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Torres wants plates off haulers, so I walk down the line to Gil's truck, light his plate with my phone, and photograph it.

I key the radio. "Hector. That diesel's coming your way. Let him out and tell me which way he turns on the county road. If he comes back, don't open the gate for him."

It takes a while before Hector comes back on, low and steady. "He's out the gate. Turned toward town."

I text my older brother Jesse. He's watching Whitlock's back gate tonight, and his woman, Raven, is watching the front one.

Voelkel's diesel just left my gate toward town. Dark gray crew cab, steel headache rack. Texas plate in the next text. Watch for it.

I send the plate, and his answer comes fast. Watching.

I go back inside and ring in the main event. It goes the distance, and by the end of it every man in the barn is hoarse from yelling.

My phone buzzes against my leg while Ozzie pays out. It's Jesse.

Raven had your diesel going up his front drive a while ago. Gray crew cab, headache rack, plate matches. Gate shut behind it.

The crowd thins out into the lot.

It's late when the last trucks pull out. Hector calls out each one over the radio as it clears the main gate.

Gil's stock truck is the last one through. "Strackbein's out," Hector says. "Took his sweet time about it."

Ozzie finishes his count and locks the house cut in his cash box. He climbs the loft ladder, pops the memory card out of the camera, and comes down with the card in his shirt pocket. He leaves the camera mounted.

I walk to the back door and check the chain. My padlock is still locked, and nobody has worked the links loose.

I key the radio. "Beckett. Bring her in."

I'm standing at Ozzie's table when Beckett brings Delilah in through the side door. It's the door with only a latch, the one she came through out of the dark not long ago, before Hector found her face down in my hay.

She's in jeans and one of my dark flannels, with the sleeves pulled down over her wrists. Her face is pale.

She walks straight across the dirt to me and stops close enough to touch, but she doesn't.

Beckett hands me a page torn from a notepad with two times on it in his handwriting. He and Ozzie set their watches by my phone this afternoon, and Ozzie wrote down the time beside every bet tonight.

"She squeezed twice," Beckett says. "Close together, early. Afterward she told me who the first one was."

Ozzie runs his finger down the column of times in this season's book. He stops on Dutch's bet on the redhead, then on the line under it.

"Voelkel," Ozzie says. "Then Strackbein, a minute behind him."

"It was him," Delilah says. "He coughs before he talks. He coughed the same way at the top of the cellar stairs every time he came down. He stood right on the other side of that wall and said Royce's name to you."

"I heard him."

"He bet on the redhead." Her mouth twists. "Of course he did."

"The second one was Gil Strackbein," she says. "I know his name from the feed store counter. Tonight I knew his voice."

I wait.

"The night I got out, the trailer was sitting at the tunnel with its lights on. The driver walked into the barrel room looking for Dutch while I was hiding behind the barrels." Her voice stays level, but her hands don't. "He said, 'I been sitting at that tunnel forever.' I heard him for a few seconds, with Royce dead behind me. Tonight I heard him say 'sitting in a truck cab all week' across Ozzie's table, and it was the same man."

Gil Strackbein hauls stock for a living. Tonight he walked Dutch through my gate, and his stock truck was the last one out of it.

"A few seconds is all you've got on him," I say. "It's a lead, not proof."