Page 42

"I don't have a truck."

"You'd find one. You found my barn in the dark with cracked ribs; in boots you took off a dead man."

That nearly makes me smile, but I'm too angry to let it.

He stands, takes my cold coffee to the sink, and pours it out. "You should sleep."

"Sadie needs her mash. And you need sleep worse than I do."

"We'll both go feed the horse," he says, and takes his hat off the hook by the door.

The dew soaks my sneakers before we're halfway to the horse barn. I leave a bucket of alfalfa cubes in water at the wash rack, grab two brushes from the tack room, and hand Knox one on the way out to Sadie's pen.

Since Nell filed down the sharp hook on her back tooth, Sadie has gone back to eating her hay. The sore inside her cheek still needs a few more days of mash. I run my fingers along her jaw. The heat is gone and the swelling is down. She doesn't jerk away when I press. She reaches past me instead, gets her lips on the brim of Knox's hat, and tugs it half off his head.

"She's never once done that to Hector," he says, and settles it back on.

"Hector doesn't let her." I laugh for the first time today, and it only hurts my ribs a little.

Knox goes around to her far side, so the mare stands between us. His head and shoulders show over her back, and I hear the stiff brush flick dust off her coat in short, quick strokes. Sadie rests one back hoof on its tip, the way a horse does when she's easy, and dozes in the sun.

"I'm going back out there," he says over her back. "Not in my truck. I'll leave it backed into the brush far down that ranch road and walk in after dark with no light. We wait for the next trailer to turn onto that gravel, and we get its plate."

"You'll be watching the wrong end."

He waits for the rest.

"The trailer's the last thing that happens on a night they move girls out," I say. "The men in the masks came first, the ones who sat in the leather chairs in the cigar room. They came down the cellar stairs from the barrel room, and I heard every one of them on that stone. Dutch and his men wore work boots. The men in the masks wore town shoes with hard leather soles that clicked."

I hear myself say Dutch's name out loud, and I keep going before Knox can ask. "They didn't come in through the tunnel with the trucks. They drove up onto that hill and parked somewhere. The tour buses and the tasting-room customers are gone from those wineries by dark. Watch for any car that drives through either of his gates after that, on a night a trailer goes up the gravel. It could belong to a man who sat in one of those chairs."

"I'll watch both gates, then." He comes around Sadie's hindquarters with a hand on her rump so she knows where he is, and he stops on my side of her. "And there's a beef delivery to his kitchen at the end of the week. Hector usually drives it. This time I'm riding along, to see who's walking around behind that building in daylight."

"He'll see you."

"He's seen Devil's Acre trucks at his kitchen door for years, and he's seen me in plenty of them. If the beef stops coming, that's when he'd start wondering." He doesn't take his eyes off me. "You said a name back there. Dutch."

He's gone still all over, the way he did last night when I told him Whitlock was the man who sat in the corner. I wish I'd never said Dutch's name.

"He carried the keys to the cellar," I say. "He's the one who caught me the first time I ran, after I climbed out of a livestock trailer onto a highway. And he hunted me with a truck all the way here. That's all I'm telling you about him today."

Knox's hand closes on the top rail hard enough to whiten his knuckles. Then he lets go.

"One more question, and it's for my gate, not for me," he says. "What does he look like?"

I could refuse him. But Hector sits on that gate every day without knowing who he's waiting for.

"Heavy," I say. "Forties. He's always got a cheap cigar clamped in his teeth."

Knox pulls out his phone, thumbs a text, and turns the screen so I can read it before he sends it.

Heavy man, forties, cigar. Goes by Dutch. If he comes near the gate, get his plate and call me. Don't open it for him.

He sends it, and the phone buzzes in his hand before he can put it away. He reads the screen, and his face goes hard.

"Who?" I ask.

"Ozzie."