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I text it to Hector, then send one to the number on her card before her taillights clear the curve.

You've got till tomorrow to quit. After that you're one of Rusk's people, and I'll treat you like one.

I walk the fence back to my truck with my hands shoved in my pockets, because I want to put one of them through something.

Delilah must have called my name in that cellar, where the only people listening were the men who held her. Dutch carried the keys down there, so he's the likeliest man to have heard her. Whoever it was passed it up to Whitlock, and Whitlock's lawyer put it in a file. That's how they knew to point a bounty hunter at my gate.

And this morning Delilah sat at my kitchen table and asked me two questions. Who taught me to hold a woman down without hurting her. What I wouldn't tell her about her father. I told her not yet, twice. She walked out to the horse barn and left her cup full on the table.

We're both keeping something now. Mine's worse, and I know it.

I drive back to the house to find Delilah and ask her why she never told me. I don't get past my own porch. Ozzie's truck is parked beside the steps, and Ozzie's sitting on the top one waiting for me.

He's past sixty, bald, short and thick through the middle. He's sat at my gate on fight nights since the first card I ever ran.

His text came yesterday while I stood in the horse barn with Delilah.

Coming by tomorrow. You won't like it.

I let him in and walk him back to my office. Ozzie's kept his old books boxed in my office closet since the year I built the ring. He goes straight to the closet, gets down on his knees, and pulls a cardboard box halfway out.

"Second ledger from the top," he says without turning around. "From a while back. I marked it."

I pull out the second ledger from the top. It's a green clothbound account book, the kind Ozzie buys every season. A torn strip of paper marks the page, and there's a coffee ring on the corner. I carry it to my desk and open it under the lamp.

E. King. Marker sold to C. Whitlock. K.H.

Ozzie's handwriting. My initials, in my hand, beside it.

It's a Sunday morning at this desk. Ozzie's counting Saturday's take into stacks, and the preacher's marker is on top of the pile because nobody's ever going to pay it. 'That one's dead,' Ozzie says. I'm eating eggs out of the skillet. 'Whitlock buys bad paper,' I tell him. 'Sell it to him.' I initial the line with my fork still in my other hand and never think about it again until the preacher's girl doesn't come home.

"You never once asked for these books after the King girl went missing," Ozzie says to the closet floor. "She turns up at your place over a year later, and a few days after that you want them pulled. I know why. I wrote that line, but you're the one who told me to sell it. Don't go looking for somebody else to blame."

"I'm not blaming anybody but me."

Ozzie nods and nudges a second carton with his knee. "This one was sitting on top of my books. It's yours too."

I know what's in it without opening it. Gas receipts from the station across from the Cattle Guard, from every night I sat in that lot after closing. The missing-person form Harlan wouldn't take from me, folded in quarters. A county map with every back road out of town marked in red pencil, the ones I drove with a spotlight and the ones I never got to.

Boots come down the hall behind me. It's Beckett, back from a night in the cedar on the ranch road west of Whitlock's and a few hours of bad sleep. He looks wrung out, with a thermos in one hand and the arm on his grazed side held tight against him.

"Nothing came through," he says from the doorway. "No trailer. The spotlight truck ran the gravel twice, once around midnight and once before dawn. From the cedar I could see the restaurant lights go off up on the hill. After that, nothing."

His eyes go past me to the open ledger on my desk. "What's that?"

I could close it. I don't.

He comes in and reads it standing up, and then he reads it again.

He lifts the flap of the second box, sees the red-penciled map, and knows what that is too. He rode half of those roads with me.

"You spent a year hunting for her," he says. "And all that time you had this."

"I knew Whitlock bought her daddy's paper. That's why I drove out to his winery the week she went missing and asked him where she was." I put my finger on the K.H. "He smiled at me, and I couldn't prove a thing. After Harlan came to my porch, I quit asking. I never pulled this book, because I didn't want to see my name next to his."

"You knew enough to keep it in a closet." He sets the thermos down hard enough that coffee slops out of the lid. "You sold the preacher's paper to the man who had her in his cellar, and now she's sleeping in your bed. Tell her, Knox, or I will."

"Not yet."