The walkie-talkie hisses, and nobody says anything into it.
"She says she walked from the highway."
The highway's nine miles. Nobody walks it.
In August it kills people, and in January, it's forty-one degrees with the wind coming down off the Sierra, and there's nothing out there but gravel,cholla, and the ditch.
"So tell her—" Compass looks at me. "What do I tell her?"
I take the radio out of his hand. "Marco, she want a ride or a phone?"
"No."
"No, what?"
"She doesn't want anything." The carefulness comes into his voice then, slowly, like a man choosing where to put his feet. "She's asking for someone."
There's frost on the inside of the window over the bench where the sun hasn't come around yet. I'm looking at it. There's a shop rag in my hand and I've stopped using it.
"Who?" I ask.
"She won't say. Says she'll say it to him."
"Him who?"
"That's what I'm telling you,güey." The radio pops and cuts and comes back. "She'll say it when she sees him."
Compass laughs. "Okay, sosomebody'sgot a problem." He looks over at me and the laugh goes out of his face. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You look?—"
"Nothing." I drop the rag on the bench. "I'll go see what the fuck this is about."
It's a four-minute walk from the garage to the gate, and I do it in three.
I don't know why I'm walking fast.
There's no reason for it.
It's a woman on a road, and it's not the first strange thing to come up that gravel since I've been here.
There's a hundred versions of this that end with somebody's cousin needing a ride into town.
There's something on the back of my neck.
I've had it before.
I had it in a parking lot in Bullhead City when I was twenty-four with two men sitting in a car forty yards out and no reason on God's earth to think they were there for me except that they were.
I haven’t had it once since I crossed the river, not one time in all these years, and it's here now and it's climbing.
I wipe the blood off my forearm with the heel of my hand and keep walking.
The gate sits at the end of a gravel run with the desert coming up to the fence line on both sides.
There's a woman on the other side of it with a black backpack hanging off one shoulder.
