Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Mila
Four people are looking at me, and my hands have been on this backpack since I sat down.
The zipper's been broken since Tucson.
It catches at the third tooth and you work it sideways, and I do that now, slowly, because my hands are the only part of me anybody in here can read and I need the extra four seconds.
Finn's turned around.
He turned when Amara said my name and he's looking at me the way a man looks at something on a highway.
I've been through worse than this, I've been through so much worse than this, and there's no air getting past the top of my chest.
I get the zipper.
The composition book comes out and it's what it was.
Marbled black and white. Ninety-nine cents. The rubber band went brittle and snapped somewhere in Arizona and I've had it closed with a hair tie since.
I lean forward and put it on the president's desk. "That's a ledger."
Nobody touches it.
Amara looks at it and doesn't pick it up. "From where?"
"A property in Cochise County, Arizona."
"Whose property?"
"I don't know."
Her chin comes up that quarter inch. "You don't know?"
"No, ma'am."
"You brought me a book you can't tell me anything about."
"I can tell you a bunch of things about it.
" My hands go back in my lap because they've started and I can't have that.
"It was on a desk in an office at the north end of the client building.
There are more of them. There's a drawer, and there's a shelf above the drawer, and the shelf goes back four years at least, because I've watched the boxes come out.
That one was on top because it's what they were writing in that night. "
Razor leans forward and picks it up.
He takes the hair tie off and thumbs it open somewhere in the middle and reads for about six seconds.
Then he tosses it back on the desk. "This is nothing."
"It's not nothing."
"It's a kid's notebook full of chicken scratch." He's got his elbows on his knees now. "Dates and letters. There's no names in here. There's no addresses. There's not one thing in this book that says anything about anybody."
"There are twelve sets of initials that repeat more than forty times each."
"So?"
"So those are the ones who come back." I keep my voice exactly where it is. "The rest come once or twice. Those twelve come every month, some of them twice a month, some of them for four years running, and one of them has been coming since before I could count."
Razor sits with that. "It could be anything," he says.
"It could."
"Could be feed deliveries."
"It could be feed deliveries." I look at him. "Are you foolish enough to think it is?"
He doesn't answer. His thumb goes back and forth across his bottom lip.
"How do you know what's in it?" Amara hasn't moved off the desk.
"I don't."
Her head comes around. "You didn't open it?"
"I've opened it." My voice comes out flat and I let it. "I've had it for months, and it's been open more than it's been closed. Dates, dollar amounts, initials. There's a column on the right I can't read, and I've had ages to learn how."
Amara's hand goes flat on the desk beside the book. "What's in the column?"
"Numbers between one and twelve." My hands stay where they are.
Nobody says anything.
Razor gets there first. His mouth comes open and shuts again, and he looks at the notebook on the desk like it moved.
Dante's still against the wall and his eyes have gone to the floor.
Amara doesn't move at all.
"There are twelve rooms," I say.
The heater's the only thing in the room making a sound.
Razor's hand comes up over his mouth and drops. "So it's useless."
It comes out with nothing behind it.
"It's useless to me." I look at him. "I'm one woman with a book. You're a motorcycle club with a cartel."
One corner of Amara's mouth pulls and she puts it away. She picks the ledger up off her desk, finally, and holds it without opening it. “What's the property?"
Here we go.
There's no good order. I've run it in my head every night since I escaped, and I've tried every arrangement, and they're all wrong, so I'm going to say it the way you'd read a chart.
Facts. You give them facts and you stand behind them.
"About six hundred acres. Maybe more." My hands are in my lap. "There's a house, a client building, an equipment shed, a pole barn, a water tank, and two bunkers."
Amara stops turning the ledger over in her hands. "Bunkers?"
"Underground. Eleven feet down. I know it's eleven because a man told another man in a hallway once and I heard it through a vent."
Dante hasn't moved off that wall since I sat down.
"Twelve rooms in the one I was in. Seven feet by nine.
" My thumbnail's found the seam of my jeans and I stop it.
"A mat. A bucket. A light somebody else controls.
A slot at the bottom of the door for the trays.
The doors are steel core with a wood veneer and they're not from a prison, they're from a hospital. I've spent a lot of time on that."
Amara's hand comes up and I stop talking. "How many stairs?"
"Ma'am?"
"From the bunker to the yard. How many stairs?"
She's looking straight at me and her face is empty.
I understand exactly what she's doing, and I answer before I've decided to.
"Fourteen. There's a landing at nine and it turns left."
"Which way does the door open?"
"In. It opens in, toward the stairwell, and it drags on the bottom left corner where the frame's dropped."
"What's the floor?"
"Poured concrete with a drain in the middle of the corridor.
" My mouth is going and I can't stop it.
"You can hear which way somebody's walking by the drain.
If they're coming toward you the water sound comes after their boot and if they're going away it comes before, because of the pitch, and I know that because I listened to it for nine years and there was nothing else to listen to. "
Amara puts her hand down.
She doesn't say anything for a second.
"Okay," she says.
That's all she says. But something's gone out of the room and something else has come into it, and Razor's not sitting the way he was sitting.
"Keep going," Amara says.
"The men who work it call it the Ranch."
Her eyes haven't left my face.
"Five of them on a given night. Four drink and sleep and count wrong. One doesn't." Flat. Even. "He counts twice a night, doors and faces. His name is Wes. I don't know his last name and I'd know his walk in a stadium."
"Ms. Bacani—"
"I'm not finished."
She stops.
"Clients come to the property. They pay, they come out, they get a room in the client building for however long they bought, and the women get brought up to them.
" I'm looking at the middle of her desk.
"No cameras. That's what they're paying for.
They're not buying a woman, you can get a woman anywhere.
They're buying a place where nobody's watching, and nothing's ever happened and nothing ever will. "
Razor's hand goes to his mouth.
"Tucson. Phoenix. Scottsdale, further out than that, and I've heard planes." My voice is doing exactly what I need it to do. "There's a strip somewhere. I've never seen it. I've been listening to it for years."
The room's gone very still.
"Nine years," Amara says.
"About. I lost the exact number somewhere in the middle, and I've tried to get it back and it won't come." It sounds like a woman on a recording. "I was twenty-two. I'm thirty-two. You can do the rest."
Finn makes a sound.
I don't look at him.
I haven't looked at him since the zipper and I'm not going to, because I'm standing on something and it's the only floor I've got.
"What were you used for?" Amara looks directly into my eyes.
Plain. No softness anywhere in it.
There are four women in this building who've sat where I'm sitting. I'd bet the ledger on it.
"Sex," I say.
Dante turns his face to the wall.
"They beat me when a man complained and they starved me down about forty pounds, because a woman who can't stand up can't run.
" Facts. "I've been pregnant. More than once.
They ended all of them, some with pills, one on a table in the client building with a man I don't believe was a doctor. I lost the number of those too."
Here it is. My reality.
I've said it out loud in a room with four people in it and the building didn't fall down.
My hands are in my lap and they're perfectly still.
Nobody looks at them.
Amara's face hasn't moved, but her jaw's working at the sides.
"How'd you get out?" Razor asks, his voice sounding like he swallowed razor blades.
"I waited."
"For what?"
"For them to make a mistake." I bring my eyes up. "Nine years. They made a lot of small ones and I let every single one go by, and then they made a big one and I took it."
"That's it," Razor says. "You waited."
"That's it."
"Nine years, or ten, or whatever amount."
"Yes."
He sits back and doesn't say anything else. I don't know what's on his face. Faces don't tell you anything. Hands tell you.
Amara gets off the desk. "Dante."
He comes off that wall for the first time in twenty minutes, and she says something to him low, three or four words, and he goes.
She comes back and stays standing.
"Say the rest," she says.
"That's the rest."
"No." She's looking at me. "You've told me about a building. You walked miles in a jacket that doesn't fit to tell me about a building. Say the rest."
The heater cuts off.
And now there's nothing to do.
I sit on a president's couch in a room with three people in it and a fourth one gone, and there's nothing in my hands, and nobody's talking, and I've got no chart to read and nothing to count.
Finn's breathing behind me.
That's what's left when everything else stops.
Forty feet of office and I can hear him and it's the same.
It's the same rhythm it was in a bed in Sierra Vista when I was twenty-two years old with my hand flat on his back, and my whole body knows it, my body knew it before I did, my body has known it since the gate.
I could turn my head about nine inches.
Nine inches and I'd be looking at him.
I look at the desk.
Somewhere in the building a door opens and there's a woman's voice and a man's, and the woman's laughing.
"There were eleven women in that hall when I walked out," I say.
"And?"
"And I went past them."
Nobody moves.
"I could've opened those doors. The keys were in a desk forty feet from where I stood and there were four men and a truck two miles west. I put my hand on a door, and I counted it out, and I went past them."
"Ms. Bacani—"
"I told them I'd come back." My voice has gone somewhere I can't reach and I don't stop it.
"There's a girl at the eighth door on the left who came in a few months before I got out and cried for a week.
I never said one word to her. Not one, in all those months, because words get you watched.
And she had her hands in the slot, and she was screaming at me to take her, and I put my palm on that door, and I told her I'd come back and I left. "
The room's silent.
"So that's the rest," I say. "I need three things and the third one's the only one I care about, and I'll say the other two again if you want, but you already know them."
Amara doesn't answer.
Behind me the door opens.
The woman has a baby on her hip.
She's maybe twenty-seven, with a six-month-old on her hip and a burp cloth over her shoulder.
She's saying something back over it to Dante as she comes through, and she's laughing at whatever he said to her in the hall.
Then she sees the room.
She stops in the doorway.
Her eyes go around it and I watch them go—Amara on her feet, Razor forward with his hand still at his mouth, Finn against the wall with his face destroyed, me on the couch.
The laugh goes out of her.
Her hand comes up and flattens on the back of the baby's head.
She doesn't think about it. It isn't a decision.
I've seen women do that in a hallway with nothing in their arms. I've done it myself with nothing in mine.
Every drop of blood in me goes to my face at once, hot, all of it, and there's water coming up behind my eyes so fast I have to look at the desk.
"Prez?" she says.
"Lashes." Amara's voice comes out somewhere I haven't heard it. Slow. "This is Camila. She came in this morning."
Lashes looks at me.
My face doesn't do anything.
It stopped somewhere around year four and it never came back, and Marie used to watch me across her kitchen table with her mouth pressed shut and I know exactly what she was seeing.
But Lashes isn't looking at my face.
She's looking at my hands. My shoulders. Where my feet are and how far they are from the door.
Her arm tightens on the baby.
"Okay," she says.
That's all.
She knows.
Four seconds in a doorway and she knows.
My throat locks up so hard I sit there breathing through my nose like an animal.
"Camila's been telling me about a property in Arizona," Amara says. "Cochise County."
"Okay," Lashes says again.
"I want you to hear it."
Lashes comes into the room. She doesn't sit. She puts her back against the wall next to Dante and shifts the baby higher and gets both arms around her, and she looks at me and waits.
I look at Amara.
Amara nods.
So I turn my head and I look at a woman I've never met, holding a baby, in a country I've never been to, and I say the only word I've got that means anything.
"The girls call it La Nada."
The baby makes a noise.
Lashes doesn't move. Not one part of her.
She's got her arms around her daughter and the blood goes out of her face all at once, top to bottom, like somebody pulled a plug. Her mouth comes open with nothing behind it.
Dante says her name.
She doesn't hear him.
"Lashes," Amara says.
Nothing.
She's looking at me and she's not in this room. Her arms have gone so tight around that baby the kid starts to fuss and she doesn't feel it.
"Hey." Dante's hand comes toward her shoulder and stops short of it. "Hermana, hey."
"They said—" Her voice comes out on a whisper with nothing behind it. "They told us. If you don't sell."
"Yes," I say.
"They said—" She swallows and I hear it across the room. "They said you go to La Nada and you don't come back. They said it's not a place, they said it's—"
She looks at me.
"You came back," she says.
And I open my mouth to tell her no.
No, I didn't come back, I got out, those are two different things and one of them means something and the other one's just luck and a lazy man and a fire door.
But her face.
Her face is doing something I haven't seen a face do in years, and it's aimed at me, and my mouth's open and there's nothing coming out of it.
"Yeah, I did."