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"Stay or go. That's yours to decide. If you go, I won't stand in the drive to stop you."

She gets up off the step with her burned hand held against her chest.

"I heard you," she says. "That's all I've got this morning."

She walks across the wet yard to the horse barn without once turning around.

A minute later, through the open barn door, I hear her humming to Sadie. It's the same hymn the girl at the piano played too fast the Sunday I sat beside her in her daddy's church and she walked out in the middle of it.

I pick up the rifle and my hat, take Jesse's truck, and go do the one thing I can do without her answer.

On the way, I stop at the ranch shop for two lengths of chain and a pair of padlocks.

The fight barn sits deep in the cedar. Inside, it's dim and quiet, and the ring ropes sag the same way they did after the last card I ran.

I open my pocketknife and cut the ropes off the corner posts, one strand at a time, and let them fall in the dirt.

I unhook the heavy bag from its chain. It hits the floor with a thud, and dust rises off it in the light from the open door.

The old school bell is bolted to my corner post. I've rung it at the end of every fight I ever ran in here.

I back the bolts out with a wrench from Jesse's truck and set the bell on the shelf by the side door.

Outside, I drag the big front doors shut. I run the first chain through the handles and padlock it.

I chain the side door too, the one Delilah came through in the dark with a dead man's boots on her feet.

I call Ozzie from the gravel lot.

"There's no fight card," I tell him. "Not this season. Not any season. Call every man who's fought here and tell him the ring's shut."

Ozzie doesn't say anything at first.

"You want me to tell them why?"

"No."

"Didn't figure." He blows out a breath. "I'll make the calls."

"Pay out anything still owed from the last card. Then box every book you've got and take them to Torres. Nothing gets burned, and nothing gets lost."

"I'll have them boxed by tonight." He's quiet a second. "I've got your answer on that white pickup, too."

"Tell me."

"Boy who runs the car wash on Main says Coleman Whitlock brings his white truck in every Saturday, regular as church. The morning after they took Hector, the boy came in and found the self-serve bay floor covered in caliche mud. He had to hose it down before he could open, and it made him mad enough to run the camera back and see who did it. It was Whitlock's white truck, before daylight."

"How long does that camera keep?"

"A month, the boy says."

"Tell him nobody touches that footage till Torres has it."

I text Torres the car wash name and the camera before I'm back in Jesse's truck.

Torres calls before I'm halfway to the house.

"I'll have the footage by noon," she says. "Ms. Treadmore looked at the pickup in our lot first thing. Same color, clean, no dog box. She can't swear it's the one she saw on your road, and she said so."