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"If the lights go out," I tell them, "get flat on the floor at the back of your cell and stay there. Don't let anybody walk you toward that tunnel."

"Heard you," Jenna says.

Torres never promised to kill the power. She only said nobody touches that generator without her say-so. If she gives that order, I want these women on the floor.

The diesel keeps rumbling past the cigar room, and exhaust drifts down the hall. A cab door bangs open, and a man's voice carries back to me.

"Let's go, Dutch. I'm not sitting in this tunnel all night again."

I've heard that voice twice before. The night I got out, the driver who walked into the barrel room griped about waiting at this tunnel. Saturday night, the same driver bet beside Dutch at Ozzie's table. I heard him through the knothole in the back wall of Knox's fight barn, where Knox put me to listen.

It's Gil Strackbein, the man I named to Knox and Torres on Saturday night. Now he's driving the truck they mean to load us on, and I'll swear to his voice before any judge Torres puts in front of me.

Dutch's boots come back from the tunnel with a second pair behind them, and a key rattles in the lock of Kaylee's cell, next to mine. Kaylee screams. Gil's voice tells her to quit fighting him.

A second lock clanks open, and Marisol cries out something in Spanish. Jenna cusses both men up one side and down the other from behind her bars.

Kaylee's and Marisol's cries move away toward the tunnel. Jenna is still locked in her cell, and I'm still locked in mine.

Before long, Dutch's boots come back along the hall alone, slow and deliberate. He always walked like that when he wanted me to lie there and listen to him coming. He has a flashlight in his fist, switched off. He stops at Jenna's cell, and his keys jingle.

The generator hum stops, and the bulbs in the hall all go out at once.

Somebody cut the generator, and that has to be Torres's call. Dutch's flashlight clicks on down the hall. Apart from his beam, it's too black to see my own knees.

In the tunnel, the truck engine keeps idling. Down the hall, I hear Jenna drop flat in her cell. The flashlight beam swings past my bars toward the stairs.

"Lights!" Dutch bellows. "Who killed the damn lights?"

Up in the barrel room, a man shouts, and something heavy crashes to the floor.

Dutch's boots pound back up the hall toward me. His flashlight clatters onto the concrete outside my bars, and his key scrapes into my lock.

On the stairs beside my cell, boots come down fast. There are a lot of them.

One set of boots lands harder than the rest, and I know that walk. Knox comes down on his heels, heavy on purpose, so I'll know it's him. He walked the guest house porch that way my first night at Devil's Acre. He was supposed to stay in that cedar until Torres sent him in.

The bad step near the bottom groans under his weight, but he doesn't slow down.

18

KNOX

In my earpiece, I hear tape tear away from Delilah's skin. Dutch grunts. Then there's nothing, no voices, no hum, no breathing. Dutch found the wire.

"Wire's dead," the tech at the receiver says.

"Go," Torres says.

The driver drops the van into gear and pulls out of the ranch-road turnout. Behind us, a second car of Torres's people swings out and follows with its headlights on.

I'm on the bench seat behind the driver with my knees jammed against a rifle case and my hands flat on my thighs. If I don't keep them there, I'll put my fist through the window.

Torres had the van brought up to my cedar the minute Delilah went down those stairs with the wire taped under her breastbone. Torres kept the van there with the engine running.

When I climbed in, she looked straight at the pistol on my hip.

'That stays in its holster. We'll talk about it after.'