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I strip off the condom, pull on my jeans, T-shirt, and boots, and take the rifle from beside my bedroom door. Then I walk out through the kitchen onto the back porch.

She's crossing the yard in the light from her porch, with one arm wrapped around her middle.

Halfway across, she stops in the grass and stands there with her head bowed.

I don't move off the porch. After a while, she starts walking again. She doesn't look back at the house once.

She climbs the guest house steps, goes inside, and shuts the door. I can't hear the deadbolt from here. She's probably turned it anyway.

I sit down on the top step with the rifle across my knees.

I take out my phone and go back through the day. The call that matters came mid-afternoon, from Ozzie, the bookie who takes the bets at my gate on fight nights.

'Never heard Preacher King say his girl's name all year. Today he's in the feed store and the Cattle Guard honky-tonk, asking has anybody heard from her.'

When she first went missing, Preacher King sat at his own kitchen table with his coffee cup rattling and told me his daughter was always restless. He never once asked me to help find her.

Now, the day after she turned up in my hay, he's asking.

A while back, the preacher ran up a gambling debt betting on my fights. I sold his marker to a man who buys up bad debt, and I initialed the sale myself.

If that sale had anything to do with her disappearing, I helped put her in danger. I hate that I can't rule it out.

I told Ozzie, 'Next time he's in the Cattle Guard, you call me before he finishes his first beer. And you don't tell him a damn thing.'

A little after that, my brother Beckett brought over the gate camera footage from the night before she turned up. He sat at my kitchen table with his laptop open, his shoulder bandaged from the bullet that grazed him the night Sheriff Harlan died.

On the screen, a woman I didn't know walked into the light over my gate. She had dark hair pulled back tight and her hands jammed in her jacket pockets. She talked to Ozzie with her weight up on the balls of her feet, the way a fighter stands when she's waiting for the bell.

She never placed a bet. When Ozzie shook his head, she walked back out of the light, and the camera never caught a vehicle or a plate.

I put my fist into the table hard enough to jump the laptop. I'd bet somebody sent that woman to look my place over, and I've got nothing on her.

Beckett didn't flinch. 'You spent a year looking for Delilah. Don't let her see how hard that year hit you.'

I know every bare-knuckle card between here and San Antonio, and I've never seen that woman at one.

After Beckett left, I sent a still of her face to the men who run the other rings in this part of the Hill Country. None of them has answered yet.

Back on the step, I text Hector, who's on my main gate.

Anything moving out there?

His answer comes fast. Nothing.

I text Beckett.

When you spell Hector, walk the back fence where Delilah came over the wire. Twice.

Below those is a text from near dark that I never answered. It's from the Farrier, a members-only house in San Antonio where I take control of women who've asked me to.

Confirming your standing Saturday.

It's my standing night at the Farrier, not a date with any one woman. I write back one word.

Cancel.

I don't want anybody else under my hands. I want the woman in my guest house.