of binoculars in shadow was two small suns flashing. A glint. He had given
himself away with light.
He lowered the glasses one inch at a time, slowly, the way his father had
taught him to move around a skittish horse, and he did not run. Running was
a shape the whole county could read. He lay flat and counted to sixty, and
then to sixty again, and when he risked the glasses the trailer steps were
empty and the yard was ordinary, and it stayed ordinary for an hour, and
nothing happened, and the nothing happening was somehow the loudest
thing the yard had ever done. He logged it with a hand that shook only
slightly. 3:47. Man on trailer steps looking at hill. Long look. May have seen
glasses. May have seen bike tracks in arroyo. Then, because the notebook
had rules and the first rule was honesty, he added: May have seen me.
He told himself the man's name on the ride home, from the gate sign he'd
read through the binoculars a dozen times — the yard roster board by the
trailer door listed the crew in marker under E. SIKES — FOREMAN, and
the name second from the top was R.J. SORN — and he told himself other
things too: that a foreman looked at a hill for a hundred reasons, that the
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arroyo took bike traffic from every kid in Alden, that a glint was not a face.
He almost believed himself by the time he turned into Mesquite Street. The
sun was down. The porch lights were coming on up and down the block, that
kind string of yellow squares that meant supper and television and doors
unlocked against nothing worse than the evening. He put his bike in the
garage and went in to the smell of his mother's cooking, and everything in
the house was the way it had been that morning, and that was how he knew,
even before it happened, that it wasn't going to stay that way.
It came at 9:20 that night, while he was supposed to be asleep.
What woke him was not a sound but a wrongness in the light. His bedroom
window faced Mesquite Street, and the streetlamp two houses down threw a
familiar pattern through his blinds — three slats of orange, steady as
furniture — and the pattern changed. It dimmed and sharpened, the way it
did when something passed between the lamp and the house, and then it held
wrong, as if the thing that had passed had not kept going. Owen got up
without turning on his light, the way you did, and put his eye to the gap in
the blinds.
A black SUV sat across the street, parked against the far curb in front of the
Hendricks' dark house, facing his. Engine off. Lights off. It was not the SUV
from the barn — he checked that first, the way you check the important thing
first, and found it true: this one was newer, unhurt, its paint deep and
unmarked, no crumple at the quarter, no crack showing at the taillight. It was
the other kind of black SUV. The kind that belonged to a ranch's security, or
to men hired by people who owned ranches and yards and a great many other
things in Leland Prescott's part of the county. And there were two men in it.
He could see them because the driver had the dome light's memory still
fading, or because of the streetlamp — shapes, a head and shoulders each,
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one behind the wheel and one beside him, still as the people in a photograph,
facing the Tate house.
For an hour they sat there. Owen knew it was an hour because he did the
thing his notebook had trained him to do before he did any of the other things
fear suggested: he got the notebook and the pencil from his backpack,
quietly, and he wrote it down. 9:20 PM. Black SUV across street, facing
house. Newer. No damage. Two men inside. Lights off. Engine off.
Watching. He wrote the plate as far as he could read it, which was most of it,
and the make as far as he knew it, and then he wrote, in letters that came out
bigger than he meant them to: THEY'RE WATCHING BACK.
At 9:26 the patrol car went by. Sheriff's office, county markings, moving at
patrol speed, and it slowed — Owen would swear to the slowing, and wrote
it down too, though he understood even then that it might have been hope
doing the driving — slowed as it passed the parked SUV, and the SUV did
not move, and the patrol car went on to the end of Mesquite and turned and
was gone, and the black shapes sat in the dark across the street like the dark
had an opinion about his house and was in no hurry to share it. At some point
the man in the passenger seat raised something to his face — a phone,
maybe, or a cup — and set it down again. At 10:04, by the clock on his
nightstand, the passenger spoke to the driver — Owen saw the head turn, that
small unmistakable motion — and at 10:11 the engine started, soft, and the
SUV pulled away from the curb without lights until it reached the corner,
where its headlights came on all at once, polite and legal, and it turned
toward the highway and was gone.
Owen stood at the window a long time after. His legs had gone pins and
needles from kneeling. In the notebook, under THEY'RE WATCHING