Josu's truck was a 1979 Ford with a flatbed and no muffler, and it started on the fourth try.
"Elko," he said. "Over the pass, down to the highway. Two hours." He didn't look at any of them. He had the long-handled axe in the cab, his shotgun across the seat and a pair of red bolt cutters on the floor. "If the road lets you go, you call the police from Elko. If it doesn't, it brings us to the town. Either way, I'm going where my son is."
"In daylight," Hassan said.
"In daylight they're slow. Everybody here knows that."
They climbed onto the flatbed. Hassan put Adam in the cab because the cab had a roof. Leah stood at the line of stones with her arms folded, beside the black thing nobody had moved, and watched them go and didn't wave.
The road was two ruts and a crown of grass, and it climbed north out of Iturri along the creek. Hassan sat with his back against the cab and fixed every landmark. A fallen pine across a side draw. An outcrop of red rock shaped like a church. A gate made of three old bedframes wired together. Dana held the side rail with both hands. Wes sat at the tailgate looking back, his brother's name nowhere in his mouth.
At the top of the pass the road went over a saddle and down. Hassan saw the red rock church go by on the left. He saw the bedframe gate.
Then he saw them both again.
He banged on the cab roof. Josu didn't slow. Through the back window Hassan saw him shake his head once, his hands steady on the wheel.
The land flattened and the trees fell away, and a wide white sheet of ground opened ahead, glaring under the morning sun.
The playa.
The truck rolled out of the sage onto the end of a dirt main street, between a stone building with a plaque and a general store with a tin roof.
Sweetwater was empty.
The ladder still leaned against the store with the brush across the paint can. A cup sat on a porch rail with a skin on the coffee. Every door they tried opened, and behind every door was a room with nobody in it: a made bed, a clock, a calendar from a year Hassan didn't look at closely. No smoke rose from the smokehouse stovepipe. Somewhere a screen door banged in the wind.
"Where do thirty people go?" Dana said.
Josu cut the chain on the barn and dragged the big door open.
The stalls were empty. The straw was clean, the buckets full, the chains coiled at the posts with their cuffs open. Marit was gone. The two men were gone. On a peg among the tack, by its sling, hung Kurt's rifle.
Wes took it down and held it against his chest.
"They moved them," he said. "After last night. They knew we'd come back."
Behind the barn, under a gray tarp weighted with stones, sat a white sedan with a green stripe and a light bar, "ELKO COUNTY SHERIFF" on the door. The keys were in it. There was a thermos on the passenger seat and a paperback face down on the dash.
"Marit said a deputy came to supper," Dana said. "She never heard him leave."
In the diner she lifted the black phone off the wall. No dial tone. She jiggled the hook, listened to the silence, and hung it back up as though it might bite.
"It worked the first night."
"It works when they want somebody to call," said Hassan.
"Dad." Adam was in the doorway, and he wasn't looking at the graves or the barn. "The old man's awake."
He was in the rocker on the porch across the street, in the shade under the eave, where he had been the evening they arrived. Earl. A blanket over his knees, a plaid shirt buttoned to the throat, a cane against the rail. His hands lay still on the armrests.
His eyes were open. They moved when Hassan moved.
Nobody went closer for a while. The sun stood on the street a yard from the porch step and stopped there.
"They sleep in the day," Wes said. "That's what Josu said. They're slow."
"He took Theo home. The first night. Theo got up when he got up."
Josu stepped down off the diner porch with the axe low in his hand. Hassan caught his sleeve.
"Look at him. He can't stand without that cane."
"Then he can't run."
"And if he's a man? An old man they kept because he's no trouble? We saw what was in Caleb's boot. We can't see under that blanket." He kept his voice low. "And if he isn't a man, and we swing, and miss, or hit twice, what wakes up under this street?"
Josu looked at the old man for a long moment. The old man looked back. He didn't blink and he didn't speak, and his chest rose and fell under the shirt, slow.
They left him.
They walked the rest of the town with the porch at their backs, and every time Hassan turned his head, the eyes were on them.
The graves were shut.
At night they had been open, every one, black and square with the earth heaped beside them. Now the earth was back in them. Every mound was raked smooth and rounded, the rake marks still sharp, as if somebody had done the whole row at dawn and taken care over it. Here and there in the soft dirt was a footprint. Small. Split. Sunk deep.
Hassan knelt at the fourth mound. There was a crack in the soil at the head of it where the dirt had settled, and air was coming out of it, very faintly. He put his palm over the crack. It was warm, and it moved against his hand, out and in, slow, the way a sleeper breathes.
He took his hand away.
"They're down there," he said. "They sleep in the ground."
Josu was beside him. He looked along the row, thirty mounds and more, and Hassan watched him think it.
"Which one is my son in?"
From under the church, faint, through the stone, somebody was crying. A man's voice, hoarse. Then a woman's, low, in a language that wasn't English, hushing him. Marit.
Dana was at the church door first. It was oak with iron straps and locked from inside. Through the crack at the hinge they could see a dim nave and an iron trapdoor in the floor with a ring, and the crying came up through it.
Hassan looked at the trapdoor, and then out at the white street.
"The sun makes them clumsy," he said. "Under the church there isn't any sun."
He made them leave. He said it by the truck with Josu's axe still in Josu's hand. There were six of them and thirty in the ground, maybe more, and the people they wanted were in a hole in the dark. Every grave they opened would wake one, and each would need one blow, exactly one, and no miss. Then the stairs, in the dark, where they were fast.
"We need every hand in Iturri," he said. "And a whole day in front of us, not half."
"Kurt's down there."
"My son is down there."
Hassan didn't answer that.
Josu stood a long time in the street. Then he put the axe in the cab and started the truck. As they pulled out, Hassan looked back. The rocker on the porch was empty, still moving.
At noon Josu rang the Angelus, twelve strokes, and Hassan went down to the creek for the noon prayer.
He set Rania's compass on a flat stone and opened the dented lid. The needle swung and settled. North. He turned the dial until the arrow for Mecca pointed where it should, up the creek, north and a little east, toward the notch in the high ridge he had faced every time he'd prayed since Saturday.
The sun stood in the south. It had risen in the east every morning and gone down behind the western ridge every night. In Sweetwater the needle had wandered like a dog off its lead, and every time the arrow for Mecca had come to rest in the same place.
The trails had bent. The road had bent. The sky hadn't, and neither had the direction he faced.
He lifted his eyes along the arrow. Far up the north draw, where the pines opened, a square of rusted tin caught the sun. Nobody in Iturri had said a word about a house up there.
He raised his hands to his ears and prayed toward it.