Randy's text came a little before midnight on Wednesday, while Vanessa was taking her lashes off. It was a link and two words, this you?, and she held the phone out at arm's length with a strip of lashes still stuck to one finger and waited for the page to load.

The headline used the word breeder in quotation marks. Under it was a picture of a camera under the eave of a house, and under that the barn in daylight, gray boards and a metal roof, smaller than it was at night. She sat down on the edge of the bed. The air conditioner dripped into the noodle tub, and she read it once fast to find herself and once more from the beginning.

She was in it. She wasn't named. He had said he protected his sources, and he had, and she was everywhere anyway. The cooler with the money under the beer was in the second paragraph, and the trucks along the road, and a tarp carried out after midnight that moved once. Further down was a woman brought out to the barn on Saturday nights in a black dress so the men at the pit would have something to look at between fights. It was his sentence, not hers, but the dress was hers, and she read the line four times. In the fourth paragraph Curtis Haney said, Who's been talking to you? She laughed out loud, alone in the room, and put her hand over her mouth.

She sat down at the dresser and turned on the ring light and wiped the foundation away until the skin under it showed, a little blotchy at the chin, the circles under her eyes brown, more or less the face she'd had at nineteen in the garage in Montclair. She looked at it for a long time and couldn't tell if it was a good face or not. Then she put a little concealer under the eyes, out of habit, and went to bed with the phone on her chest.

In the morning she took the phone down to the front desk in her robe and flip-flops and slid it under the glass. On the TV a man in a gray suit was holding a Bible over his head with both hands. Mrs. Oduya put her reading glasses on and read with her finger on the screen, and it took her a long time. At the bottom she scrolled back up to the picture of the barn.

"Which one is you?"

"I'm not in the picture."

"No." She handed the phone back. "That's better. They always use the worst picture."

A man was standing by the coffee machine in the corner with a paper cup, a man she'd seen maybe three times, upstairs, in the evenings. He had his phone in his other hand, and he looked from it to her.

"That thing online. With the dogs. That was you, right? My cousin sent it to me."

She knew what he wanted, to be a man who had been close to something, and she could have said no. "Yes."

He looked at her for a while like people looking out the window when the traffic slows down for a wreck on the shoulder. Then he put the lid on his coffee and went out to his car. Mrs. Oduya looked at Vanessa a little longer than she usually did before she looked back at the TV. "Those dogs. Lord."

That afternoon Gil didn't come at three. He drove for a bakery in Ontario and brought her whatever was left in the truck, and once it had been a whole cake with Happy Retirement Linda on it that nobody picked up.

Brandon called on Thursdays, around four, to say which nights were taken, and sometimes just to talk about a fight he'd seen or his mother's car. At four she checked the phone. At six she took a shower with the bathroom door open so she'd hear it. At ten she turned it face down on the dresser so she wouldn't keep looking.

He didn't call.

On Friday Lorena from room eleven caught her at the ice machine. Lorena had been at the Blue Yucca longer than Vanessa, with a boy of about eight who did his homework on the walkway, and she worked nights behind the counter at the Circle K on Foothill. She had never said a word about what Vanessa did. She held her ice bucket on her hip and looked down the walkway before she talked.

"Some guys came in last night. Asking about you."

"What guys?"

"Truck guys. They wanted to know which room." She shook the bucket so the ice settled. "I said I don't know any Vanessa. Then they asked about some woman with a bat. Like I'd know her either."

"What did they look like?"

"Like guys who ask which room." Lorena looked at her. "Maybe you go see your mom for a while, mija."

Vanessa didn't have a mom to go see. She'd never had a where, only a next, a man or a room or a week paid for. That night she packed and stood by the door with her jacket on and her hand on the chain until her feet hurt, and then she went to bed. The suitcase was still standing there on Saturday, zipped.

She did her face at five, slowly and all the way, because she wanted to have it on. At seven she moved the curtain an inch. There was a pickup in the lot that hadn't been there an hour earlier, parked nose-out by the dumpster with two men in it and the engine off, and the cigarette at the end of an arm out the window brightened and went dull. Brandon's silver Altima was parked next to it, the one with the dent in the back door, and Brandon wasn't in it. He knocked the way he always knocked, three and then one, and she looked at the chain for a while before she took it off.

"Hey, Vee."

"Hey."

He came in past her without touching her and sat on the end of the bed, which he never did. He turned his car keys over and looked at the suitcase by the door.

"Going somewhere?"

"I was going to."

"Yeah." He looked at the suitcase some more. "You look nice. That's the Saturday face." He almost smiled. "Sit down, Vee. Will you sit down?"

She sat at the dresser with her back to the mirror. She had been reading Brandon for two years, and she knew what he looked like when he wanted something and when he was going to lie, and this was neither. He looked like a man in a waiting room, in his good shoes and the jeans he had ironed, with the gold chain he wore outside his shirt because his mother had given it to him.

"You didn't call. Thursday."

"I know." He rubbed his face with one hand. "The barn burned down, Vee. Wednesday night, after your thing came out. Somebody burned it with a couple of the dogs in it and beat the hell out of Curtis, and he's in the hospital with his arm in a cage. He says it was some crazy lady with a bat."

She hadn't known, and he saw it on her face, and his shoulders came down a little. "Okay. You didn't know. Everybody's read that thing. It's got the black dress in it. Who else wears the black dress? I'm not mad about that. That's dogs. Nobody's going to kill anybody over dogs." He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "I need you to tell me you didn't give him names. Give me something I can take back."

"I gave him names."

He closed his eyes. "Which ones?"

She told him in the order she had given them at the diner.

"Gary Fenske."

Brandon nodded with his eyes closed, as if he had already counted on that one. Gary bet loud and paid late, and half of Fontana knew it.

"Hector Villa."

He opened his eyes and looked up at the water stain over the bathroom door, and he stayed there long enough that she heard the ice machine down the walkway drop a load.

"Who else?"

"The one with the boat on the trailer. Ron. I told him what he drives."

"Ron Kessler." Brandon rubbed his mouth. "He'll think it's about the boat."

"And Darrell."

"Jesus, Vee." He laughed, a short one, through his nose. "Darrell's downstairs."

She had known it since the arm in the pickup window. Darrell had a wide pink face that was always a little wet at the hairline, and he was the one who had carried the tarp out the back door. She had seen it move. When he came back in he took a fresh beer and stood next to her by the wall, close enough that she could smell the dog on his shirt, and she kept smiling at the pit until the last fight. Afterward she threw up on the gravel behind the Altima while Brandon sat in the car with the engine running. She hadn't let herself think about it since. At the diner it had come out of her before she knew it was coming, with his name on it.

Her hands were cold. She heard her voice go soft before she had decided anything. It was the oldest thing she had, older than Brandon: the head tipped a little, the shoulders let down, a woman tired of deciding who would be grateful to anybody who did it for her. She had used it on him the first night, two years ago, when he was still a man who paid and called ahead and brought a bottle of something sweet.

"Brandon."

For a second it worked. She saw his hands stop on the keys and his mouth open a little, and she thought, there, he still wants out of this more than he wants anything. Then he looked away from her, at the wall.

"Don't. Don't do that to me. Not that."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You are. You know you are." He stood up. "You think I want this? I drove over so it would be me first. So I could maybe find something. I'm the one who brought you out there. If I don't come back with something, it's me next."

"You could just go."

"Go where?" He looked at the suitcase. "Where are you going?"

She didn't have anything to say to that.

He came a step closer, and for a moment she thought he was going to touch her face. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry it was you."

She heard them on the walkway, two sets of boots and one of them heavier, and nobody knocked. Brandon opened the door.

Darrell came in first, and the room was full. He smelled like cigarettes and the cab of a truck, and he looked at Brandon before he looked at her, and Brandon shook his head once. The second one was a kid, maybe twenty, skinny, with a mustache that hadn't come in and a Dodgers cap he took off in the doorway and then put back on, as if somebody had taught him to take it off indoors and he'd remembered too late that this didn't count.

"This her?"

"Shut up, Joey."

Darrell finally looked at her. He was afraid and angry the way afraid men are angry, and he didn't know yet that his name was in a reporter's notebook.

"Get your shoes on."

She thought about screaming long enough that Darrell saw her think it, and he took her by the upper arm in the same place Brandon always did. When she pulled, Joey got her other arm, and Darrell's hand came over her mouth, big and damp, and pressed until her head went back against his chest. A bottle went off the dresser, and the room filled with the smell of her perfume.

"Easy." Brandon stood by the bed with his keys. "Easy, she's coming."

While Joey knelt in front of her like a shoe salesman and got her sneakers on, Brandon reached past them to the dresser and picked up her phone. He didn't look at it. He put it in his back pocket and looked at the wall, and she watched him do it over the edge of Darrell's hand.

They walked her out between them, down the walkway under the buzzing lights to the office. Mrs. Oduya was behind the glass with a choir singing on the little TV. She looked up at the four of them going by, at Vanessa between the two men in her Saturday face and her sneakers with the laces open, and Vanessa looked back at her. Mrs. Oduya held her eyes. Then she looked down at the counter and turned a page in her receipt book.

Brandon drove. Joey sat in the back with her, his hand on her wrist on the seat between them, and Darrell's headlights hung in the back window the whole way, never closer and never farther. Nobody turned on the radio. She counted sounds because that was what she did, the turn signal when Brandon changed lanes, eleven clicks, the seams in the road that went tup, tup up the grade through the pass. On the long straight past the summit Brandon's phone lit up on the console, and he picked it up and typed with his thumb at seventy miles an hour, a long time, and put it face down, and she counted that too, the little taps. He didn't look at her in the mirror once. The lights of Victorville went by off to the left, and after that came a two-lane road with no lights at all, and after a long time a turn onto dirt.

It was a workshop, or had been, a long building of corrugated tin with a roll-up door rusted halfway open and a single bulb burning over a side door. When Brandon turned off the engine she could hear how much nothing there was, the tick of the motor cooling and the wind and far off a sound that might have been a dog or might not.

Darrell left the pickup's headlights on, and in them she saw the grave. It was by the side of the workshop where the ground was softer, a long hole with the dirt piled next to it and a shovel stuck straight up in the mound. It was not very deep. Joey looked at her looking at it, and he let go of her wrist and put his hands in his pockets as if he didn't want them seen.

They put her on the concrete step under the bulb to wait. Darrell checked his phone and said he was twenty minutes out, and she heard from how he said it that the he wasn't Haney. Moths came to the bulb, and Darrell lit a cigarette.

Joey kept looking out past the headlights into the dark. He took a folding knife with a wooden handle out of his pocket and started cleaning under his thumbnail with the point. "I fed those dogs for two years." He wasn't saying it to anybody. "Every day. Shadow and Duchess and a red one Curtis never named. They found Duchess by the barn. They didn't find Shadow."

"Curtis says she turned into a cat," Darrell said. "Burkhart. Shadow's a cat now too."

"Fuck you, Darrell."

Brandon stood a little away from them with his back against Darrell's fender and one hand in his back pocket, on her phone, she thought, and he wasn't looking at her or at the grave or at anything. She had about twenty minutes, and she had Joey, who had fed the dogs and wasn't allowed to be sad about them.

"Was Shadow the black and white one? With one ear down?"

He looked at her, and she kept her voice easy. "I saw him in the barn. He looked at everybody like he was bored."

"That's him. He was a good dog." He folded the knife and put it away. "People don't think they're good dogs."

She made her face into the face of somebody listening, which was the easiest face she had, and she could see him begin to lean toward it. He started telling her how Shadow took his food out of the bowl one piece at a time and set it on the concrete before he ate it, and she nodded.

"Look at him." Darrell had come over. "Two minutes and she's got the kid crying about his doggy. That's her job, you dumb shit. She sold out Curtis. She sold out me." He bent down to her. "You gave him my name. Brandon told me."

She looked over at Brandon and thought of the phone lighting up on the console on the long straight, and the taps. Brandon looked at the ground.

Joey hit her. It was an open hand across the side of her face, not very hard, the kind a boy gives when he's watching to see how it looks, and her ear rang. When she looked back at him his face was the face she had been waiting for since the motel, closed and red and doing what it was told.

The man came in a dark sedan, clean even after the dirt road, and turned off his lights before he got out. He was fifty or a little past it, in a pressed shirt and a light jacket that hung heavier on the right side, and he looked at things in order. He didn't say his name, and the others didn't say it either. Joey took his cap off and kept it off.

The man looked at the grave first. Then he looked at her.

"You're Vanessa. You gave the reporter names." He looked at Brandon without turning his head. "Which ones."

Brandon said them. She heard the names come out of Brandon's mouth in the dark, in the same order, three names and then Darrell, in the flat careful voice of somebody reading a list at the DMV. When he got to the second name the man's eyes moved, once.

"Why Darrell?"

She looked at Darrell's wet pink face. She could smell the beer on him from where she sat, and under it, though it couldn't be there, the dog.

"Okay." The man nodded as if she had answered. "Your friend with the bat. Where is she?"

"I don't know her."

"How did you get in touch with the reporter?"

"A guy at a bar knew him. He texted me."

She waited for the next question. It had to come next, and she could feel the phone in Brandon's back pocket, the reporter's number in it, his first text, Brian here. Cholla Diner on Foothill, 8:30? My treat. Brandon's hand had gone to his back pocket and stayed there, and his face in the headlights told her nothing about why.

The man didn't ask it. He had decided before he got out of the car, she saw that now, and nothing she could tell him would change what the hole by the workshop was for. He looked at his watch.

"Okay. Go ahead. I'll be in the car." He went back to the sedan and sat in the dark with the engine running.

They did it on the ground in front of the workshop, in the headlights, so they could see.

Darrell pulled her off the step by her hair, and she fell on her hands and knees on the concrete, and the first kick took her in the side under the ribs and lifted her off the ground. She didn't know a sound like that could come out of her. Joey kicked from the other side because Darrell was watching him. His kicks were wild, catching her hip and her thigh and then her stomach, and she folded up around it. Darrell stepped on one wrist and leaned on it until something gave.

She counted. She had always counted. She counted the kicks and lost count at eleven and started over. She counted the thud of a boot going in and the grunt Darrell made at the end of every kick like a man lifting a box, and Joey breathing high and fast, and her own breath coming out in pieces that weren't words. Her mouth filled up warm and tasted of metal, and when she spat, a tooth came out with it and lay on the concrete in the light, very white, and she looked at it from close up and thought, that's mine, that's one of mine.

They stopped to breathe and started again. Now they were tired, and tired was worse, because they were doing it to get it done. Brandon stood by the fender of his car, and when her head was turned that way she could see his good shoes, not moving.

After a while she stopped being able to tell where it hurt, because it was everywhere and then it was nowhere in particular, a big flat roar like the freeway. She heard her grandmother's voice saying her name in church, the long way, Vanessa María, as she only said it at Mass. She heard the choir on Mrs. Oduya's TV. She saw the edge of the grave from the side, a line of dirt against the dark, very close, and the shovel standing up out of the mound.

She tried to crawl. She got one elbow under her and pushed and moved six inches toward the dark.

"Where you going," Darrell said, and pulled the shovel out of the dirt.

She was thinking about the cake. She was thinking that Linda had probably

It smelled like rain.

It smelled like spring after a rain, wet earth and new grass coming up out of it, and the smell was all around her, over the dust and the oil and the blood, and it didn't belong there. There was no rain. The ground under her cheek was dry and the sky was clear and full of stars.

She lay still. She could hear everything: Darrell breathing behind her with the shovel in his hands, Joey a step farther off, the sedan idling in the dark. And she could see them, all four, without opening her eyes. She had always been able to see what a man wanted and what he was afraid of after a few seconds. Now it came without the seconds.

Darrell was afraid of the dark past the headlights, and of the man in the sedan, and of his own name in a notebook. Joey wanted somebody to tell him he had done right, and he was going to be sick and wanted nobody to see. The man in the car wanted to go home clean. And Brandon.

Brandon by his car was afraid and ashamed, and under both of those, under everything, was what he had felt for her for two years and never said, whatever it was, kept in the same place he kept his mother's chain. She found it the way you find a light switch in a room you know. She leaned on it.

Brandon moved.

She heard him come off the fender and his feet on the concrete, running, and he hit Darrell from the side with his whole body before the shovel came up again. They went down together, and Brandon was up first, standing between all of them and her with his arms out, screaming at them to stop, stop, stop it, his voice going high and cracking.

"What are you doing?" Darrell was on one knee, holding his shoulder. "Brandon, what the fuck are you doing?"

The door of the sedan opened. She got up while they were looking at each other. It took a long time. Her body hurt in all the same places, but it moved differently, as if it were being carried. She stood in the headlights with her shirt torn and blood down her chin and one arm hanging, and they all turned and looked at her.

"Stop," she said.

She said it quietly, and the wind seemed to stop to hear it. Her voice came out lower than her own and very clear, and it almost sang, the way her grandmother's voice had in church when she was only talking to the priest, and the four men stood in it and didn't move.

Then she started on them, one at a time, in the order she wanted.

She took Darrell's fear and turned it a little, so it pointed at the man standing nearest to him, who was Joey. For Darrell, Joey with his narrow face and his little mustache was the thing past the headlights, the cat, the woman with the bat, everything Curtis had seen. Darrell got up off his knee with the shovel. She went to Joey and found the place where he wanted somebody to tell him he was a man, and the place under it where Darrell had called him a dumb shit in front of her, and she pressed. Joey opened the knife.

The man from the sedan had his hand inside his jacket and was walking toward them, looking from one to the other, deciding. He was easy, he was made of one thing, and the thing was that somebody here was going to cost him. She showed him who: a man hesitating with a knife in his hand. She sat down on the concrete step under the bulb, with the moths going around it, and put her good hand in her lap.

Joey went at Darrell. He was fast and stupid and he got inside the swing of the shovel and put the little knife in Darrell's side, under his arm, twice, three times. There was a shot. It was much louder than she'd expected out here with nothing to stop it, and Joey sat down on the ground as if somebody had pulled a chair out from under him. He looked at the man from the sedan with his mouth working, and then he lay down on his side in the dirt and drew his knees up, and his cap rolled off.

"Good," she said, and she meant it, and she didn't know who she was saying it to.

Darrell was still standing, with his arm clamped down on his side and blood coming out between his fingers, black in the headlights. He looked at the man with the gun, and she made sure of what he saw. He saw the thing that had been waiting out in the dark all night, standing right there in a pressed shirt, and he came at it with the shovel. The man shot him in the chest. Darrell kept coming because he was too big to stop all at once, and the shovel came around flat and hit the man on the side of the head with a sound like a pan dropped on a floor, and they went down together at the edge of the grave.

Darrell didn't get up. The man did, partway, on his knees with one side of his face open and the gun still in his hand, and he turned it toward the only other man standing.

Brandon stood with his arms at his sides, breathing in big shaking breaths. She turned to him and gave him the last thing, which was her: the woman on the step with one arm hanging and her face broken, the thing he had stood next to all night and not protected, and the man on his knees was pointing a gun at it.

Brandon kicked the gun. It flew off into the dark, and the man reached after it, and Brandon picked up the shovel.

She didn't watch all of it. She watched the moths. She heard the shovel go up and come down, and the man make a sound with no words in it, and the shovel again, Brandon making a noise every time like a man crying who had forgotten how. The sound got softer, and then it stopped. Brandon stood there for a long time. He dropped the shovel into the grave. She heard it hit the bottom.

The wind came back. The pickup's headlights were still on, lighting up nothing now, a patch of dirt and the side of the workshop and the three of them lying where they had stopped. Joey's cap was upside down next to his hand. The sedan sat with its engine running and its door open and nobody in it.

She sat on the step. Her wrist was broken, she thought, and her ribs on the right side, and her mouth where the tooth had been, but the pain was somewhere under her, like water under a boat, and she sat on top of it. The smell of rain didn't go away. She kept thinking she had heard, just before, a long way off, waves coming in on a beach at night, and once she saw a room full of people dancing where nobody was watching, nobody at all, and it was the best thing she had ever seen. Then it was gone. She thought it was the shock. People in shock saw things. She knew what she had done and could have counted it for anybody, one, two, three, in order, as she counted everything.

Brandon turned around. He looked at her across the concrete and the bodies with his face wet and his hands hanging, and his mouth opened and closed.

"Vee," he said.

She stood up.

She walked past him, past Darrell and the man at the edge of the grave, past the open hole with the shovel down in the bottom of it, to the silver Altima with the dent in the back door. She opened the passenger door and got in. The dome light came on and showed her the inside of the car, the cups in the holders, a parking stub from somewhere in Ontario on the dashboard, an air freshener shaped like a tree that didn't smell like anything anymore.

After a while Brandon came. He walked around the front of the car through the headlights and got in on his side and sat with his hands on the wheel. He started the car without asking her where. The radio came on in the middle of a song about somebody's truck, and neither of them reached to turn it off, and the seatbelt chime began to go because she hadn't put hers on, and it went on all the way out to the paved road.