Page 91 of Coyote

The light through the wire had dropped and turned red. Not much of it left.

I put my face close to the packed part and pulled air in through my nose.

Tin. Old piss. Dry rot in the dirt.

Nothing of him. A hundred and fifty days, and the ground had taken all of it back already.

I sat up. My eye stung, and I told myself it was dust.

There was an arc worn into the hardpack, smooth and dark, sweeping out from the anchor ring on the back wall and curving toward the gate. I walked it out.

Inside that circle, right against the sheet metal, the dirt was pressed flat in a shape about the size of a man. Except it wasn't his size. It was two feet too short. If he'd laid straight, his shins would have been out in the rough gravel. He'd slept curled up for five months because the stall was built for things that didn't have to carry a head that high.

At the far edge of the circle, where the chain ran out against the wire, his boots had dug the dirt into a shallow bowl.

He'd stood there day after day. That was where the iron ran tight, and he'd kept his boots planted anyway, looking out at the yard, at the trucks, at the road, at nothing at all. He'd stood there enough to shift the dirt.

Down low on the wire at that spot, a foot off the ground, the galvanized links shone silver-bright. That was where Miguel had slid the water jug through in the dark.

I looked back at the walls for the thing I knew had to be there.

There wasn't a mark on them. No dents in the tin, no boot prints, no place where the wire had pulled off the pipe frame. He hadn't bent anything, torn anything, or kicked anything.

I'd have torn that wire with my teeth. I'd have broken my own skull against the pipe before I sat there.

I put my forehead against the tin and held it there until the heat hurt, because I needed something to want besides Zaroff's throat, and there wasn't anything.

Then I slid back down into John's arc of packed dirt, resting my spine against the sheet metal exactly where those scratches ended.

Zaroff had put me on this ground for free, and I was going to make him pay for it.

Zaroff had bragged about forty people.

On my way out of the pen, I counted the folding chairs. He was short by a dozen.

They'd rigged the work lights up on two flatbed trailers and run a string of yellow bulbs directly over the concrete pit. The folding chairs sat in neat, quiet rows facing the empty brush, with metal coolers slotted between them and somebody's transistor radio throwing static into the air. A woman in an expensive, tailored jacket stood near the back, holding a paper plate of brisket.

Every single one of them turned around when the padlock clicked off the hasp.

Zaroff stood at the gate himself, holding a heavy maglite, while his people stripped me naked. "Sixty minutes from when you clear the lights," he said. "I'll be counting them out loud for these folks, so don't imagine I'm going to lose track." He tipped his chin toward the black space past the trailers. "Go on."

I looked over his shoulder at the row of faces.

They wanted me to bolt for the horizon. Instead, I walked out of that yellow light in absolutely no hurry. Behind me, the radio started up, playing some country rock anthem, and someone popped the cork on some champagne while everyone else cheered.

Enjoy your party, asshole, I thought as I sped up my pace. It'll be your last.

I stepped into the brush and the shadows.

Honestly? I was fucking thrilled. All week I'd been begging for the chance to get my hands on Zaroff, and then his men went and did half the work for me.

Idiots.

The play was simple. I'd swing wide, let them watch the ridge. Then I'd hook the arc back around and hit them from the south, straight off the gravel road. They expected me to run for the ranch, for safety, for freedom. The last thing they expected was for me to come for them.

They'd lined the stock trailers nose-to-tail on the west edge of the gravel. There was a tiny gap at the hitch between the second and third trailers. A small man could go through it sideways.

I'd crawl right under the flatbed with the work lights. The glare would blind those spectator pricks, and I'd pull Zaroff down right in front of his own paying guests.