Page 58

He used to stand in that pulpit with his Bible open and preach it straight down at me in the third pew. 'Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.' He preached obedience to me from the time I could sit still.

He handed me to a man who sat in a dark corner and watched other men make me kneel on a stone floor. And he called it a scare.

My eyes burn. I won't cry in front of him.

"They didn't keep me a day or two, Daddy." My voice is shaking now, and I don't care if he hears it. "They kept me a year. The last weeks of it, Coleman kept me in his cellar. Every transfer night, when the trucks came to take the other girls to Mexican brothels, his friends came down the stairs in masks. Men who like hurting women. Men who paid Coleman for a preacher's daughter they could put on her knees and use however they wanted. I did what they told me, or I paid for it in bruises. That's how your debt got paid. Whatever Coleman told you, I'm the one who paid it."

My father bends at the waist like his stomach's been kicked. The coffee cup slips out of his hand and smashes on the sidewalk.

"What did you gamble on?" I ask.

Still bent over the broken cup, he shakes his head. "It doesn't matter now."

"Cards? Horses? Tell me what."

His head comes up. He's looking past me, toward the gravel lot, and his face goes slack.

Tires crunch on gravel behind me.

I turn. A white pickup has pulled into the lot off Main Street. It's clean and new, without a speck of caliche dust on it. It rolls slowly up beside the front walk, as if the driver wants a good look at the doors.

By the time I look back, my father is already backing away down the path toward the parsonage.

"Daddy."

He goes around the corner of the church at a stumbling trot. A screen door bangs behind the building, and a door slams after it.

I walk toward Knox's truck with the tire iron in my right hand. The scabs across my knuckles pull tight around the steel. My knees have gone weak, but my grip on that iron holds.

The white pickup stops beside me, with the driver's door close enough to touch. The driver's window slides down.

Coleman Whitlock sits behind the wheel in a pressed white shirt with the cuffs turned back once. His silver hair is combed neat.

He looks past me at the red letters on the church doors. Then he looks at me and gives me the soft, sorry smile from the second pew.

"Welcome home, Delilah," he says. "Your daddy's paper is still open."

My father left me alone on this walk with the man he handed me to. That marker was never torn up. Coleman still means to collect it, and he means to collect it from me.

It's barely light on a weekday, and he drove straight to these doors. I'd bet my life he knew what was painted on them before he left his house.

I raise the tire iron and take a step toward his open window.

"The dogs didn't stop at Jezebel, Deacon," I tell him. "They licked up Ahab's blood too."

Ahab was the king who sat back and let somebody else do his killing for him. Daddy never once preached that part.

His smile holds while the window rolls up between us. My own face shows in the glass, with my hair hacked off and the iron raised in my fist.

Behind me, an engine roars. I glance back. Beckett's truck bounces over the curb into the church lot with Knox in the passenger seat. Knox's door is already coming open.

12

KNOX

I'm out of Beckett's truck before it stops rolling, and Whitlock's white pickup is already easing out of the church lot. He turns onto Main Street without any hurry, like a man who got what he came for.

Delilah stands in the gravel beside my truck with a tire iron raised in her fist. She's still facing the empty spot where his truck was parked.