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The county gives me one call a day. The first one goes to Torres, not Morgan.

"Tolliver's still working that window," I tell her.

"Noted," she says. "Stop working my case from a jail phone, Carrick." She hangs up. She doesn't tell me I'm wrong.

The second call goes to Tom Eldridge. He's quiet long enough that I think he's hung up, too. Then he says the bunkhouse roof still leaks, and that I can put his address on whatever paper the parole people need.

After that, the nights go quiet. I lie on the bunk with my arm under my head and my ribs knitting, and I rest like a man who's put down everything he can.

On the morning of the hearing, a deputy walks me down a corridor to a small room. It holds a table, a chair bolted to the floor, and a television on a cart.

On the screen, a hearing officer from the Wyoming Board of Parole sits behind a desk in Cheyenne with a stack of paper squared in front of her. Kessinger drove north after the surrender, and now his voice comes through a speakerphone in the middle of my table. The AUSA's letter is already in the record, and the hearing officer reads parts of it aloud in a dry voice that makes every sentence sound like a line item.

Torres testifies by phone. She doesn't talk fast this time.

"He came in when coming in could send him back to prison," she says. "Nobody offered him a deal before he walked through my door. He signed a proffer letter that doesn't bind your board or his supervision, and he knew it. His statement put warrants on a trafficking operation that ran through your state and mine for years. Every piece of it we've checked has held."

The hearing officer offered at the start to continue the hearing until appointed counsel could be assigned. I waived it. The violations aren't disputed, and nobody else needs to tell her why I committed them.

She writes something down. Then she looks into the camera at me.

"Mr. Carrick, you absconded from supervision for the better part of a year. Why?"

"Because a man was using my parole to make me run sealed envelopes and cash for him," I say. "He'd have used it to bury me if I'd reported. I was scared of what I was carrying, and I ran from the wrong people."

"What about now?"

"Now I'm sitting in your jail because I called my parole officer and told him where to find me."

She studies me through the screen until the silence gets heavy. Then she asks Kessinger for his recommendation. He clears his throat on the speakerphone and gives it to her without a single wasted word.

The order comes through that afternoon. A deputy slides it through the slot on a single sheet, and I read it standing up.

Violation found. Parole continued with modified conditions. Parole expiration recalculated to exclude the period of absconding. Supervision transfer to New Mexico approved for expedited processing under the Interstate Compact. Offender may remain in New Mexico pending final acceptance and shall report according to temporary instructions issued by the receiving state. Offender shall obtain written permission before any travel outside the receiving state.

I read it again. Then I fold it into quarters and slide it into my shirt pocket.

Eldridge confirmed the bunkhouse address to Kessinger this morning. Until New Mexico approves something else, that's where my paperwork says I live.

I'm not going back to prison. I still have a parole officer. He's a New Mexico officer I haven't met yet, and he'll know where I sleep, where I compete, and which state line I cross on which weekend. I'll ask permission to haul a horse to Amarillo. I'll sit in a waiting room with a paper number as often as he tells me to.

Since Cheyenne, anybody who held my paper was somebody to get away from. Now I know where the next one will be, and I'll be there when he calls my name. I'm finally not running from them.

They walk me out through the release door in the late afternoon with my belt and my wallet in a plastic bag. My truck is parked at the curb, idling, with Morgan behind the wheel.

I open the driver's door and stand in the gap.

She looks up at me with one wrist draped over the wheel. "You told me the truck was mine."

"The truck was yours till I got out." I tip my head toward the passenger seat. "I'm out."

She climbs down and walks around the hood to the passenger side without a word, which is how I know she missed me.

On the drive, she gives me what she's allowed to give, which is whatever anybody could read in the paper. Steve's detention hearing was yesterday. The judge held him without bond after the AUSA laid the route exception and the preserved server logs on the table. Burl is back in a cell with his bond revoked. Clint told the whole roping string he'd talk to anybody who'd listen, and nobody's heard that he's stopped.

"Is Delilah among the women they found?" I ask.

"Torres hasn't released names." Her fingers knot together. "She will."