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Work lights hang over the ring in the middle of the dirt floor. The ring is a plywood platform a step up off the dirt, covered in canvas, with ropes strung between four corner posts. I built it the first summer I ran fights.

Men are packed shoulder to shoulder all the way to the walls. A few have climbed the hay bales under the loft to see over the rest.

Ozzie's table sits under the edge of the loft, just inside the back wall. This season's betting book lies open in front of him, with his cash box at his elbow. The camera I mounted in the loft this afternoon points straight down at the table.

Dutch is standing at that table with a fold of bills in his fist. He coughs, wet and deep, and slaps them down.

"Put me down on the redhead in the opening fight," he says, loud enough to carry over the crowd. "Write it under Voelkel. Dutch Voelkel."

Ozzie writes it down without looking up.

Dutch didn't have to give his last name, but he gave it anyway. He wants me to know exactly who's standing in my barn.

Gil slaps a bill down beside Dutch's. "Put me on the roofer," he says. "I been sitting in a truck cab all week, and I'd like to see somebody with sense win one."

I walk over and stop at the corner of the table across from Dutch. Delilah is only a few steps away, on the other side of those boards.

"You're Hollister," Dutch says.

I look at him and nod. "It's my barn. Everyone knows that."

"It's a nice barn." He looks up at the loft, then along the walls, and his eyes stop on the chained back door. "Man could burn up in here with that back door chained."

"The front's wide open."

He studies the chain a while longer before he looks back at me and raises his voice the way a man does when he calls a bet. "My little brother would've liked this place. His name was Royce. He liked a good fight."

Men around the table turn their heads. On the other side of the wall, Delilah heard that.

He said was, the way a man talks about somebody dead. Delilah drove a piece of rebar in under Royce's ear, and Dutch is watching my face to see whether I know it.

Whitlock already knows she's been talking. Her daddy carried that up the hill to him, and Whitlock watched her sit beside me in church.

What he can't know is whether she told anybody what happened to Royce. If my face so much as twitches, Dutch will know she told me.

"Never met him," I say.

"He went missing a few weeks back." Dutch rolls the cigar to the corner of his mouth. "Nobody's seen him since."

"I'm sorry to hear it."

He can't go to the law about his brother. Any deputy who went looking for Royce would end up at Whitlock's cellar door—something Whitlock would never allow.

He keeps looking at me, and I look straight back at him.

He's heavy through the shoulders and belly, and none of it is soft. His knuckles are thick and scarred, and he stands with his weight even on both feet. He's been in plenty of fights.

I've climbed down onto bulls in the chute that wanted me dead, and I never wanted to hurt one of them. I want to hurt this man.

Dutch looks away first. He takes out his lighter and puffs until his cigar is lit again.

I reach across the corner of the table and take the cigar out of his mouth. "No smoking."

I drop it in the fighters' water bucket at the end of Ozzie's table, and it hisses out. Dutch stares at the bucket for a long moment. When he looks up again, he's looking at the ring.

I walk away from him.

The bell is an old school bell bolted to my corner post. I ring it from the dirt floor outside the ring.