Which told her that what they had found in that box was exactly as significant as Don Teodoro had believed it was.
“You won’t make it to Phoenix,” Fausto said.
He said it quietly, almost conversationally, which was worse than if he had shouted it. A threat delivered quietly by a man who has resources is a different category of threat.
She understood what she was holding.
She understood what it meant that he had come up this hill personally, at night, with men.
She tightened her hand around the USB drive.
And then, from somewhere down the road below — from the direction of the main highway, distant but getting less distant — came the sound of a siren.
One.
Then two.
Fausto heard it.
She watched his face.
She watched the calculation happening in real time — whether to move, whether to stay, whether the men behind him were going to hold their position when sirens were getting louder.
They were not.
She had known they would not be, because she had made one phone call before she drove up this road. Not to the journalist in Phoenix — that call was for tomorrow. This one had been to a retired sheriff’s deputy she had met three years into her sentence through a prison legal aid program, a woman who had quietly believed in her case when almost nobody else did and had stayed in irregular contact ever since.
She had told her: I’m going up to the property. If you don’t hear from me in four hours, send someone.
She had not heard from her in four hours.
The sirens were not distant anymore.
Fausto looked at her one more time.
Then he turned and walked back toward his truck with the careful, unhurried movement of a man who has decided that the most important thing right now is to be somewhere else, and who has lawyers for mornings like the one that was coming.
The other men followed.
The trucks backed down the hill.
The headlights disappeared around the bend.
Jacinto lowered the rifle.
He let out a breath that sounded like it had been held since September fourteen years ago.
Aitana stood on the hillside in the dark and listened to the sirens getting closer and felt the USB drive in her fist and thought about Don Teodoro, who had tied a red ribbon on this thing and buried it in the ground and made an old man promise to keep checking on it, year after year, on the theory that his granddaughter was going to come back one day and need to know the truth.
He had been right.
He had always been right about her.
“Thank you,” she said, to the dark and to the stars and to nobody in particular.
Then she walked down the hill toward the lights.
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