Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chapter Twenty
Mila
The gate opens before we're close enough to see who's on it.
Somebody's been watching that road. They saw the trucks and had it rolling before Amara's bumper was in the drive.
Zorro's standing in the middle of the yard with a rifle across his chest and Ruby beside him with a dish towel still in her hand.
And behind them, the whole club.
Not the ones who went. The ones who stayed.
Axel and Rosa, Compass with grease to his elbows, Kelsey with both girls beside her, Astra, Marco and his men off the gate, Marie on the porch step with both hands pressed over her mouth.
They've been out here waiting. God knows how long.
I get out of the truck on legs that have forgotten how to work, and Marie is across that gravel before my boots hit the ground.
She goes past me.
Straight past me to the second vehicle, to the door Finn's climbing out of, and she takes her son's face in both hands and doesn't say one word.
I stand in a yard in Mexico and watch a woman check her boy for holes.
Then she turns around and finds me and puts both arms around my neck.
"You brought him home." She says it into my hair.
"He brought himself home."
"You brought him home." Her hands tighten at the back of my neck. "And you brought yourself back too, so don't argue with me. I'm too old and I've been awake for two days."
The women come out of the vehicles slowly.
That's what opens the yard up. Not us. Them.
Women in borrowed clothes stepping into daylight in a country most of them have never set foot in, in front of forty strangers, and the whole club goes so still I can hear the dogs at the house across the street.
Nobody rushes them.
Amara must have called ahead, because not one person moves toward those trucks.
The men fall back on their own, all the way to the fence, without a word from anybody.
Every woman in the club steps up.
Ruby's got the towel over her shoulder and her hands out where they can be seen.
"There's food," she says, in Spanish, to no one and to all of them at once. "A ridiculous amount of food. There's a room for every one of you with a lock on the inside of the door, and nobody comes down that hall who isn't a woman. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not until you say so."
Lucia's got a fistful of the back of my shirt.
She's had it since Sasabe. Six hours of tunnel and highway and she hasn't let go once, and her fingers tighten now.
I reach back and put my hand over hers.
"You see the woman in the green apron?" I keep my voice down. "That's Ruby. She's got a son and another baby coming. You can stand behind me as long as you want. She's going to feed you either way, and she's very hard to say no to."
Lucia looks at Ruby a long moment, then she lets go of my shirt.
She doesn't go to Ruby.
She moves about four feet off and stands there on her own two feet in an open yard with the sun on her face, and she tips her head back and looks at the sky.
Two years underground.
I turn around and look at a fence post until my eyes stop.
Yoli goes to the medical room and Sakura goes with her, and Nova's already in there with her sleeves shoved up.
I watch the two of them work through the doorway.
The nurse practitioner from Vegas and the nursing student from Montana, disagreeing gently about whether to redress the wound now or let her sleep first, and Yoli's watching them go back and forth like it's the most fascinating thing she's ever seen.
They're arguing about her.
Two grown women standing over her, disagreeing out loud about what's best, and then Sakura turns and asks her which she'd rather.
Yoli's mouth comes open. She doesn't have an answer ready.
Nobody's asked that child what she'd rather in a very long time.
Sakura will probably be here for at least a week, then someone will take her back to the crossing and she’ll be back in Vegas, with her husband and kids.
I head into the main room and sit down at the table and it takes me one second to realize Ruby made too much meat.
She made an obscene amount of meat.
There's a whole cabrito going in the pit out back and carne asada and a pot of frijoles the size of a bathtub, and when I say something about it she waves the towel at me.
"I didn't know how many," she says.
"You knew how many. Amara called from the road."
"I didn't know how hungry." She points the towel at my chest. "Sit down. You look like a coat rack. Somebody get this woman a plate before she falls over."
***
Amara finds me around eight, out by the fire pit, which somebody's finally lit.
She sits down on the bench beside me with a beer she isn't drinking and watches the fire a while before she says anything.
"My uncle called this afternoon."
I go still.
"He's got people looking for Trask." She turns the bottle in her hands. "Started the minute he heard about the ranch. He's got names. He's got the man's businesses mapped. There's somebody sitting on a house in Sierra Vista and another one on a property in Bisbee."
"Has he found him?"
"No." She says it plainly. "Trask went to ground the same day. He's got forty years of practice disappearing inside his own state and he's doing it now. My uncle's people are good. They're not miracle workers."
The fire cracks and throws sparks up.
"So, he's alive."
"He's alive. He's lost his ranch, his operation, thirty-two men, and every piece of leverage he ever had over the Kincaids.
" Amara finally drinks. "And he's going to spend whatever's left of his life being hunted by a man with more money and more patience than he's got. That's not the ending you wanted."
"No."
"It's not the one I wanted either." She looks at me sideways.
"You want the truth? I'd rather have him breathing and running than dead and finished.
A dead man can't tell me who else was in that ledger.
There's a ring out there still buying and still selling, and Wendell Trask has been in bed with those people for twenty years. "
I watch the fire.
"You think he knows them," I say. "The ones who took Lashes."
"I think he's paid them." Amara sets the bottle down on the stone. "Those women didn't fall out of the sky. La Nada bought inventory from somebody. And when my uncle's people finally put a hand on Wendell Trask, I think he's going to be a very talkative old man."
Lashes comes and sits on my other side about an hour later.
She doesn't have Hope.
There's a woman at the far end of the yard with the baby up on her shoulder, dark red hair, laughing at something Kelsey said, and Hope's patting at her face with both hands.
"Scarlett." Lashes says it before I ask. "Came down with Damon's people. She's staying a few days to help with the women."
"She's good with the baby."
"She's good with everybody." Lashes says it a hair too fast, then puts her eyes back on the fire.
I let it go by.
We sit there a while.
"They're going to be okay," she says finally. "The eleven. Not all at once and not for a long time, but they're going to be okay. Ruby's already fighting three of them over who does the dishes."
"Yeah."
"So say the rest of it." She still doesn't look at me. "You've had a face on you all night."
I pick a stick up off the ground and turn it over in my hands.
"I'm not finished," I say.
"No."
"We took the women off that property." My voice comes out level. "They didn't walk to Cochise County on their own, Lashes. There's a supplier. And the day that supplier hears Trask went under, they'll sell to somebody else and start filling new doors somewhere I've never heard of."
Lashes doesn't say anything.
"And you were bought," I say. "From the same kind of people. Maybe the same actual people. We don't know yet."
"We don't know yet." She says it slow. "But Imani's got the ledger. And Amara's uncle is going to get his hands on Trask eventually."
"And when he does, Trask talks."
"He talks a lot." Lashes turns and looks at me, and her jaw's set.
Her eyes have gone bright and hard in the firelight.
"I've had one name in my head for years.
One. Never got it, because the man who could've given it to me went into a hole in Colombia and didn't come out.
And I've spent years telling myself it was over because they got me out. "
"It's not over."
"It's not close to over." She puts her hand out, palm down, and I lay mine on top of it. "You in?"
"I'm in."
"It'll take years."
"I've got years." I watch the fire eat through the stick I threw in. "That's the whole point of what we did up there."
They call church at nine and Finn goes in.
Nobody tells me why.
Nobody tells him either.
Razor comes and finds him at the pit and says Prez wants you in ten and walks off, and Finn looks at me with his whole face gone careful.
"It's fine," I say.
"You don't know that."
"I know that." I get up on my toes and straighten his collar, which does not need straightening. "Go on."
He goes.
I stand in that yard for forty-five minutes with my heart going like a rabbit under a hawk.
Marie comes and stands beside me and takes my hand and neither of us says one word, and the whole club drifts out of the main room in twos and threes until there are thirty people standing around a fire not talking about what's happening behind that door.
Ruby brings me a plate I don't eat.
Lucia comes and stands on my other side.
At ten o'clock the chapel door opens.
They come out in a line with stoic faces on.
Python first, and I can't read one thing off him.
Then Zorro. Boulder on his crutch.
Doom. Brick. Razor.
Every one of them walks past me into the yard and gives me nothing at all, and I want to grab somebody by the vest and shake them.
Then Finn.
He comes out in his prospect cut with his hands empty and his face doing nothing, and he stops on the step, and my lungs quit.
Amara comes out last.
She's carrying a box.
Plain cardboard, the size you'd put a pair of boots in, and she walks it out into the middle of that yard and every conversation in the compound dies at once.
"Rooster." She stops and plants her feet. "Come here."
He goes.