Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rooster
Morning comes up over a rented house outside Elgin and there are eleven women asleep in it.
That's the first thing I do when the sun hits the kitchen window. I count them.
Two on the couch under one blanket. Three in the back bedroom with Yoli. Four more in the front room on cushions Damon's guys pulled off every piece of furniture in the place. One at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee she hasn't touched, watching the door.
And Lucia, asleep sitting up against the wall in the hallway, six feet from the bedroom where Mila is, because that's as far away from her as she'll get.
Eleven.
I stand in a stranger's kitchen with a cold cup in my hand and count them twice, and the wire I've had strung through my chest since a woman walked up to my gate slacks off a turn.
They're out.
Whatever else is coming, at least these women can start healing.
For them, the madness is behind them.
Amara's on the porch with a phone against her ear, and she's been on it since four.
"He's sending three vehicles and two of his own people." She hangs up and pockets it. "They'll be here by two. Documents take a couple of weeks."
"Documents?"
"Mexican identification. Real ones, or real enough that nobody's going to look twice." She drops down heavy onto the step. "For the ones who want to stay south. He's got a woman in Hermosillo who does the paperwork for the families he moves. She's very good and she doesn't ask questions."
"And the rest?"
"Five of them have people in the States.
" Amara rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands.
"Nadia's got a mother in Tucson. Belén's got a whole family in San Diego.
Two out of Texas, and one who won't say yet.
" She squints up at me. "Those five don't move until a doctor's cleared them.
All of them. I don't care how bad they want to run through a door and see their mama.
Some of these women haven't seen the inside of a clinic in six years, and I'm not putting them on a bus and calling it a rescue. "
"Imani's not touching the visa angle, then."
"Imani's not touching anything with a federal seal on it for a good long while, and she agrees with me.
" Amara says it flatly, no hedge in it. "We took sixteen armed people across a border and shot our way off a property in Cochise County last night.
There's no world where we walk any of this into a US courthouse and it goes well for those women or for us. "
"So, what do we do?"
"We do it the slow way. We put them somewhere safe. We get them well." She looks out at the desert. "And we let their families come to them."
I sit down on the step next to my president.
"That's not justice," I say.
"No." She keeps her eyes on the horizon going gold. "It's just keeping them alive. Justice is a different job and I don't have the paperwork for it."
Razor comes out at eight with news I don't understand at first.
"It's gone." He hands Amara a phone with a satellite feed pulled up on it.
"What's gone?"
"The property." He taps the screen. "Alejandro's got a man watching from the road. Six trucks came in at dawn and they've been hauling out ever since. No sirens, no county sheriff, nothing on any scanner."
Amara scrolls it slowly, her thumb dragging across the image. "Of course they are."
"He lost thirty-two men and he's not calling the law." Razor folds his arms. "That's a man with more to hide than we've got."
And it hits me all at once, standing in that doorway with the sun coming up over my own county.
"It never happened," I say.
Both of them look at me.
"By tonight there's no bodies, no bunkers, no doors, no ledger, nothing.
" My hands have gone tight down at my sides and I make them open.
"Nobody's ever going to prove there were eleven women in the ground on that property.
He's erasing it. When he's done, the only record left in the world is eleven women's word against a man who's never had a charge stick to him in forty years. "
"Yeah," Razor says.
"So he gets away with it."
"He gets away with the ranch." Amara hands the phone back without looking at it. "He doesn't get away with those women. We have them. He wanted them under the ground and they're not."
***
I find Mila in the back bedroom, sitting on the floor where she's been since we got here.
Yoli's asleep. Somebody found a clean shirt for her and she's got it on over the bandage.
Her color's better than it was last night. Even under, she's holding onto Mila's sleeve with two fingers.
Lucia's in the corner with her knees pulled up.
There's a plate beside her somebody talked her into taking. She hasn't eaten any of it, but she's holding it, and from the way Mila keeps glancing at it I understand that holding it is a step.
"Hey." I stop in the doorway.
Mila looks up.
I've seen this woman furious. I've seen her wrecked, seen her come apart in a fitting room, seen her put herself back together on a cold bench at four in the morning.
I've never seen her look like this.
Her shoulders have come all the way down.
There's no wire running through her anywhere.
She's sitting on a floor with her back not touching a wall and her eyes not on the door, and it takes me a second to work out what I'm looking at, because I've never once seen it on her.
She's finished. Exactly the way she said she'd be.
"Come in," she says. "She's been asking about you."
"Who has?"
Lucia's watching me from the corner.
She's got Mila's jacket around her shoulders, and she watches me the way she's watched every man in this house since the ladder, back against something solid and both hands free.
I stop where I am and don't come any closer.
"You can come in," she says.
It's the first English I've heard out of her.
I come in slowly and sit down against the opposite wall, as far from her as the room allows, and I put both hands flat on my knees where she can see them.
"You're the one from the porch," she says.
I look over at Mila.
"I told her." Mila shifts her weight so Yoli's hand stays where it is. "About the photograph. About the dog. She wanted to know why a bunch of strangers came for her, and the answer turned out to be a long story, so I told her the long story."
Lucia turns the plate around in her hands.
"She talked about you." She says it to me, careful, a word at a time, like she's rationing them. "In there. Not by name. Just a boy who left."
"Lucia—"
"She used to say she wasn't angry anymore. Through the wall." Her thumb runs the rim of the plate. "She said it like it was true. I never believed her."
"It wasn't true," Mila says.
"No." Lucia almost smiles. "It wasn't."
Then she looks at Mila, and her whole face changes, and her chin starts going.
"I have to tell you something." She switches to Spanish, because English won't carry it. "That night. When you knocked."
Mila goes very still.
"I heard you say it. Volveré." Lucia's got both hands wrapped around that plate like it's the only thing keeping her on the earth. "And I said it back to myself for a long time after. Every night. Volverá. Volverá. Like a prayer, except I never prayed, so it was only a thing I said."
Mila reaches over and puts a hand on her foot. Not her hand. Her foot, over the sock, where it's safe.
"Then the summer came, and they took Elena up the stairs, and they brought a child down and put her in Elena's room." Lucia's crying and she doesn't wipe at it. "And I stopped saying it."
"Lucia."
"I hoped you were coming back." She looks straight at her. "I need you to know I hoped. But I was afraid. I was so afraid you weren't, and after a while being afraid was easier than hoping, so I let go of it."
Mila doesn't move.
"I let go of you." Lucia's voice cracks down the middle. "And then somebody knocked twice on my door and I almost didn't answer, because I thought I was dreaming it. And it was you. It was you the whole time, and I'd stopped believing."
Mila doesn't tell her it's all right.
That's what I'll remember about my woman for as long as I'm breathing. She doesn't reach for the easy one.
"You should have stopped believing," Mila says. "Two years is too long to ask anybody to hope. I'd have stopped."
"You didn't."
"I was outside." Mila's voice doesn't waver. "It's easy to keep a promise in a warm bed. You had to keep hope in a room. You had the harder one, and I'm never going to let you feel bad about it."
Lucia sets the plate down on the floor.
Then she crawls across that bedroom on her hands and knees and puts her head in Mila's lap.
Mila puts a hand on her shorn hair, and neither one of them says anything else for a long while.
I get up without a sound and leave them to it.
***
Nadia Okonkwo makes her phone call at ten in the morning on Damon's burner, standing out in the driveway because she wanted to be outside for it.
We give her the yard. Everybody goes in. But it's a small house and the windows are open and there's no way not to hear it.
She dials. She waits.
"Mom?"
And then there's a sound out of that phone I'm going to hear for the rest of my life.
It isn't words.
It's a woman three hundred miles away making a noise into a telephone at ten in the morning, and it goes on and on and on.
Nadia sits down in the gravel with the phone pressed against her ear.
"I know." She says it over and over. "I know. I know, Mama. I know."
Boulder's standing next to me at the kitchen window with his leg wrapped and the crutch shoved up under his arm, and there are tears running down into his beard.
When he catches me seeing it he doesn't do one thing about it.
"Four years," he says.
"Yeah."
"She called that tip line every week for four years." He wipes his face with the flat of his hand. "That's what her mama's saying out there. Every Monday. Every single Monday for four years, and they told her the same thing every time."
Throughout the day, the ladies try to find their families. At least, the ones who can try.
Belén Ferreiro's number is disconnected.
She dials it in the front room with six people pretending not to watch.
It rings twice and cuts to a recording. She dials it again, because everybody does, and gets the same recording.
Then she stands there holding the phone.
"It's the house number." Her voice comes out thin. "It's been that number my whole life."
Nobody knows what to say to her.
"Six years is a long time." She turns the phone over in her hand. "People move."
She sets it down on the coffee table very carefully, the way you set a thing down when your hands aren't reliable, and stands looking at it.
Lashes crosses the room.
She doesn't hug her. She stops a foot short and waits until Belén looks up at her.
"Okay. So the number's dead." Lashes keeps her voice level. "That's all it is. It isn't an answer. It's a dead number."
"You don't—"
"I know exactly what you're doing, because I did it too." She doesn't blink. "You're standing there deciding they gave up on you. Don't. You've got no information. You've got a disconnected line, which means somebody moved house, and it’s as simple as that."
Belén's mouth is shaking.
"Here's what happens now." Lashes ticks it off on her fingers.
"We've got a woman in Chihuahua named Imani who can find a person from a name and a city, and she's extremely good at it, and she owes me a favor she doesn't know about yet.
You give me every name you've got. Your mother.
Your brothers. Your grandmother. The street you grew up on. And we start there and we don't stop."
"And if they—"
"Then we'll know. And knowing beats the six years you've had of not knowing.
" Lashes puts her hand out, palm up. "I've done this.
I've been the woman standing over a dead phone.
So I'll tell you what nobody told me. Families don't usually move because they've stopped looking.
They move because they can't stand the house anymore. "
Belén takes her hand.
We roll at four in the afternoon.
Three of Alejandro's vehicles and two of ours, running south with the women split between them, and Yoli in the back of the lead SUV with a nurse practitioner from Las Vegas beside her, because Sakura won't hand her off to anybody.
Mila's in the second vehicle with Lucia's head on her shoulder.
I drive.
The road runs out flat and gold ahead of us and the Huachucas come up on the right.
My mother's house is somewhere out past that ridge, thirty-five minutes from where I'm sitting.
I don't look at it.
Because I'm not going to it, and because Wendell Trask is out there too, somewhere behind us, standing in a cleaned-out yard with thirty-two men and nothing to show for any of them.
He did all of that for one reason.
Me.
That's the piece I can't put down. He didn't set that trap for eleven women. He was never trying to keep them.
Mila had it right from the start.
They were inventory, and inventory gets replaced.
He knew we were coming and he left the doors unlocked, because I was going to be in that yard.
He wanted me on his own ground.
Thirty-two men stood out in the cold half the night waiting on a shot at one prospect out of Chihuahua.
And a fifteen-year-old took a bullet through the collarbone running for a truck.
That's what it bought him. Not me.
A child bleeding into gravel because Wendell Trask wanted a crack at the Kincaid boy who talked to the government eleven years back.
Both hands on the wheel, desert going by, and I'm not angry the way I've been angry before.
It's colder than that.
It's what you feel when you finally understand you were never a person to somebody.
You were a shape they built a plan around.
In the mirror, Lucia's asleep against Mila's shoulder.
Mila catches me looking.
She doesn't say anything.
She lifts two fingers off her knee where nobody else can see them, the way I did to her down in the creek bed, and puts them back down.
We drive south.