“Good. I’m gonna make dinner now, so why don’t you start on that book. I hope broiled shrimp on angel-hair pasta sounds good to you.” He ripped the bubble wrap away and shoved the metal panel back over the opening. My head dropped in relief that he was gone, and I sat motionless in my white bathrobe, staring vacantly into the floor.

A small lamp, screwed into the wall, exuded dim, barely sufficient light onto the pages. Because he’d yet to give me the duffel bag, I didn’t have the aid of my glasses, so my eyes were failing me.

I dropped The Prince onto the floor, having finished half of it. I hoped that would be enough for him. When I reached up and turned off the lamp, the placid light of a full moon flooded in between the bars, soft and soothing. I would’ve dreaded to spend my first conscious night in the perfect darkness of a new moon.

The room had grown unbearable from a day’s accumulation of sunlight, and though the heat had dissipated from the desert with the onslaught of night, it had lingered in my room. So I’d opened the window when the sun set, and now the dry chill of the desert night infiltrated the room, forcing me to burrow under the fleece blankets.

Closing my eyes, I listened. Through the open window, owls screeched and coyotes or wild dogs yapped at the moon, though they seemed a great distance away. Since dinner, I hadn’t heard a peep from him. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing.

For the last hour, jazz music had filled the cabin. It came quietly at first, stealing in like a whisper, so that I heard only the guttural rumblings of a bass. The volume rose, and the ride cymbal pattern and the offbeat swish of a closing hi-hat pulsed into the room. When the piano and trumpet and saxes climaxed through the wall, I suddenly recognized the song, and it took me back twenty years, to a different time, a different life. It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing “All Blues,” a moody, blues form piece in 6⁄8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.

An acute scream soared above the music. I sat up and listened. Another scream ruptured the night. Clutching the iron bars, I turned my eyes on the desert, but saw nothing save miles of moonlit sagebrush. Again, a scream—a woman’s, closer than before.

Fifty feet away, a figure stumbled through the desert, choking for breath. When it was halfway past the window frame, a second, larger figure entered on the left side. It lunged upon the smaller figure and drove it into the ground at the foot of a greasewood shrub.

I heard a female voice, crying, shriller screams, pleadings, but the words were indecipherable when they reached my ears. The larger figure kicked at the ground. Then it knelt down, thrusting.