"Somebody went looking." My hands are going and I let them. "That's what I need— that's the part. It wasn't an accident. A man in that fucked up organization went and pulled her records because hewantedto know."
"What organization?" Razor asks.
"Ironwood."
Razor sets the water bottle on the floor.
"Southern Arizona. They started inside and came out." My voice is coming out somewhere over my own head. "Guns, mostly. Whatever else paid. My father worked for them for nineteen years."
"Your father?"
"Oliver Kincaid. Ollie." Something's wrong with my throat. "He wasn't a believer. I know how that sounds in this room, and I'm telling you anyway. He was a working man who took work, and by the time he understood what he'd taken he was in it, and you don't just quit a job like that."
"How old were you?" Amara asks.
"When?" My hands are back on my knees and I don't remember putting them there.
She doesn't blink. "When he brought you in."
The heater ticks.
"Sixteen."
"Chingado." Dante's arms come apart and he pushes off the wall, one step, and then he stops himself and leans back into it. He hasn't said a word since I walked in.
"Loading. Driving. Standing where he told me to stand and not asking." My eyes are burning, and I don't do anything about it. "By eighteen I could've put nine men in prison, and I didn't know that yet, I didn't know what I had, I was a kid on a job site."
"And then they found out about your mother," Amara says.
"It was a brick through the front window first." I'm going too fast now and I can't slow it down. "Then they got my dad in a parking lot in Douglas. Four of them. Men he'd worked beside for years, one of them was at my confirmation, one of them taught me to drive a forklift. Then it was the house. Then it was me, at school, in the lot. Then?—"
I stop.
There's nothing coming through my throat and I stand there with my mouth open like a fish.
"Then," Amara says.
"Ninety-two. Outside Hereford." It comes out in pieces and I can't do anything about the pieces. "They put her into the ditch, and she rolled it, and she was upside down in that car for forty minutes before a rancher found her. Forty minutes. Hanging in the belt."
Razor's not looking at me anymore. He's looking at the floor.
"There was nothing to give them."
Amara's head comes up.
"You understand? There's nothing. If it's money you pay it, if it's a debt you work it off—there's nothing. It's her blood. It's what sheis." My voice comes apart in the middle of it and I keep going through the hole. "She was born wrong in their eyes. There's nothing to hand across a table, and there’s no way they’ll ever stop."
The heater cuts off and the room's so loud I can hear Razor breathing.
"So we went in."
"Both of you," Amara says.
"Federal building in Tucson on a random Monday." I've got my hand over my mouth and I take it down. "We gave them everything. Names, routes, buyers, three bodies they hadn't found, years of my father's life. I was twenty-five."
Nobody says anything.
"Wendell Trask got thirty-eight years. He's the head of Ironwood. He's still in, and he'll die in."
