A dog barks somewhere out past the pole barn and my heart goes so hard I'm sure they can hear it coming up through the ground.
Then Wes comes up.
Wes coming up is the worst thing that has ever happened to me and I include everything.
He walks differently.
Everybody else on this property walks like men who are bored.
Wes walks like a man who's counting his own steps, even, unhurried, and he comes out of the stairwell and stops and doesn't say anything for a long time.
"Where?" he asks.
"She fell, man, she was—she's got nothing, she's got no shoes, she can't evenwalk?—"
"Where?"
"West fence. Gotta be the west fence, it's the only?—"
And that's it.
Because Wes is right about everything except this: Wes thinks I'm running.
Wes thinks I'm a hundred and four pounds of terror with a head start pointing myself at the nearest fence line, because that's what they all do, that's what every woman who's ever tried it has done, they run at the dark and they get four hundred yards and the dogs bring them back.
I let them go west.
I lie under a trailer and listen to four men and a truck peel off toward a fence line two miles from here.
The cold comes up through the gravel into the open meat of my back, and I don’t move. Moving would get me caught.
That's what I figured out during my third year here, lying on a mat in the dark with a smell in the room I won't ever get out of my nose.
I figured out that a search is a shape.
It starts small and it gets big, and everything it leaves behind is empty.
If you’re patient enough, if you are willing to lie in the worst place on earth for long enough, the worst place on earth becomes the safest one.
I've been patient for years.
A couple more hours is nothing.
The truck comes back at eleven. Four doors. Four men, and Wes goes down.
Then the middle is empty.
* * *
Gravel first. Twenty-two paces.
The office is unlocked because Chuy’s in a truck at the west fence with the rest of them.
The door only latches if you pull it, which is something I learned from a woman named Pilar who's dead now.
I take the ledger off the desk.
It's a Mead composition book, marbled black and white, ninety-nine cents, the kind I did my chemistry homework in during high school, and there's a rubber band around it.
