Page 47

Car on the county road at the north fence. Woman. Binoculars. Rental sticker on the bumper.

I left my truck at the corner post so she'd see me coming and have time to leave. She didn't leave.

Up close, she's mid-twenties, with dark hair pulled back tight. She has a fighter's shoulders under a canvas jacket and a white scar across the knuckles of her right hand.

It's the woman from my gate camera, the one who asked Ozzie who runs my fights and never placed a bet.

"This is a county road," she says. "I checked."

"You're looking at my land through binoculars. I didn't have to check."

One corner of her mouth goes up. She takes a card off the passenger seat and holds it out the window between two fingers. I take it.

Audrey Treadmore. Fugitive Recovery. San Antonio.

"I bring back people who skip out on what they owe," she says. "Bail, mostly. Sometimes family that wants them found."

"Who wants who found?"

"A lawyer in Fredericksburg hired me to find a runaway congregant. The preacher's daughter. Delilah King."

I keep my hands loose at my sides. She watches them anyway.

"Lawyer got a name?"

"Stanley Rusk. He does work for Coleman Whitlock. He gave me a thin file. A photo off a feed store calendar. Her father's address. And one more thing, which is why I started at your gate instead of her father's door."

She looks straight at me. "Under known associates it says one name. Knox Hollister, Devil's Acre. Somebody heard her calling for you." She taps the steering wheel. "It doesn't say who heard her, or where. Somebody was close enough to hear her and wrote it down. Nobody gets that close to a girl who ran off on her own."

Heat climbs up the back of my neck. I keep my feet where they are.

On her first full day here, I told Delilah on the guest house porch that a dark-haired woman had come asking at my gate. She went dead still. I asked her flat out who sent that woman, and she didn't answer me. She must have known then that Whitlock had sent somebody after her. She's kept it to herself every day since.

"Is she here?" Audrey asks.

"You came to my gate a while back asking who runs my fights, and you walked off before my camera caught a plate." I put one hand on her roof and lean down to her window. "You don't get to ask me anything."

She doesn't lean away from me. "Fair."

"Why sit out here in the open where my men can see you?"

"Because I wanted you to come." She puts the binoculars in the glovebox and shuts it.

"I return people to whoever pays, and I don't usually ask why they left," she says. "But I ran her name through every database I pay for before I took a step. A girl who runs off leaves a trail. She buys gas, calls a friend, pulls cash out of a machine. Delilah King hasn't done one of those things in a year. No bank, no phone, no job, no car."

"Lots of girls go quiet."

"Not that quiet." She looks at the road ahead of her instead of at me.

"And the lawyer doesn't want her taken home to her daddy," she says. "He wants her brought to his office, and nobody else told. If I hand a grown woman to a man who isn't her family and she turns up hurt, that's on me. Something about this case is wrong."

"Quit, then."

"I might." She starts the engine. "Before I do, ask her something for me. Nobody goes a year without leaving a trail unless somebody's keeping them. Ask her what they kept her for."

She doesn't know Delilah's here. She asked it to see what my face would do, and I give her nothing.

She pulls away slowly, so I can read the plate if I want it. I already have it.