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At the far end, next to the big roll-up loading door, there's a regular door. I'm halfway to it when it opens.

A man walks in with a cigarette in his mouth and a phone in his hand. "Dutch? I’ve been sitting at that tunnel forever. That you hollering?" It has to be the driver, tired of waiting at the tunnel.

I duck into the next aisle and crouch behind the bottom row of barrels. He comes down the middle aisle fast, toward the pounding, so close I can hear his keys jingle. I wait until he's past. Then I run for the door he left open.

My bare feet slap the concrete. Behind me, he yells, "Hey!"

I'm through the door before he can catch me. The night air hits my face, cool and sweet with cut grass. For almost a year, all I've breathed is cattle stink and diesel exhaust in that barn on the Thornton routes, then weeks of cave air and cigar smoke in that cellar. This air is so fresh I nearly stagger.

A stock trailer sits idling on the gravel at the mouth of the loading tunnel below the building, its running lights on. That was supposed to be my ride. I turn my back on it and run uphill into the vineyard, with vines whipping my arms and rocks biting my bare feet.

Behind me, a truck horn blares twice, then holds in one long blast. Everybody within hearing knows I'm out now.

When I reach the top of the hill, flashlights are swinging through the vine rows below me. A deer fence taller than I am blocks the way. I follow it along the ridge to a pipe gate over a cattle guard. I climb it with one arm clamped against my bruised ribs and drop down on the other side.

The last time I ran, I climbed out of a Clovis livestock trailer onto the shoulder of a dark highway. Dutch found me the next day lying in a ditch. He finished his cigar standing over me before he put his boot on my ankle. This time I'll die before I let him catch me.

I crouch behind a fence post just long enough to pull on Royce's boots. They're too big, so I lace them tight. Stealing a dead man's boots is surely forbidden somewhere in Leviticus. The Lord and I can discuss it later. Then I shrug into Royce's jacket, bloody collar and all.

A green sign stands on a post at the edge of the road.

GILLESPIE CO.

I read it twice. I spent a year being hauled from one place to another. And for these last weeks, they've kept me in my own county. Somewhere close, my father has been preaching every Sunday. I could have walked to his pulpit.

The lights of Fredericksburg glow low on the horizon, but I won't go anywhere near them. Half that town knows my face, and in all that time the sheriff never once came looking for me.

I look up instead. Daddy taught me the stars on the parsonage roof when I was little, back before Mama got sick, back when he still laughed. 'Follow the two stars at the end of the Big Dipper's cup, and you'll find the North Star,' he'd said. I put the North Star in front of me and walk into the brush.

I walk the rest of that first night. At sunrise I crawl deep into a cedar thicket, where the branches grow so thick a man could walk right past and never see me. Twice that morning, I hear a diesel engine crawl along the road below, too slow for anybody just passing through. Through a gap in the branches, I catch sunlight flashing off glass, the way it flashes off binoculars. The second time, it stops right below my thicket and idles. Over the engine, I hear Dutch's voice.

"She's on foot and hurt. She won't get far." He doesn't bother keeping his voice down. "I want her alive. I want her to know it's me."

I lie with my face in the dirt and my heart pounding against the ground until the engine fades. He's not hunting a runaway anymore. He's hunting the woman who killed his brother.

The second night, a horse comes out of the dark in somebody's pasture and blows at me over the wire. I hold out my hands, and it sniffs them. "Hey, sugar," I whisper. My voice cracks, because a year ago I trained horses for half the ranchers in this county. For a minute I feel like myself again. Then headlights sweep the far side of the pasture, and the horse spooks and bolts.

Near midnight I find a stock tank. I've had two swallows of warm, muddy water when headlights swing off the road and head straight for the windmill. I crawl into the brush on my elbows.

A man gets out and walks the edge of the tank with a flashlight. The beam stops on the mud where I knelt. He crouches and studies my tracks, then pulls out a phone.

"Got tracks at a stock tank," he says. "Big boots, fresh. Headed north. Tell Dutch."

He follows my prints toward the brush. I slither out the far side on my belly and inch across the open pasture while his flashlight beam sweeps back and forth over the weeds around me. At the fence, Royce's jacket snags on a barb, and the light swings toward the sound. I wriggle out of the sleeves, leave the jacket hanging on the wire, and crawl deep into the tall grass beyond before I go still.

The beam finds the jacket. I hear his boots walk up to the fence and the wire twang as he yanks the jacket free. Then he's on the phone again.

"Found Royce's jacket on a fence," he says. "She's not on the roads. She's cutting across pastures, like she knows this country."

I lie there with my cheek in the grass and wait for him to leave. Daddy used to warn from the pulpit that girls who sneak out to honky-tonks end up in a ditch. I've done the honky-tonk and the ditch. He can preach the rest of that sermon without me.

When the headlights are gone, I get up. The man was right about one thing. I do know this country. Now Dutch will search the pastures too, not just the roads. But I know something he doesn't.

A gas pipeline runs through these back pastures, a mowed strip of cleared ground that cuts across ranch after ranch for miles. Out on that open strip, anybody with binoculars could spot me. So I stay in the cedar along its edge and use the cleared line to keep my bearings. I know which of these ranches have cattle guards a truck can cross, and which ones are nothing but locked gates and barbed wire for miles. I stick to the locked ones, where no truck can follow me.

I find the pipeline before dawn and spend the second day under a live oak beside it, too tired to be hungry. At sundown on my third night out, I follow it north through the cedar.

A little before midnight, I come out of the cedar onto the shoulder of a paved road. I stop dead with my hand on a fence post, and my throat closes up. I know this road. I know the curve where it drops toward the creek and the yellow cattle guard on the far side. At nineteen, I drove the last mile of it with my headlights off every Saturday night I could sneak out of the parsonage.