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She sits down beside me. She doesn't make me ask.

"The suspension is formal," she says. "Inspection served it this morning. It runs until the investigation closes. Torres put a letter in my file before I got upstairs, and the review's been expedited because the underlying operation has concluded." She looks straight ahead through the glass. "Nobody will put it in writing yet, but Torres says my field work is over if they keep me. Intelligence wants me for trafficking pattern analysis. None of the paperwork is finished."

"Do you want it?"

"I want the work." Her jaw sets. "I don't know yet whether I want the desk."

"You'll run the desk inside a month."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be."

She laughs once, low, and it cracks something tight in the lobby air. Then the front doors open behind us, and she stops.

The man who comes through them is gray at the temples and thick through the middle, with a canvas coat that belongs somewhere colder than New Mexico. He carries a file folder under one arm. A pair of county deputies follows him in, and neither of them looks surprised to see me.

Kessinger stops a few feet away and sizes me up like a stock contractor eyeing a bull that got loose on him once. "There you are, Carrick."

"Here I am."

"You came."

"I said I would."

"The board will hear you by video from here," he says. "If they send you back to Wyoming, I'll be the one driving you."

Torres comes down to the turnstile with the AUSA behind her, the same lean man with his tie pulled loose. She nods to Kessinger. They've plainly spent an hour on the phone already. Then she turns to me through the glass.

"Kessinger's fair," she says. "Tell the board what you told me, and don't dress it up."

"I don't know how to dress it up."

"I know. That's why I'm testifying."

I stand and take both sets of keys out of my pocket, hers and mine, and put them in Morgan's hand. Her fingers close around them, and I close mine over hers. She raises her head.

"The sorrel goes home with Dax until the owner's back," I tell her. "Truck's yours till I'm out. Tolliver's still out there, so you stay off the circuit till I'm back."

"I'm suspended, Carrick, not stupid."

"Smart didn't keep two men from walking you to a stock trailer."

"I'll have the truck waiting when you're out," she says, and she makes it sound like a date on a calendar.

I turn around and put my hands behind my back.

The deputy's cuffs are cold. They click through the ratchet twice, and the steel settles on the bones of my wrists.

The last time a man cuffed me, I was twenty-two. There was blood drying on my knuckles and a man on a barroom floor who wasn't getting up. I didn't look at anybody that night. I looked at the floor.

Today I look at Morgan.

She's standing by the hard chairs with my keys in her fist and her chin up. She doesn't come toward me. I keep my eyes on her until the closing doors cut the line between us.

The county holds me for days. The cell is concrete painted the color of old cream, with a steel bunk, a steel toilet, and a slot for the trays.

The man in the next cell talks to himself through the night about a woman named Darlene. I've done harder time in better company.