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One day.

Four hundred people.

One client.

No subcontractors.

Small enough to see every edge.

Small enough, maybe, to hold in two hands.

I reached for my coffee.

It had gone cold.

I drank it anyway and began correcting the site plan.

Chapter 3

Cash

The tape measure had three opinions about the east side of my arena, and none of them agreed.

“Hold it tighter,” I told Tuck.

He squinted down the length of steel, re-anchored his sneaker against the base of the fence post, and pulled. “I am holding it.”

“Like you want it to get away?”

Tuck Ellery was nineteen, built like a yardstick and tanned the color of dry tobacco. His hat was new enough to still be a little stiff, and the shape suggested he’d stored it overnight under a mattress or perhaps a tire. The kid grinned with every tooth he’d been issued, and if you’d told him to walk a mile with an open paint can, he’d ask what color and start at a run. He yanked the tape so it nearly bit my hand. “There. Satisfied?”

“Ecstatic,” I said.

The fiberglass tape bowed between us, caught on a clump of alfalfa that had no business being in the middle of a hayfield but had put down roots there anyway, presumably out of spite.

One hundred and ninety-two feet.

It had been one hundred and eighty-eight ten minutes ago, and one hundred and ninety-five before that, and at this rate we’d have an arena shaped like a kidney bean, which was not a sanctioned event.

June had turned the north hayfield into something that smelled of warm grass and dust and the faint mineral tang of the creek beyond the fence line. The morning was still cool enough that the sweat on my neck came from work rather than weather. That would change by noon. By noon, the field would be an oven with a view.

I drove the third survey flag into the corner we’d just measured, or thought we’d measured, and stood back.

The rectangle lay across the flat ground like a promise made by somebody who hadn’t checked his calendar. Two hundred feet north to south, a hundred and fifty east to west, give or take the will of God and a tape that had been living in the back of my truck since March.

Tuck stood at the far corner holding the end of the tape against a flag that leaned six inches out of plumb. He looked at me with the expression of a man who believed in what he was doing but couldn’t find it.

“Is this right?” he asked.

“Which part?”

“The . . . all of it.”

“Pull the flag and let’s try again.”

He pulled it. We stretched the tape. One hundred and ninety feet. Different again. The ground had a slight crown I hadn’t accounted for, and the tape wanted to follow it downhill.

“Write that down,” I said.