever is on the other end of that phone, he's decided it matters less than standing on this slab with me. A man who works for careful people doesn't make that choice unless something personal has gotten into the works.

"You know what you did to me?" His voice stays low, but it's lost its instructional flatness. "The better part of a year, I ran you clean. You carried what I handed you. You made the introductions. You kept your mouth shut. Then some fed in borrowed boots shows up on the circuit, and you start sending Clint on fool's errands and walking girls back to their friends. Do you know what that looks like from where I stand? It looks like a man who can't keep a dog on a leash."

"I was never your dog."