Page 18 of Rooster's Remorse
That gets me a blink. A fast one at that.
Her hand comes off the door. "Excuse me?"
"I'll walk." I get my backpack up higher on my shoulder. "You've got one road in, and I've already seen it. I want to see what's at the end of it."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I've got some things to say to you," I tell her, "and I'd rather say them where I can see what's around me. Andbecause you're going to say no to at least one of them, and I want to know what I'm running from when you do."
The wind again.
Then the president of the Reapers Rejects, Mexico charter, looks at me across thirty feet of gravel, and one corner of her mouth pulls, and it isn't a smile.
"Say them now."
I look at the truck, then back at her. "Here?"
"You're on my ground, standing in my road, and my prospect's bleeding." She pushes the door shut with her hip and it doesn't catch. "Here."
Okay.
My mother's floor. A bus station bathroom. A spare room with the door open.
I put my feet where I want them and I say it.
"I need three things." I hold up my hand, and it doesn't shake. "One. I need a roof. Not forever. Until I can disappear, and I'll tell you when that is, and it won't be long."
She doesn't move. "Two?"
"Two." My throat wants to close, and I swallow it down. "He's going to look me in the face and tell me why he left."
Behind me he takes a breath and lets it go.
She tips her head an inch toward him without turning. "That's between you and him."
"No, ma'am." I wait until her eyes come back. "It stopped being between me and him the day it got my mother killed."
Her hand comes off the truck.
"And three?"
Here.
This is the one I've carried for eight months and thirty-one hundred miles, and nine of them on foot this morning.
The one I've been saying in my head since I put my hand flat on a door in the dark and lied to a girl I've never spoken to.
My voice comes out, and it doesn’t sound like mine. It's not steady and I don't care.
"There are eleven women being forced into trafficking in a hole in the ground in Cochise County, Arizona, and I walked out and left them there."
The wind stops. It actually stops.
"I told them I'd come back."
