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"This time I mean it."

"I'll know Saturday."

He stays where he is while the light turns orange through the barn door behind me.

"You going to say her name tonight?" he asks.

He means Sandy. I haven't said it since Torres told me where they found her. Last night I lay in his bed and opened my mouth to say it, and nothing came out.

"I said it every night so somebody was still waiting on her. She's dead. I don't know who I'm saying it to now."

"Whoever's listening," he says. "Say it where I can hear it."

In this barn, the first time I told him about her, he said her first name back to me. I hold on to Sadie's mane and give him her whole name.

"Sandy Canutson."

"Sandy Canutson," Knox says.

He holds his hand out over the rail. I take it and let him walk me up to the house in the last of the light. That night I say her name in the dark beside him, out loud, and his arm tightens across my waist.

Saturday morning, I wake to Hector's truck grinding out toward the back acreage with fuel for the generator, and Ozzie's truck follows not long after. Knox is already gone. He spends the day out at the fight barn with the ropes and the lights.

In the middle of the afternoon, he comes back to the house and tells me he stood at the knothole while Ozzie and Hector called bets across the table. He heard every voice. Ozzie's writing the time beside every bet tonight, and Knox has a second camera up in the loft aimed at his table. Whatever time Beckett marks, they'll match it to Ozzie's book and the tape after the last truck's gone.

At dusk he comes up to the house long enough to strap on his pistol and tell me where everybody will be. Hector parks his truck across the main gate. Jesse and Raven leave at sundown to watch Coleman's gates.

By full dark, I'm on the back porch steps in my jeans and one of Knox's dark flannels. My sleeves are pulled down, and my arms are wrapped around my knees. Beckett sits in a chair against the wall behind me with his rifle across his lap and the radio on his belt, favoring his grazed shoulder.

Trucks have been coming up the drive and turning off toward the back acreage for most of an hour. Their headlights sweep across the pasture one after another, and I can't see who's driving any of them.

A mile off, the fight barn's lights glow yellow above the trees. Somewhere inside that barn, one of the men from the cigar room may be laying money on Ozzie's table right now.

In my head I hear that smoker's rasp leaning on ain't, and the throat-clearing before the laugh. My stomach turns over, and I hold on to my knees until it settles.

Knox's voice comes over Beckett's radio.

"Bring her."

Knox already knows where I'm going, but his rule says I leave a note. I punch in the code, tear a page off the pad of feed orders, and leave it on the kitchen table.

Fight barn. Beckett's with me.

Beckett takes the steps first with his rifle and waves me after him to his truck. I climb in, and we head into the dark toward that barn full of men and whatever voices are in it.

14

KNOX

Hector's voice comes over my radio while the last trucks are still pulling in. "Boss. Heavy man in a diesel pickup, behind Gil Strackbein's truck. He's got a cigar in his teeth. Gil says he's with him. You want him stopped?"

My lot filled up before full dark, and the late ones are parked nose-in along both sides of the cedar road as far back as my lights reach.

I'm working the gate to my barn lot tonight, looking over every man before he gets past me. Ozzie usually works it but tonight, he’s at his betting table under the loft, where the camera can see him.

A heavy man in his forties with a cheap cigar is all Delilah could give me to watch for.

Hector’s truck is parked across my main gate on the east side of the ranch, where the drive meets the county road.