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I find her jeans and underwear in the dirt outside the ropes, and she pulls them on. I bring her sneakers over from beside the ring and put them on her feet.

She rests her hand on top of my head while I tie them.

The radio on my belt clicks. "Top of the hour, boss," Hector says. "Quiet down here."

"Copy."

"You stepped through the ropes twice tonight," she says.

"The card was over the second time."

"Walk me home. I walked here alone once. I'd like to walk back with you."

My truck is parked against the barn wall. But she walked for days through cedar and barbed wire with cracked ribs to reach this barn, and she's asking to walk home from it beside me.

We go out the side door, and I drop the latch behind us.

Outside, I shut down the generator in the cedar, and the barn goes dark behind us. I switch on my flashlight.

We walk the cedar road side by side. I'm bare-chested in the night air, and the stars are out thick over the trees. Her shoulder bumps my arm every few steps.

Where the road climbs the last rise before the house, the cedar opens up. From up here, you can see across the east pasture to the county road and my main gate.

A lit square sits down at the main gate where nothing should be lit. It's the cab of a truck, with the driver's door standing open and the dome light on.

By that little bit of light, I can see the gate past the cab. It's standing open to the county road.

It's Hector's truck. It's the only one on that gate tonight, and Hector always sits at that gate with his dome light off. I can't see anybody standing in the light.

Hector checked in on the hour, right before we left the barn, and my radio hasn't made a sound since. Whatever happened at that gate, he never got a word out about it.

I switch off the flashlight and pull Delilah behind me. I draw my pistol and key the radio.

"Hector."

No answer comes back. The open door stays lit at the bottom of the hill, and nobody steps into the light.

15

DELILAH

Knox keeps me behind him all the way down the hill. His pistol is out in his right hand, and his left hand is back on my hip, holding me close against his spine so nothing out in the dark gets a clear look at me. He radioed Beckett from the rise, and Beckett's truck comes down from the house with its lights off and stops short of the gate.

Knox puts me against the side of Beckett's truck, with Beckett and his rifle between me and the road. Then Knox walks up on Hector's truck with his pistol leveled.

The truck is empty.

"Both of you, join me," Knox says without turning around. Beckett and I cross to where he’s standing.

I keep my hands to myself and look. The dome light shines on the bare seat, Hector's thermos in the cup holder, and his key in the ignition. The key to the gate padlock hangs in the lock on its own brass ring, and the lock stands open. The chain lies in a loop in the white caliche gravel.

Out past the gate, in the shallow ditch along the county road, a flashlight lies in the weeds, still burning. Its beam lights a patch of flattened grass about as long as a person. Hector's radio lies face down in the gravel beside it, and his straw hat sits upside down a few steps farther on.

Knox crouches by the padlock without touching it. "That's Hector's own key. Nobody pried this lock. He opened my gate himself. Nobody touches anything."

He sweeps his light across the gravel at the mouth of the gate. A heavy truck swung in wide here, turned around, and went back out onto the road. Each rear wheel left two tracks side by side.

"That's a dually," Knox says. "A one-ton pickup or a stock truck. A truck that size doesn't turn around in one clean pass at a strange gate in the dark. Whoever drove it had looked this gate over before tonight."