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Clint is talking close to her ear. His free hand rests on the small of her back, light and friendly. He's steering her outside of the bar one easy step at a time so he can get her to the dark side of the lot, where his truck is parked beside the Thornton rigs.
I've sent him off on fool's errands. I've needled him about draw sheets. I'm finished being clever.
I walk straight through the crowd, and people get out of my way before they know why. I put myself between Clint and the edge of the light, close enough that he has to stop or walk into me.
"Go back to the grandstand," I tell the girl. "Find your friends. Don't leave with anybody tonight."
She looks at me, then at Clint. "Who are you?"
"Somebody who's seen how this ends."
"Easy, Carrick," Clint says. The grin is still in place. "We're just talking."
"Then you're done talking." My voice stays low. "She's leaving. You're staying right here where I can see you."
The girl backs up a step, then another. Whatever she reads in my face or his, it's enough. She turns and pushes into the crowd toward the lights, and the space she leaves behind stays empty between us. Clint's gaze follows her until the crowd closes behind her.
At the far end of the counter, Quinn has gone still with his beer halfway to his mouth. He's staring at his partner like a man who's just seen a horse kick.
"Tell whoever you report to that I'm still here," I tell Clint.
When he turns back to me, the ease has drained out of him. His face is perfectly calm, his eyes flat and appraising as they move across my shoulders, my hands, the distance to the crowd, the distance to his truck. He's taking my measure.
Clint looks at me without the grin, and I recognize the expression. Neil wore it at the Lubbock bar while Sandy waved from the doorway. Clint is counting inventory now, and he's just added me to it.
16
MORGAN
The network is moving, and on haul-out morning it has an entire rodeo circuit to hide inside. We're in our second motel now, across town. My name never touched its register, and Slade moved my sedan out of sight from the road the minute we pulled in.
Through the sliver where the blanket doesn't meet the window frame, the interstate on-ramp turns from black to pewter while stock trailers climb it in a steady line. Goosenecks follow bumper pulls up the grade. A contractor's semi grinds past them with bucking horses shifting behind its slats, and every rig in that line carries paperwork that makes it invisible.
Slade came back from the competitor bar a little after midnight. He set the chain, checked the blanket over the window, and gave me the barrel racer and Clint Wilson in a handful of flat sentences. She went back to her friends, and Clint lost his grin.
Then Slade stretched out on top of the covers, fully dressed, boots and all, with his face toward the door. He told me Clint had added him to the inventory in the tone another man would use to report rain.
I didn't ask what inventory meant on this circuit. I've spent this whole deployment learning the answer.
When I turn from the window, he's at the sink in his jeans with a roll of athletic tape in one hand. The bruise along his left side has faded from green to a mottled yellow that looks worse under the vanity light. He tears a strip free with a snap of his wrist and lays it across his ribs without a flinch.
"You're wrapping it too low," I tell him.
"I've been taping my own ribs since before you carried a badge."
"You've been taping them badly since before I carried a badge."
I reach for the roll. He lifts it out of my hand without looking at me and lays the next strip directly over the last one.
"Low's where it hurts," he says.
"That's the argument for wrapping higher."
He catches my wrist and sets two of my fingers on the bruise below the tape, where the yellow darkens toward plum and the swelling still runs hot. "There," he says, and lets go.
His gaze holds mine in the mirror, level and unhurried, until I give up the point. "You're thinking about Hendricks."
"I'm thinking about a man who waves at federal agents in parking lots."
