Chapter 8: Cage Nine

I woke my mother with a hand on her shoulder.

She sat up in bed with her hair in its night braid and her glasses already on.

"Is it the tire?"

"The yard. Stay with Luz. Lock the door."

She did not ask anything else.

She took my father's old shotgun from the closet and checked that it was empty, with deep disgust.

Then she carried it down the hall anyway.

"I will sit in her doorway with a domino and a bad attitude," she said. "Go."

I drove to the yard at ninety miles an hour on empty streets.

The night guard at the front gate lifted his head from a magazine and did not look surprised.

"Haverford said you'd be along, Ms. Arriaga. He told me to let you in and not call anybody."

"Did he."

"He was very polite about it."

I found the tractor parked behind Warehouse B, tilted with one wheel on a curb.

Beyond it the back row of trailers stood in the dark, long white boxes on rusted legs, with weeds grown up to their axles.

A flashlight beam moved underneath the seventeenth one.

I walked up in my boots and stopped beside a pair of legs sticking out onto the gravel.

"Dell."

"Don't move," he said, from under the trailer. "Step to your left."

I stepped left.

He slid out on his back, grey with dust, with a black plastic box the size of a deck of cards in his hand.

A magnet clung to its back, and a wire trailed from one end.

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