"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 likethis.
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.
