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She looks past Beckett, out the barn door toward the county road. "There was a white pickup on the shoulder down the road from his gate when I drove in. Nobody in the cab that I could see. I took it for a rancher checking cattle. Either that text is luck, or somebody watched my car go through his gate this morning. Sundown Monday is tomorrow."
Coleman drove a clean white pickup into the church lot to look at me. I can't prove the one on the road was his.
The night I walked to Devil's Acre, I swore I wouldn't let anybody die for me. Now Hector is the one paying, because Dutch wants me back.
I hold out my hand for the phone. She hesitates, then puts it in my palm.
"I'm taking this to Knox," I say.
"Take it."
In the doorway, Beckett's hand goes to the radio on his belt.
"I'll tell him myself," I say. He takes his hand off the radio.
Down the drive, Knox's truck is coming up from the gate, taking its time, with dust rising behind it. Beckett steps aside to let me out of the barn.
He walks a step behind me all the way to the house with his rifle, and he doesn't say a word. At the back steps he stops and lets me go in alone.
I walk into the kitchen. The map is still on the table where Knox left it. I sit down across from his empty chair with the copy of the marker Knox sold in one hand and Audrey's phone in the other, Hector's face still on the screen.
Knox's truck door slams in the yard. His boots hit the porch steps, heavy and slow, the way he always walks so I'll know it's him.
Every morning since I got here, that sound has meant I'm safe. I grip the marker copy hard and watch the door.
16
KNOX
She unfolds a photocopy of the marker card and lays it open between the two coffee cups we left on the table before dawn. My initials are face up where we can both see them. Audrey had Rusk's file at my gate this morning, so this page came out of it.
On a Sunday morning, I sat at my desk while Ozzie did the books and counted Saturday's take into stacks. The real card sat on top of the pile. He wrote the sale in his green ledger, and I initialed his line with my fork still in my other hand. Then I put my initials on the back of the card too.
I've just come up from the gate, where a Texas Ranger and an FBI agent from San Antonio are photographing Hector's ditch. Audrey Treadmore met me down there at daybreak with Rusk's file, like I told her to. I sent her up to the house to wait for me, and she went straight to the horse barn instead, where Delilah was feeding in Hector's place. Beckett stopped me on the back steps with his rifle and wouldn't look me in the eye. 'Delilah's in the kitchen,' he said. 'She wants to tell you herself.'
Delilah sits across from my empty chair, with Audrey's phone face down under her left hand and my county map still folded on the table beside her. My pearl-snap shirt is closed at her throat, where I snapped it at dawn.
Her right hand stays flat on the page. Mine went flat on this table the same way when Torres asked who sold Whitlock the marker, and I kept my mouth shut that day.
I don't sit. I stand at the end of the table holding my hat.
"Did you sell my father's marker to Coleman Whitlock?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Is that your hand on the back?"
"Yes. I told Ozzie to sell it to him, and I initialed it at my desk."
I don't give her a reason. Anything I say now is an excuse, and she didn't ask for one.
"You stood in this kitchen this morning with your hand at my throat," she says. Her voice doesn't rise. "You asked me for someday. At the foot of your bed, you told me you had my paper because I signed it. You signed my paper too, Knox. You signed it knowing this."
"I did. I've known it every day you've been on this place, and I kept it from you."
She turns the phone over and slides it across the table to me.
Hector looks up at me from the screen. One side of his face is swollen, and that eye is shut. Blood has dried in his gray mustache, and a black zip tie is cinched tight around his wrists. Behind him, a concrete floor meets pale rock, the way Delilah described the back wall of her cell.
