The Dispatcher

THREE

Ian makes a right onto Crockett Street and heads north toward work. As he drives he passes the Skating Palace, Bulls Mouth Theater (where they play whatever was on most screens six months ago, the scratched film rolling through a projector that runs louder than the sound system), Wok House, Morton’s Steakhouse, a Dairy Queen, and several other places.

He makes a left onto Crouch Avenue and drives past Interstate 10, Bulls Mouth Baptist Church, the petting zoo, and is rounding the bend that borders the north side of the Dean woods when he sees a police cruiser up ahead. It’s rolling in the opposite direction, headed toward him. Its horn honks and the driver’s side window comes down. The two cars stop side by side and Diego nods at him.

A dachshund barks from the back seat.

Ian nods toward it. ‘What’d he do?’

‘Tried to rob Sally’s Gun amp; Rifle.’

‘Then he deserved to get caught. Nobody with half a brain fucks with Sally.’

‘Not if they want to keep their nuts.’

‘How much you make so far?’

‘Seventy.’

‘How many dogs still loose?’

‘Three or four, I think.’

‘I hope you’re reporting all this to the IRS.’

‘It’s not income. It’s beer money.’

‘You haven’t bought a drink in five years.’

‘Four. And that’s just for myself. I still buy for my friends. If you ever stopped into Roberta’s you’d know that.’

‘I don’t get drunk anymore.’

‘You buy a six pack every day from Bill’s.’

‘Six doesn’t get me drunk.’

‘So have six at Roberta’s.’

‘With that markup?’

‘I said I’d buy.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You hear about Genevieve?’

‘What about her?’

‘She finally left.’

‘Yeah?’ Ian says. ‘Good for her.’

‘Weird thing, though. When Andy showed up at Roberta’s last night, left side of his face was cut and bruised. Refused to talk about it.’

‘That is weird,’ Ian says.

‘It reminded me of what you said about maybe someone should do more than talk to him.’

‘I don’t remember saying that.’

‘Are you-’ Diego licks his lips-‘are you all right, Ian?’

Ian looks at his watch. ‘I better get to work,’ he says. ‘Don’t wanna be late.’

‘Ian-’

He rolls up his window, puts the Mustang into gear, and gets the car moving. He glances in his rearview mirror and sees Diego’s car still stopped in the street, taillights glowing red.

In another seven minutes he pulls into work.

At three o’clock he steps outside for no other reason than he wants a few minutes away from his desk. He reaches into his car and pulls a plug of cigar from the ashtray and lights it with a match, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke from the corner of his mouth. He squints at the horizon. Probably should get a bite to eat. Maybe he’ll see what’s floating around the fridge when he heads back in. Pretty good chance he left a carton of General Tso’s chicken in there on Monday, and if no one else got to it-a possibility with these barbarians-he’ll have that.

While he’s out here he should make a call. He should make two calls, one leading directly to the other. Personal calls it would be better not to make from the office. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone, then scrolls through his contacts till he finds the one he’s looking for.

It rings three times, then: ‘Hello?’

It’s a strange thing: Ian does not miss Lisa, but hearing her voice makes him miss the past, a past in which his future, now past itself, was still ahead of him and filled with possibility. He met her when he was twenty-two.

He’d already been married-and divorced-once, to a girl named Mitsuko he met on a train in Paris. They made eyes at each other while they shot through the darkness underground, and when the train stopped at rue du Sentier they both got off. Eventually it became obvious they were headed to the same place-Chartier-for dinner. They got a table on the second floor near the stairs and every time a waiter walked by he would have to tuck in his elbow to avoid getting bumped (and it happened often as against the wall opposite was the silverware cart). Ian would have been mad except every time it happened she laughed and said, ‘Your face.’ He didn’t know what was so funny about his face, but her laugh was adorable. Two weeks later Ian’s trip was over and, not wanting to separate from Mitsuko just yet, he proposed marriage. She flew to Los Angeles a week after him and they said their I dos at a quick-wedding spot in Torrance. And two months after that they were divorced. Mitsuko finally got the courage to call her parents in Japan and after twenty minutes of crying she said she was flying back home. Ian was eighteen when that happened, and in truth he was relieved. He wasn’t nearly as ready for marriage as he’d thought.

But four years later, when he met Lisa on the sand in Venice Beach, he thought he was much older and wiser. He was twenty-two: no kid. She was beautiful and surfed better than half the guys in the water and had a smile that was all tomboy confidence. Looking at her beneath the Los Angeles sun he could imagine a future for himself. Before he even knew her name he could. A happy future with five kids and a house on the beach. His mom still owned Dad’s surf shop then (she hadn’t sold it to pay for the several cosmetic surgeries she was convinced would land her a new husband), but he ran it, and it seemed that as long as she had enough money to stay in vodka and cigarettes she was okay and happy to let him run it. He would have his house and his five kids and his father’s surf shop. The old man was five years dead by then, and it didn’t even hurt much to think about anymore. The future was as bright then as it had ever been. Everything seemed lined up in a row as he stood on the sand and watched her come out of the water soaking wet with a board under her arm.

But now the future is past, and in the end he couldn’t see it clearly at all; it turned out so different.

‘Lisa, it’s Ian.’

‘Ian! God. Is it 1985 again? Please tell me it’s not. I’ve gotten rid of all my stonewashed jeans.’

‘No such luck.’

‘I take it from your tone this isn’t a nostalgia call.’

‘Afraid not. I was hoping you could tell me how to get hold of Jeffrey.’

‘Yeah, do you have a pen?’

‘I’ll remember it.’

The phone rings five times. Ian is about to hang up when the sixth ring is cut off and replaced by a ‘Hello?’

Ian licks his lips. His chest feels tight.

‘Hello?’

‘Jeffrey.’

‘Who is this?’

‘Jeffrey, it’s me.’

Now it’s Jeffrey’s turn to go silent. Then, finally, ‘Dad.’

Ian nods. ‘Dad,’ he says.

‘How’d you get my number?’

‘I called your mom.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I have some news.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s Maggie.’ Jeffrey says nothing, so Ian continues: ‘She’s alive. I thought you should know.’

Silence from the other end of the phone but for a sound like a desert wind.

‘Jeffrey?’

‘Alive?’

‘We still haven’t got her back, but she’s alive.’

‘Really?’

‘She got to a phone day before yesterday, called for help. We’re working on finding her. But it was her and she’s alive.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I know. Hard to wrap your head around.’

‘Yeah.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Jeffrey. I know you felt like I blamed you, and I know I’ve been a crummy dad. I’m sorry for that. But it wasn’t your fault.’

Jeffrey does not respond.

‘Jeffrey?’

‘I’m here.’

‘I missed your birthday last month.’

‘You’ve missed a few.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I’d like to-’

‘Listen, I’m at work. I should go.’

‘You got a job?’

‘Of course.’

Of course is right: his son is the same age Ian was when he met Lisa. He had an apartment and worked at his dad’s surf shop and had already been married and divorced. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised to learn that his son is growing up. Part of him expected Jeffrey to stay frozen in time, waiting for Ian to be ready to act once more as a father. But that just isn’t the way things work. It never was.

‘What do you do?’

‘I work on a reality TV show. One of those stupid dating shows. I’m an assistant editor. Mostly I just shuffle footage around on an AVID. But, look, I really don’t have time to talk. I’m glad you called and told me about Maggie.’

‘Okay,’ Ian says. Then: ‘Hey, remember that chess game we were playing?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Queen to b4. I promise to be much quicker about my next move.’

‘There is no next move, Dad. I put that game away years ago.’

Click.

Ian pulls the phone away from his ear and looks at it. The call’s duration is on the screen: 3:53. Less than four minutes.

He should have said different things. He shouldn’t have mentioned that goddamn chess game. He should have said different things.

He drops his cigar to the ground and snuffs it out with the heel of a shoe. He pockets his phone and heads back inside, straight to his desk. He’s decided not to have lunch after all.

Maggie walks around to the back of the stairs. She sits on her haunches and looks at the darkness beneath the bottom step. She doesn’t want to reach in there. She is afraid to reach in there. She swallows and sticks her hand into the shadows. But she does not find the hand-made weapon. Her fingers brush cold concrete, nothing more. Her first thought is that Borden must have taken it. He must have taken it and hidden it from her or destroyed it or showed it to Henry who will now punish her with it. He’s going to make sure she is forever trapped in the Nightmare World, stuck here with him and the damp shadows that lay themselves over everything.

But then she remembers that Borden is not real. He is not real. He is made up, and things that are made up cannot hurt you. Not unless you let them.

But maybe Henry took it.

Maybe he knew she was up to something and came down here last night and took it. He could even now have plans to punish her. He could come down here and tie her wrists with that bloody yellow rope and hang her from the punishment hook and drag the sharp edge of that shard of plate across her softest parts, across the flesh of her stomach and throat and-

One two three four five six seven eight.

Calm down. It has to be here.

Nobody came down here last night. She would have woken up. No one came down here last night and no one took her weapon, so it has to be here.

Her fingers brush across the wooden handle. She wraps them around it and pulls it from the shadows. She gets to her feet.

It feels good in her grip. Good and solid and dangerous.

Looking out the window she sees that the sun has already moved to the other side of the house. The shadows have begun to lay themselves out on the ground like picnic blankets. Midday has come and now it is leaving. It has begun its retreat. Before, she had always dreaded the sun passing to the other side of the world. All she knows is what she can see through the basement’s sole window and she has always wanted it lighted. But now she is anticipating the night. The sinking of the sun. The sound of the front door closing with Henry on the other side. His truck’s engine rumbling to life. The sound of its tires crunching on the gravel driveway and that sound fading.

She has not seen Donald’s El Camino pull to a stop in front of his mobile home yet, which means it’s still early, but the time has to be approaching. In another hour, maybe two or three, but surely no more than that. Then she will find out whether Donald will be eating with Beatrice or alone. Usually he eats alone in his mobile home and Beatrice eats alone here, or eats at the card table down here with Maggie, and Maggie is counting on the same tonight. She doesn’t want to have to wait another day to make her escape. She wants out of here.

Now that she has tasted the air outside she cannot stand the claustrophobic prison of the Nightmare World.

She is counting on it: her escape will be tonight.

Donald will drive up to his mobile home and disappear inside. He will do whatever he does in there for several hours before coming over for a plate of food, and by then Maggie will already be gone. Beatrice will have come downstairs with a plate for her and Maggie will have been waiting beneath the stairs. By the time Donald comes over Beatrice will be lying on the concrete floor in the basement in a pool of her own blood and Maggie will be in the arms of her daddy.

She looks outside at the shadows. It’s only mid-afternoon but evening is coming.

And with it, escape.

Gripping the weapon in her hand, Maggie nods to herself.

Soon.

Diego drives north on Main Street. He’s on his way to the library on the corner of Wallace and Overhill. The librarian, Georgia Simpson, is having some trouble with Fred Paulson’s kid. Junior’s apparently passed out drunk in the children’s section and Georgia doesn’t want to go anywhere near him. He’s got puke on his boots and down the front of his shirt. Diego doesn’t blame her for wanting nothing to do with him. He’s dreading having to deal with the little shit himself. He’s so useless his own dad won’t hire him, so Junior simply wanders around getting drunk and causing trouble.

Diego’s just passing the summer-abandoned high school when a dog, one of Pastor Warden’s dachshunds, runs out of the woods to his right and into the street.

‘Shit.’

Diego stomps the brake and the car screeches to a stop, the rear end sweeping left a quarter turn before the whole thing rocks on its springs and stands still. Diego’s heart thumps in his chest and his hands grip the wheel tightly. He swallows and looks to the street in front of him, but the dog is not there. He knows he didn’t hit the thing. He’d have felt that.

He looks around for it-catching it in his periphery.

It’s now in the school’s football field on the west side of the street.

Diego pulls the car to the dirt shoulder of the road, kicking up a cloud of summer dust that hangs in the air a moment before thinning into nonexistence. After a truck rolls by he swings open his door and steps from the car, a greasy paper bag hanging from his fist. In the greasy paper bag, leftover fried chicken he bought from Albertsons yesterday morning. As he jogs into the football field, a sorry thing since last year’s chinch-bug infestation, he pulls a piece of chicken from the bag and calls to the dog.

It’s halfway across the field, but when Diego calls, it turns and looks at him, deciding whether it’s interested, Diego thinks. There is something in its mouth. A bone maybe.

Diego whistles.

‘Come on, boy,’ he says, sitting on his haunches and holding out the piece of chicken.

The dog walks toward him.

The bone or whatever it is in its mouth is large. Too big to belong to a squirrel or a gopher or a rabbit. But every once in a while someone will hit a deer with their car, and it could be a leg bone from one of those. Not a full-grown one, but still.

Three years ago Carney Dodd, now stuck in a wheelchair as a result of a different accident, slammed his pickup truck into a monster buck must have weighed a quarter ton, and Carney, never one to wear a safety belt, was propelled through the windshield. According to his own version of the story he landed on the asphalt twenty feet away, hitting it face first, and he had the skin missing from the bridge of his nose and his forehead to prove it. As soon as he landed, though, again according to him, he got to his feet and stomped to his truck and pulled out his Remington 1100 and finished the fucking thing off with a deer slug to the face. ‘Take that, y’son of a bitch.’

Maybe somebody other than Carney Dodd hit a deer that didn’t die immediately, that made it out into the woods before dropping, and maybe this little floppy-eared dachshund found it and decided to take a piece.

That’s what Diego thinks at first.

But as the dog approaches a seed of dread sprouts in his belly.

The bone is white and meatless. On one end, a knot. A few black strings, maybe tendons, maybe plant matter, hang there like tassels. On the other end, though, Jesus fuck, a small hand. A small human hand. The ends of the first three fingers are eaten away to the bone, and in fact part of the first finger is gone altogether, but black skin or decomposed muscle, or something, still clings in places to the rest of the hand like a driving glove.

When the dachshund reaches him he grabs it by the scruff of its neck and pulls it to him and pries the jaw open. He doesn’t think; he just knows that he must get this small limb out of this dog’s mouth. After a moment of prying it falls to the grass. It does not look real lying there on the ground. It cannot be real. Real arms are attached to people. This thing just lies there like a discarded beer bottle after a drunken Friday night.

He picks up the dog and gets to his feet and looks down at the arm on the ground.

It cannot be real, but it is.

The dog struggles against him and tries to nip at his face. Diego pulls his head back just in time, and then carries the dog to his cruiser. He puts it into the back with the windows cracked, and then pops the trunk. He finds a pair of gloves and a large plastic bag, puts on the gloves, and walks back into the field.

He feels strange approaching it. A bodiless arm lying on the football field behind Bulls Mouth High School. He picks it up and puts it into the plastic bag. He has to bend the fingers down to get the bag sealed.

When he returns to his car he sets the bag on the passenger’s seat and grabs his radio.

Diego steps into the woods with a roll of yellow tape in his right hand. He feels sick to his stomach. He’s been a cop for six years now and this will be his third body. If he can find it. The Deans own a decent chunk of land and there’s no telling how deep into it the body might be. Of course, if someone killed a child and simply used the woods as a convenient place to dispose of it it’s probably no more than twenty or thirty yards from Main Street, just far enough into the trees that a person could park on the shoulder of the road, carry a corpse and a shovel, and dig a shallow grave without being seen by anyone driving past. People’s cars break down all the time. No one would think twice about someone’s old banger sitting on the shoulder of the road. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice it unless it belonged to someone they knew.

He thinks about how small that arm was. A child’s arm. A five- or six- or seven-year-old. And it was just bone but for a few scraps of leathery flesh or muscle. Dead a long time.

Somewhere a mother weeps.

Diego doesn’t have children of his own, but he has spent the last four years raising his nephew Elias, now nine. Elias’s parents, Diego’s baby sister and her husband, died in a car accident that the child survived. Diego and Cordelia are his parents now, and over the last several years Diego’s gotten used to that idea. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel if Elias went missing and, some time later, someone discovered his dry bones clenched in the jaws of a dog.

He can’t imagine.

As he walks through the woods he rips pieces of yellow tape from the roll in his hand and ties them to tree branches to mark his path. He remembers getting lost in the woods as a boy and being terrified. He was only lost for an hour and a half, an hour and a half of panic before he realized he could hear cars passing by and ran out to the street, but it was the longest ninety minutes of his life.

Even now, twenty yards into the woods, the street has vanished behind him and the light below the canopy is gray save a few blades that have managed to stab their way in between the branches and leaves, and the air is cooler than out on the street by several degrees.

Twigs break beneath his feet. The ground is softer here as well, feet collapsing the composted leaves that cover the earth. He tries to avoid poison oak and ivy as he makes his way deeper into the woods.

Five minutes ago he thought he was on his way to flirt with Georgia Simpson while she shelved Louis L’ Amour and Zane Grey novels. Now he is hunting a corpse. It doesn’t seem much of a trade off. A lot can happen in five minutes.

He swallows. His heart beats rapidly in his chest. He knows there’s no reason for that, but he knows, too, that a man doesn’t have much control over his heart.

He tells himself all that was left was the bone. He tells himself there’s no chance the person who did the murder, if it was a murder, is still out here. No chance at all.

But still his heart beats rapidly in his chest.

Something scurries past to his left and he spins toward the sound and draws his SIG.

A squirrel disappears behind a tree.

Diego laughs at himself and reholsters his weapon. He continues walking.

But fifty yards or so from the street he stops again. Something on the ground makes him stop. He looks at it and swallows. A thatch of hair lying amongst the dead leaves. The hair is very dirty, small pieces of leaf and dirt ground into it, and there is a blue barrette clipped onto it, holding it together. A blue barrette with a small piece of cut glass like a jewel glued to its center. The barrette is somehow worse, more affecting, than anything else. The hair is just hair, but the barrette-Diego can imagine a small girl standing before a mirror and clipping it into her hair and smiling at herself and how pretty she looks. The hair is blond. Might once have been, anyway.

He ties a piece of yellow tape around a fallen twig and stabs the twig into the ground near the thatch of hair. Then continues on.

In another fifteen or twenty yards he comes across a black shoe with a silver buckle. Poking from the black shoe is a white sock with a small pink bow sewn to it. The white sock has a hole eaten through it, and at the edges of the hole what might be black blood. Perhaps some insect ate the bloody part of the sock away. Diego picks up the shoe. Within it is a foot. The remains of a foot: nothing but dry bone, the rest long ago eaten by flies and beetles and such. He can easily hold the shoe in the palm of his hand without either end of it touching air. The girl it belonged to could not have been older than two. The girl it belonged to was smaller than the girl or boy whose arm is even now lying bodiless in Diego’s police cruiser.

There is more than one body out here. He is sure of it.

He sets the shoe back down and ties yellow tape around a nearby rock.

And continues walking.

A hundred yards into the woods he comes across a piece of tattered, rotting fabric.

And twenty yards beyond that, disturbed ground. The floor of the woods has been uniformly covered in a blanket of decomposing leaves from which small plants are growing-weeds, and mushrooms like boils, and young trees-but here the ground is disturbed, the leaves clawed aside, and it is here that he-

‘Oh, fuck.’

It is impossible to tell how many bodies are here, as only parts of them have been uncovered. An arm jutting from the soil here. A foot there. A scrap of yellow fabric. One human eye socket staring out of a white skull, all the soft parts long destroyed by time.

He walks to a tree and leans against it. He stares down at the ground. The ground spins.

After a moment he begins to cordon off the area. It takes him only a minute or two, and when he’s done he starts making his way back out to the street, following the yellow flags he left on his way to this bone-scattered nightmare. The boys from the sheriff’s department will be arriving soon, and he’ll have to lead them to the crime scene.

As he walks he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and dials Ian.

Ian pulls the headset off and gets to his feet. He picks up his cup of cold coffee and takes a swallow, just to wet his suddenly dry mouth. He walks out to the police station proper.

Chief Davis is sitting with the phone to his ear, saying, ‘Well, goddamn it, just let her do it then. I don’t know why you call and ask if you don’t care. All right. Goddamn it. All right. I love you too.’ He hangs up.

‘Chief.’

‘Uh?’

‘We got a situation, maybe related to my daughter.’

Chief Davis takes off his glasses, cleans them with a Kleenex, and sets them back onto his narrow nose, blinking at Ian.

‘What’s the situation?’

‘Couple corpses in the woods.’

‘No shit?’

‘None.’

‘So Diego found the owner of the arm?’

‘Looks like. Plus more.’

‘And it might be related to your daughter?’

‘Little girls.’

‘Diego didn’t say one of them might be,’ he licks his lips, ‘might, uh, be your. .’ Chief Davis lets it trail off and finds a thread on his shirtsleeve that needs to be pulled.

‘He doesn’t think so.’

‘He say why?’

‘There’s nothing left but bones and a little bit of hair and fabric.’

‘But little girls?’

Ian nods.

‘Sheriff ’s boys on the way, yeah?’

‘They are. Might even be there. Nance was in town to go over the case with Finch.’

‘I should be heading down too. And you wanna go?’

‘There might be something there to lead us to Maggie.’

‘All right,’ Davis says, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll get Thompson on the phones. You wanna ride with me or take your own car?’

Ian pulls his Mustang to a stop on the side of the road. All he can think is that this might bring him one step closer to finding his daughter. He knows that girls’ bodies were found, two at least, and he knows that’s sad. But he doesn’t feel anything like sadness right now. He doesn’t even feel anything that might live on the same street as sadness. Each body was once someone’s daughter but none of them is his daughter. His daughter is alive while they are dead. His daughter is alive and he will find her and bring her home safe. If these bodies help to make that happen, then-well, he denies the fleeting thought that these deaths were then worth it. He tries to deny that thought. But even as he shoves it into the darkest corner of his mind, out of the light of conscious thought where he might be shamed by its ugliness, his heart believes it. Every beat speaks the truth of it.

A hundred bodies sacrificed would be worth it, a thousand, if in the end he got his daughter back.

As he and Chief Davis step from their vehicles Ian looks at the line of cars. There are two from the sheriff’s department here already. They’re parked behind Diego’s car, and behind them is Chief Davis’s car, behind which Ian’s car is parked. Deputy Kurt Oliver, who works out of the Bulls Mouth office, sits on the hood of one of the county vehicles. His eyes are closed and his head is tilted toward the afternoon sun.

Chief Davis says, ‘Detective already here?’

Oliver opens his eyes and turns to look at them lazily. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘John Nance, down from Mencken-and Bill Finch is here too.’

‘Anyone else?’

He shakes his head. ‘Sheriff’s on his way.’

‘Coroner?’

‘Not here yet.’

Chief Davis nods. ‘Where they all at?’

Oliver nods toward the line of trees. ‘Follow the trail of yellow tape. It’ll lead to the bodies.’

A dog barks from the back seat of Diego’s cruiser.

Chief Davis puts a hand on Ian’s shoulder. ‘Let’s see what we got,’ he says, guiding Ian toward the woods.

‘Hey, Oliver,’ Ian says, ‘why don’t you drive that dog up to Pastor Warden’s place before this heat kills it?’

‘What for?’

‘I just said, so this fucking heat don’t kill it.’

‘Why don’t you do it?’

‘Because I’m going to the crime scene. You’re sitting here useless. For fuck’s sake, Oliver, get your head out of your ass and drive the goddamn dog up-’

‘Pastor Warden’ll give you ten bucks if you take that dog to him.’

Deputy Oliver slides off the hood of his car. ‘No shit?’

Davis nods.

‘Well why the fuck didn’t you say so?’

A few minutes later Ian and Chief Davis arrive on the scene. One of the sheriff’s detectives, John Nance, has cleared out a large hole, or a few small ones, in which the bones from three bodies are piled. Three female bodies, if the rags hanging on them is any indication. And young. The one that still has hair, just a snatch of it hanging from the bone, has blond hair. They are all in decomposing dresses.

‘Not waiting for the coroner or forensics?’ Chief Davis says.

‘I’m not disturbing nothing. The insects took care of most of this a long time ago. Forensics guys can play with hair and teeth and bloodstains. . if they ain’t too badly degraded.’

‘Were they buried all at the same time?’ Ian says.

Nance looks over to him. ‘That’s outside my expertise, but I’d say no.’

Ian nods.

Nance is in his late forties or early fifties, with gray hair and a face like melted wax. When he’s standing he looks like pulled taffy sagging under its own weight, shoulders slumped, arms hanging down, cheeks droopy. But he is not standing. He’s sitting on his haunches over a row of skeletons and piles of seemingly random belongings: shoes, clothes, toys. The belongings were once in bags, but two of the bags have disintegrated, leaving behind unrecognizable fragments. Nance pulls a dirt-covered hair brush from a pile beside the oldest corpse and lays it down on a sheet of plastic he or Finch spread across the ground to his left. He sets it next to other items he’s already pulled from the earth: a bracelet, a pair of empty shoes, a bunch of small dresses, a one-eyed doll.

Bill Finch stands over Nance with a small mini-DV camera and records the process. ‘Want me to get some still pictures too?’

‘No need yet.’

‘Right.’

Diego, who’s been standing several feet away rolling a cigarette, tucks the cigarette behind his ear and walks over to Ian.

‘They’re all too young,’ Diego says.

Ian nods. ‘I know.’

‘But look at them. Maggie was only seven when-’

‘But they’re not her.’

‘No,’ Diego agrees. ‘They’re not. You should come look at the clothes. Some of the stuff that was buried looks the wrong size for any of these three. I think maybe the killer came back out here and buried some of her stuff.’

‘Yeah?’

Diego nods.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I dunno. People do weird things.’

‘You think some of it might have been Maggie’s?’

‘Maybe.’

Ian walks around to where the plastic’s been laid out, to where various dirt-covered items lie, looking like the results of an archeological dig: this is what the late twentieth and early twenty-first century will look like to the aliens when they finally arrive and find human civilization beneath a pile of ash. Ian silently scans the items, looking from one to the next. A strange numbness at his core as if his middle had been hollowed out and replaced by stone.

‘That’s my daughter’s.’

He points to a pink nightgown folded into quarters and covered in dirt and leaves. There are a few drops of what looks like blood near the collar. She was hurt.

Nance looks up from the hole. ‘Your daughter’s?’

Bill Finch says, ‘That’s Ian Hunt.’

‘We met once a couple years ago,’ Ian says.

‘And that’s your daughter’s?’ Nance says, nodding at the nightgown.

‘It is.’

‘You sure?’

Just after dinner the night Maggie was kidnapped and Ian was sitting at the table going over their taxes. Debbie was in the back getting dressed and Maggie was in the bathroom. She called to him. He walked to the bathroom and pushed open the door and she was standing in the middle of the room, skinny little-girl body dripping water onto the tiles while behind her the bathtub drain made gurgling noises.

‘What?’

‘I forgot a towel.’

‘And?’

‘And can you get me one?’

‘Can I get you one what?’

‘A towel.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Can you get me one, please?’

‘Can I get you one what, please?’

‘Dad.’

‘Okay.’

He walked to the linen closet and pulled out a towel for her. He tossed it to her.

‘And a nightgown.’

‘Did you forget to wash, too?’

‘No. Well.’

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t wash behind one of my ears.’

‘Why?’

‘Experiment.’ She grinned a wide, gap-toothed grin.

‘What kind of experiment?’

‘Mom said if I didn’t wash behind my ears I’d grow broccoli there.’

‘She did?’

Maggie nodded.

‘But you didn’t believe her?’

‘I don’t know. It’s an experiment.’

‘But you washed everywhere else?’

‘Duh. I’m not gross.’

‘Okay. Let me get your nightgown.’

‘The pink one!’

Three drops of blood next to the collar like an ellipsis. Covered in dirt and dead leaves. Lying on a sheet of plastic beside things he’s never seen before. Things that belonged to other little girls, now dead.

‘Yeah,’ Ian says. ‘I’m sure it’s hers.’

‘All right,’ Nance says. ‘If we got someone alive, the daughter of one of our own, your daughter, then I say let’s kick this with both feet.’

Chief Davis blinks several times. ‘What do you have in mind, detective?’

‘Well, I think we should move on the most obvious suspect before he has time to prepare. Ask questions, imply we got more than we do, see how he reacts.’

‘The most obvious suspect?’

‘Whoever owns this land.’

‘Henry Dean,’ Ian says.

‘We should get Sizemore to approve it, and-’

‘I don’t work for Sizemore,’ Chief Davis says.

‘But the sheriff’s department handles murder cases because we got the murder police,’ Bill Finch says. ‘Nance is murder police. This ain’t Fred Paulson crashed his car into a tree. It’s a multiple homicide.’

Davis squints silently at Finch for a moment, then says, ‘Fair enough.’

‘So we get the okay from Sizemore,’ Nance says, ‘and we bring Henry Dean in for questioning, intimidate him as much as we can, see if he cracks.’

‘It’s close to Main Street, though,’ Diego says. ‘Anybody could have dumped the bodies.’

‘But you don’t get nowhere until you pick a destination,’ Chief Davis says. ‘Can’t drive to every place at once.’

‘Exactly right,’ Nance says.

‘I think both departments should be in on this,’ Chief Davis says. ‘I know Henry Dean, known him since first grade, and I know what buttons to push.’

‘First grade?’ Nance says.

‘Yup.’

‘You think he’s our guy?’

‘Could be.’

‘I mean based on his personality.’

‘Who knows? In my experience you never know who’s capable of what till they gone and done it and you’re catching flies in your open mouth.’

Nance nods at that, then turns to Bill Finch. ‘Where was the sheriff at last time you-’

‘My ears are burning.’

Sheriff Sizemore moves toward them, his big belly swinging in front of him like a wrecking ball.

‘Sheriff,’ Nance says.

‘I want to go to the Dean house,’ Ian says as he, Chief Davis, and Bill Finch walk toward the street. Diego stayed behind so he could tell the coroner exactly how he came upon the bodies and give him the legal time of death.

Chief Davis shakes his head. ‘No chance, Ian. You’re too close to this.’

‘It’s my daughter.’

‘Now, Ian-’

‘I’m going,’ Ian says.

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ Finch says. ‘Sizemore just wants us to bring him to the station so he or Nance can question him.’

‘Things might get hairy,’ Ian says.

‘I’ll bring Deputy Oliver.’

‘Deputy Oliver couldn’t blow his nose with a stick of dynamite. My daughter might be in that house, Finch. You might’ve got your fingers in every part of my life, but it’s still my life. My fucking family.’

‘Now hold up,’ Finch says. ‘I know Maggie might be in there. I know you love her. But look at you, man. You’re already worked up and we don’t know if he’s done a damn thing. You’re not going. You’ll just cause trouble.’

‘You got no authority over my officers, Finch,’ Chief Davis says.

‘He’s an officer on a technicality. He sits at a desk all day. And you said yourself he was too close to this.’

‘I did,’ Chief Davis says, ‘but I can. He works for me. That don’t mean I like the guy who weaseled his way into his wife’s bed trying to-’

‘I didn’t weasel my way-’

‘Look,’ Ian says. ‘This isn’t up for debate. I’m going.’

They walk out onto the street and into the sunlight.

‘Fine,’ Chief Davis says, ‘but I don’t even want you to get out of your car unless we need you. I mean it.’

‘Okay,’ Ian says, walking toward his Mustang. ‘Fair enough.’ His mouth is very dry.

Maggie paces the floor and looks at the ceiling. Strange noises come from above: banging and talking, footsteps back and forth, and things sliding and shifting. The sounds are making her nervous. Usually the only noise from upstairs is the drone of the television-daytime dreaming with eyes wide open. But this is different. She does not like different. She does not want different. It is worrying her.

What’s going on up there? Maybe they know her plans and are building some terrible torture device with which to punish her. Maybe they’re-

One two three four five six seven eight.

They don’t know anything. It is true that they’re making strange noises, and it is true that they’re talking about something, something that’s causing Henry to raise his voice at Beatrice, but she doesn’t think it has anything to do with her. When Henry is mad at her she knows it right away. Still: it makes her nervous.

Today is her day for escape and, except for that escape, she wants today to be like every other day. She wants today to be more like every other day than any day has been yet. She wants it to be perfectly normal. Normal is predictable and predictable is what she needs if she’s to escape, and she needs to escape: fresh air in her lungs and sunshine on her skin and Daddy’s arms wrapped around her.

If strange things are happening upstairs, and they are, that might ruin her plan.

No. It will work out. It has to work out, so it will. That’s all there is to it. There’s no point in thinking about it not working out.

She walks to the back of the stairs and pulls the weapon from the shadows for the third or fourth time today. She does not hesitate. The thought of staying here even one more day is much worse than anything she can imagine lurking in darkness.

It makes her sick when she thinks of what she plans to do with this weapon in her hand, it makes her stomach feel like rotten milk, but she also wants it done. She wants to be through it and up the stairs and through the front door and standing outside beneath the yellow sun.

She closes her eyes and imagines the sharp edge of the weapon hacking into the flesh of Beatrice’s ankle. She imagines seeing beneath the skin, seeing the opening in the skin like a slit in a piece of thick leather, seeing all the organic levers and pulleys that make up the moving parts of a human being, seeing blood pour from within and splash in great red drops on the dirty wooden step before the woman tilts like a great tree felled.

She can do this. She just has to be patient. In another two hours Beatrice will come down here and she will-

A metal thwack as, from the other side of the door, the lock is turned and the deadbolt retracts.

She looks out the window. It is too early for this to be happening. Donald’s El Camino has not yet even rolled down the driveway. It is far too early for this to be happening.

Should she do it now, anyway? Should she make her move now or should she wait? Something is happening, something she doesn’t understand, and if she waits she might never have another chance. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. This is all wrong. Everything about this is wrong and wrong and wrong.

Borden told. He is real after all and he told. He wants her stuck here in the Nightmare World forever and ever. He wants her to suffer and-

Borden is imaginary. He’s not real. He’s never been real.

The door at the top of the stairs creaks open and a bulging silhouette fills the doorway. Beatrice. It’s Beatrice and she’s coming down. She’s not carrying a plate. She’s not bringing dinner down. Maggie knew she wouldn’t be. It’s too early for dinner. Henry is still home and the shadows are not yet long, so it’s too early for dinner. She can hear his deep voice vibrating through the wood floor and into the basement. There are other voices up there, too. She can feel them but she cannot hear them. But they’re there and they vibrate differently than Henry’s voice. Something is wrong.

She ducks once more behind the stairs, hiding in the shadows there with the weapon gripped in her now sweating hands. She can’t decide what to do. She can’t decide whether to put the weapon away or use it. If she doesn’t do this now she might not have another chance. There are strange voices upstairs, there was banging earlier, and Henry yelling.

But the plan was to wait for Henry to leave. Another couple hours, no more.

Except Henry may not leave. She has no idea what’s going on and she cannot count on things happening like they normally do.

This might be her only chance.

She’s not going to wait. When she attacks Beatrice the woman will scream. She’ll scream and that will draw Henry. When Henry comes running down to see what happened she’ll slice his ankles too. He probably won’t be down for good, but that doesn’t matter. As long as she has time enough to get upstairs and out the front door that doesn’t matter at all.

She can do this.

It can all still be okay.

The stairs creak as Beatrice makes her way down. Her breathing is heavy and somehow thick. Her feet drag across the wooden steps, and the steps sag beneath her weight.

‘Sarah?’ she says.

Maggie does not answer. She stands in the shadows beneath the stairs gripping the weapon. Her breath is still in her throat: dead air: waiting for what happens next.

Another step down from Beatrice and her right ankle is now in front of Maggie’s eyes, visible between two planks of wood. White and soft and easy to reach-easy to cut.

She can do this.

Her heart pounds in her chest.

Her face feels numb.

She can do this. She knows she can. She has to do it, so she can do it. That’s how it works. She is not too weak for what must be done. She is strong. She is strong and brave. Her daddy said so. Her daddy once told her she was the bravest person he ever met.

Beatrice lifts her left leg to bring it down next to the right.

Maggie lifts the weapon with both hands and hacks at the flesh between the boards, drawing a red line where before was unblemished white skin.

Blood splashes on Maggie’s hands and arms. It is hot. Much hotter than she expected it would be.

Beatrice screams.

Back up. Watch the sun rise from the western horizon. See clouds in the bleached denim sky once blown apart by the wind pull themselves together again. Cars reverse down streets. A shattered drinking glass reconstructs itself and flies up from a tile floor and into Roberta Block’s right hand and she sets it into a sink full of soapy water and unwashes it. A turkey vulture flies backwards through the sky. Genevieve Paulson sits in bed in her parents’ guest bedroom and tears roll up her cheeks and vanish into the corners of her eyes. Her daughter Thalia unsays something that unbreaks her heart and walks backwards out of the bedroom door and down the hallway to where her grandma is unbaking cookies. The hour hands on all the time pieces spin counter-clockwise, pulling their ticks and their tocks back out of the time stream to be spent once more. Now stop.

The same turkey vulture hangs motionless in the sky above the Deans’ house just south of Crouch Avenue like it was nailed into the blue.

For a moment everything is very still. Then-after a beat: exhale-time moves forward once more. The turkey vulture flies over the house and toward the woods, trying to catch a scent of death in its nostrils.

And Henry Dean steps through the front door of his house, keys dangling from his index finger. He’s out of beer and wants a couple-three more before heading to work. And for work. A good buzz helps the night pass. He walks down the steps and across the gravel driveway to his truck. He yanks open the door and slides the seat of his Levis across the seat of the truck, stopping behind the wheel. He starts the engine and shoves the transmission into first, releases the clutch, and gasses the thing with a booted foot. The tires spit gravel and the truck gets moving.

When he hits the street he makes a left, and then cracks the window to get a breeze in the cab of this Ford-brand oven. But he doesn’t turn on the air conditioner. Henry refuses to use an air conditioner. People managed for thousands of years without them and he’ll be damned if he’s gonna prove frail and womanish by using one hisself.

Sweat trickles down his forehead, catches on a thick gray eyebrow, and holds there a moment before rolling along the arc of hair and running down the side of his face. He smears it away with his palm, pushing it into his retreating hairline.

Then he turns left on Main Street and heads toward Bill’s Liquor.

Some ways down, through heat fumes rising from the cracked asphalt, he sees several cars parked on the shoulder of the road up ahead and pulls his foot off the gas.

‘What the hell?’

He downshifts to third, then second, then first as he approaches. Two cars from the Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Department and one from the Bulls Mouth Police Department. A sheriff’s deputy is sitting on the hood of one of the county cars, staring at nothing in particular and smoking a cigarette.

Henry brings his truck to a stop and rolls down his window.

‘Hey, dep,’ he says, ‘how the hell are you?’

‘All right, Henry. How you doing?’

‘Can’t complain.’ He smiles. ‘Hot, though, ain’t it?’

‘Shit yeah, man. Hotter’n a pussycat in a pepper patch.’

‘What’s with all the police?’

The deputy glances over his shoulder, sees nothing of concern, and leans toward Henry conspiratorially.

‘You really wanna know?’

‘No, I ast ’cause I wanted you to lie to me.’

‘Bodies.’

Henry’s face goes numb. He tries not to show it.

‘Bodies?’

‘Little girls. Two or three of ’em buried in the woods.’

‘No shit?’

‘None.’

Henry forces a surprised whistle and the shake of a head. ‘Well, I’ll be goddamned.’

‘Indeed.’

‘What kind of bastard would go and kill little girls?’

‘The sick kind. Probably raped ’em first.’

Henry feels his face go hot, feels anger clamp down on his chest like a pair of channel-lock pliers. He’s no rapist. He’s a family man. He loves his wife and would never cheat on her. Especially not with a rape to no little girls. He feels an urge to reach out his window and grab the deputy by the collar and slam his face against the metal door of the truck. Instead he nods and says, ‘Probably did. It’s a sick world. I hope you catch the son of a bitch.’

‘I’m sure we will,’ the deputy says.

‘Well, good luck to you,’ Henry says, tossing off a sharp salute.

He puts the truck into gear and lets off the clutch and presses the gas and continues south on Main Street. As soon as he knows the deputy can no longer see him the life drains from his face and his friendly expression sags into a dead scowl. The light leaves his eyes and his mouth curls down at the corners.

His mind is a gray fog which no thought can penetrate, which nothing can penetrate but an uncomprehending animal dread. But as he approaches Hackberry Street he sees Chief Davis’s car heading toward him, and behind it a red 1965 Mustang, and that clears the fog in a hurry.

They found the bodies. It won’t be long before the police figure that two plus two equals four. Even if there’s no evidence on the bodies themselves-and his guess is that with all the science they got these days the police will find him all over them-they’re on his property. He’ll be the first person they question. They may even get a search warrant. Sheriff Sizemore is friendly with some judges that might make it happen in a hurry. If they get a search warrant they’ll find Sarah. If they find Sarah it’s over.

The little bitch said she’d called her daddy. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. It meant his life would shortly be falling apart. Which meant it couldn’t be true. Except it was true. It was true and it still is. He doesn’t know how she knew about the bodies, but she did, she must have known about them, and-

After the two cars pass by, he makes a u-turn.

The beer is canceled. Work is canceled. His life is canceled.

It’s time for a new plan. He drives toward home, toward what has been home for over forty years, and thinks about what he should do. His brother Ron has a place in California, in a practically deserted mining town called Kaiser just other side of the Arizona state line. He and Beatrice and Sarah can go there. They’ll hide out there till the heat dies down. He has no doubt that there will be heat. People care about dead little girls. He’ll be tried and convicted on the news shows within days. The media need a villain. But they can hide out in Kaiser till the heat dies down, and once it does. . well, that’s where things break down a little bit in his mind.

If the police don’t have enough to arrest him he might be able to come back home. His running will be suspicious, but suspicious behavior ain’t evidence. It seems more likely, though, that Bulls Mouth is about to become a part of his past. In which case they’ll head down to Mexico. It won’t be safe to try for Mexico till things quiet down, but once they do quiet down they should be able to make it across the border without too much trouble. Most eyes are usually focused on those trying to enter the United States, not on those trying to leave it. He’s not sure how exactly they’ll get by in Mexico, but he’s sure they will get by. Maybe they can even get a house on the ocean. He’s always wanted to see the ocean. Or maybe Canada instead. They speak English there. He can work that out later.

Up ahead Chief Davis’s car and the Mustang pull to the shoulder of the road. Henry drives by them a moment later. He maintains his speed despite a great urge to put the gas pedal to the floorboard. He can’t act suspicious.

At Crouch Avenue he turns right, and again into his driveway two minutes later. Gravel kicks out from the tires and shotguns against the side of the house as he brings the truck to a stop.

He storms up the wood stairs to the porch, takes two steps across the porch, and pushes his way through the door and into the house.

‘Bee!’

‘What?’

He walks into the kitchen.

Beatrice stands at the sink, a soapy plate in her hands. She looks at him, her eyes searching his face. ‘What is it?’

‘Put that down. We gotta get out of here.’

‘Get out of here? What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about we gotta get out of here. Pack some shit. Whatever you want to take with you. Whatever you can get into boxes in the next twenty minutes or so. We’re leaving town and my gut says we gotta make it snappy.’

‘Leaving town? Why would we leave town?’

‘There’s some trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble? Did we do something wrong?’

‘We didn’t do nothing wrong, but people will say we did. Pack some shit. We gotta go.’

‘Well, how long we going for?’

‘Probably forever. Goddamn it, Bee, we don’t have time for questions.’

‘How are we supposed to pack everything in twenty m-’

‘We’re not packing everything. Only things we have to take. Now, goddamn it, get your fat ass moving. We don’t have time to fuck around. I got no idea when the police will be here, but I fucking know they will be. So move.’

Beatrice’s chin begins to tremble and her eyes get glossy with tears. A strange, sad squeak escapes her throat.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled at you, Bee, but we need to leave. I don’t have time to answer a lotta questions. What I need is for you to go to the garage, find some cardboard boxes, and start packing whatever you can think to pack. Can you do that?’ He strokes her round smooth cheek with a callused hand. ‘Can you do that, Bee?’

She nods.

‘Good girl. Now get to it.’

He gives her a quick kiss on the mouth, then turns to the bedroom.

‘Bill’s Liquor.’

‘Donald.’

‘Henry. What’s up?’

‘Me and Bee are leaving town. You might want to do the same, though I don’t know for sure if it’s necessary for you.’

‘What’s going on?’

Seventeen minutes later there’s a knock at the front door. It came faster than he’d expected. He was hoping to be out of town before this could happen. They shouldn’t have tried to pack anything. They should have simply got in the truck and gone. But the idea of leaving behind all those years of life without taking even-

‘Henry?’

‘I’ll get it, Bee!’

‘Okay.’

He closes his eyes and exhales and opens his eyes. Then slips a hand between his mattress and box spring and wraps it around a Lupara and pulls it out. He breaks it open and checks both barrels are loaded. They are. He tucks the gun into the back of his Levis, then grabs a few more shells and stuffs them into his pockets. He doesn’t think it will come to gunfire, but he’s not counting it out only to find hisself with his face in the gravel while some cocksucker from the sheriff ’s department is slapping cuffs on his wrists and ramming a knee up into his balls. His hope is that it’s just Chief Davis come by to let him know what’s going on. Sorry to bother you, Henry, how you been? Good to hear it. Just stopping by because, well, have you ever seen anything suspicious out in your woods? Any trespassers or anything? He hopes that will be the beginning and the end of it, but he’s not counting on it. As he heads out of the bedroom, he stops at the closet and grabs a.22 rifle from the shelf.

No one ever went into battle with too many weapons.

He walks into the kitchen where Beatrice is packing dishes. He grabs her by the arm and spins her around. A plate slips from her hands. It drops to the floor and shatters.

‘Not dishes, Bee. Goddamn it, we don’t need to take no fucking dishes.’

‘But-’

‘Look, just head downstairs till I say so.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘Go.’

‘Okay.’ She nods at him, looking like she’s fighting back tears.

There’s another knock at the front door. Buckshot barks at the people on the other side.

‘On my way.’

He glances over his shoulder to see Beatrice pulling open the basement door and disappearing behind it.

He nods to himself. Good, she’ll be safe down there. He heads to the front door. Buckshot sits staring at it. He barks once. Two human shapes behind the yellow pebbled glass. He leans the.22 against the wall where they won’t be able to see it with the door open.

He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a pack of Rolaids and thumbs one of them into his mouth and chews it with his eyes closed. Nothing going on here. Everything is finer than frog hairs. No, sir, I didn’t see nothing out of the ordinary, but truth is, I don’t really keep too close an eye on that land. Trees don’t tend to cause much trouble unless they get a few drinks in ’em, you know, and these ones are twelve-stepping it. Ha-ha.

He tongues chalky powder from a molar.

‘It’s okay, boy,’ he says, petting the dog’s head.

A fist rises into the air on the other side of the glass, ready to knock a third time.

He grabs the door handle, thumbs the paddle, and yanks open the door before it can.

Ian sits in his car watching Chief Davis and Bill Finch walk across the gravel driveway to the front door. He wants to be there with them. He wants to look into the man’s eyes. If he could look into the man’s eyes he would know. Instead he is here in his car. The window’s rolled down and a convection-oven wind is blowing against his face. His stomach feels sour and his mouth is dry and his eyes are burning. He pulls a plug of cigar from his ashtray and stabs his mouth with it and chews on it but does not light it.

Chief Davis raises his hand and knocks on the yellow pebbled glass that fills the top half of the front door. The muffled sound of a dog barking.

Ian leans forward, waiting. The door does not move. For a long time it does not move.

‘Knock again,’ Ian says under his breath.

After a moment Chief Davis raises his hand to do so, but Bill Finch grabs his wrist before the fist can make contact.

‘I’m in charge here,’ he says.

Chief Davis shrugs and blinks. ‘If it makes you feel manly.’

Finch stares at him a long moment. Then turns to the door and knocks himself.

The dog on the other side of the door barks again. Then the sound of a voice from within, though Ian cannot hear the words from this distance. And still the door does not move. Chief Davis and Bill Finch stand side by side before it, motionless, and wait. And wait.

‘Fuck this,’ Ian says under his breath. He pulls the wet cigar from his mouth and drops it into the ashtray, then pushes open the car door and steps out onto the driveway. Stones grind beneath his feet and Chief Davis throws him a look that stops him. He remains outside the car, but only stands there with his hand holding his car’s open door, neither shutting it and heading toward the front door nor getting back into the vehicle.

Bill Finch is raising his hand to knock again when the door is pulled open.

The dog barks.

‘Hush now,’ Henry Dean says, petting him.

And there he is. Is he the man who kidnapped Maggie, the man who stole Ian’s daughter? Sagging face, bald head, dead eyes like unpolished stones pressed into sucking mud, veined nose bursting forth. Ian can think of at least a dozen times he’s seen him around town. They’ve nodded to one another, maybe even exchanged howdys. It makes him sick to think about. All those times he could have grabbed the man and choked him till he was dead. All those times he was but one violent move from his daughter. Seven years and only this fat old man has stood between them. If he’s the one.

As Henry Dean looks at the cops a light enters his eyes and a smile broadens across his face. ‘Hey, fellas,’ he says. ‘What’s going on?’

‘We need to talk,’ Chief Davis says.

Bill Finch glares at Davis a moment, then turns back to Henry Dean. ‘It’s a serious matter,’ he says.

Henry Dean licks his lips. ‘Shit.’

‘Shit?’

‘You know why we’re here?’

‘’Course I know,’ Henry says. ‘It can only be one thing.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Someone saw my truck and put two and two together.’

‘Your truck?’

‘All them scratches.’

‘What about them?’

Henry thumbs something into his mouth, a mint or an antacid, and looks at them perplexedly. ‘You ain’t here ’cause I run into Pastor Warden’s fence?’

Chief Davis shakes his head.

Bill Finch says, ‘It’s a more serious matter than that.’

‘Oh. Shit. Forget I said anything, then. What’s going on?’

Sweat runs down Ian’s face. His hand clenches his car door till the bones ache with the pressure of it.

‘Just arrest the motherfucker already,’ he says under his breath.

Henry Dean couldn’t possibly have heard him, but his eyes dart toward him for a fraction of a second before moving back to the men standing nearest.

‘Maybe it would be best if you stepped outside,’ Bill Finch says.

‘Stepped outside?’ Henry says, and laughs. ‘What the hell for?’

Chief Davis puts his hand on his service weapon. ‘Is there anyone else in the house, Henry?’

‘Chief. Todd. We grown up together. What are you doing with your hand on a gun?’

‘Answer the question,’ Bill Finch says.

‘My wife,’ Henry says.

‘We need you to come down to the station and answer some questions.’

‘What about?’

‘Step outside.’

The faint sound of a woman screaming.

Both Chief Davis and Bill Finch look past Henry toward the sound of the scream. In that moment Henry Dean produces a weapon from behind him, a sawed-off shotgun, and Bill Finch’s chest explodes.

The dog at Henry’s side starts barking wildly.

A mist of blood hangs in the air even as the man drops to the weathered porch and rolls down the three steps to the gravel driveway. He lies face up, staring at the wild blue sky.

Chief Davis jumps left, but still catches one from the second barrel. Catches it in the face. There isn’t even a scream. There isn’t time for one. One second his face is fine, the next it’s a mask of blood and musculature, and white teeth and pieces of bone splatter on the driveway behind him in a thick and widening triangle of red liquid like his head is a ketchup packet that’s been stomped on.

By the time Ian is once again looking to the doorway Henry Dean has dropped his sawed-off shotgun to the ground and is pulling a rifle from behind the door.

Ian dives behind his car, unlatching his holster and drawing his SIG in one smooth motion. He pokes his head up briefly to get an idea of where he is in relation to Henry Dean and hears a shot explode on the air. It carries death though it sounds no more harmful than someone popping a paper lunch bag. The bullet grazes the trunk lid and chips of gray metal cut into his head and cheek.

The dog continues to bark wildly.

Ian drops to the ground again, gravel digging into his arm and his side, and tries to catch a glimpse of the man from under the car, but the angle is wrong. He can’t see anything but more gravel and the base of the house.

‘Go get ’im, Buckshot! Get ’im!’

Running across gravel. Barking. A brown blur seen from under the car.

Ian turns around in time to see the dog coming around the back of the vehicle with teeth bared, its eyes black, foam hanging from its jaw in frothy strings. It leaps at Ian and Ian has just enough time to pull the gun around toward it and pull the trigger.

There is a brief yelp and then silence.

The dog continues through the air, lifeless, and drops on top of him, its dead open mouth on his throat. Hot spittle runs down his neck. Hot blood soaks into his uniform. He pushes the dog off and it falls to the gravel with a meat-sack thump, wet and viscous, and lies there, still.

‘You son of a bitch,’ Henry says, and there is another shot. It only kicks up gravel.

Ian pulls himself up into a crouching position, making sure his head is below the level of the trunk. Inhale. Exhale. He’ll be on the porch waiting for him. He’ll have to get his own shot off quick and drop again if he doesn’t want to take one in the face like Chief Davis did. The man is fast. Inhale. Exhale.

He catches his breath in his throat and jumps to his feet, ready to take a shot. But he never has the chance.

Before he even catches sight of the man-standing at the bottom of the steps now, feet distanced, rifle pressed into the crook of his shoulder, left eye closed, aiming at where he rightly reckons Ian will pop up-there is a dull thwack in his chest just to the right of his sternum, like someone thumped him with a rubber mallet. It doesn’t even hurt. Not at first. But suddenly he can’t breathe. He inhales and hears a strange sucking sound from beneath his shirt. He looks down at himself, confused. A small dot of blood appears on the fabric. He looks up at Henry Dean to ask him just what the hell happened, but the man is heading up the steps and into his house. Ian drops to his knees, both of them popping on impact. Gravel digs into the flesh, and though he is aware of it he hardly feels it at all. He looks down again and sees drops of blood splashing to the gravel.

This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.

Then he’s face down, sucking in chalky white dust. He spits. Whenever he tries to breathe his chest makes that wheezing noise: a low whistle, like a punctured tire.

Sounds of feet on gravel stepping quick.

Ian rolls onto his side to see what’s happening.

Henry Dean is helping his wife Beatrice into a green Ford Ranger pickup truck. That seems like it should be impossible. Henry was just standing on the gravel aiming a gun at him and a curl of white smoke was slipping from its barrel. It doesn’t seem like he should have had time to go inside and get his wife and bring her outside and put her into their truck. She is crying and her right foot is covered in blood and a skin flap hangs from her ankle.

Ian blinks.

In the next moment Beatrice is sitting in the truck and the door is shut and Henry Dean is halfway up the steps leading to the house.

What’s happened to time? Someone broke time.

I need my gun. I can get him if I can get to my gun.

He rolls in the other direction. It hurts and the sharp points of stones dig into his back. He looks for his gun. There it is, just over three feet away; within reach, if he’s lucky. He puts his arm out toward it, fingers stretched. His fingers touch it. He pulls it toward him. Then wraps his hand around it. He rolls back toward the house.

Henry Dean is now dragging Maggie out the front door of the house. She is pale and thin and her nose is bleeding, but it is Maggie. His daughter. She’s so grown up. Practically a woman. And that man with his hand clutching her wrist stole her from him and stole her childhood.

Ian raises the gun in his hand.

But Henry Dean sees him and pulls Maggie to him and lifts her and uses her as a shield. She tries to pry his hands away, but cannot manage it. Blood drips from her nose and onto the man’s large arms.

‘You gonna shoot your own daughter, Hunt?’

Ian tries to aim at the man’s legs, to shoot them out from under him, but his hand is too shaky, and he is afraid of hitting Maggie. He would never forgive himself for that.

The man walks toward him, using Maggie as a shield, and once he’s close enough, he kicks the gun away.

‘Help me, Daddy! Daddy!’

She reaches for him and a bloody snot bubble grows in her left nostril and pops. Tears stream down her face. Her teeth have blood on them.

Ian reaches for her.

‘Baby,’ he says. ‘My Maggie.’

But then a boot swings toward him at great speed, a blur of motion, and kicks him in the face. Hello, darkness.

He comes to to the sound of that punctured-tire wheeze. That strange sound of air leaking from his chest. The pain is greater now, overwhelming. Something in his chest feels closed off. Like a door slammed shut. He cannot seem to breathe.

His eyes are open and staring at the back tire of his car. Rust and splattered mud. And beyond his car is Chief Davis’s car. And in Chief Davis’s car is a radio. He turns over on all fours. He grabs the rear bumper of his car and pushes himself to his feet. Chief Davis’s car is only twenty feet away. If he can get to it everything will be fine. Thompson is working the phones and if he can get to the radio everything will be fine. He takes a step and his knees buckle and he falls. First to his knees, then to his side.

Thompson is working the phones.

He has a phone.

He reaches into his pocket for his cell phone. He can feel it. He doesn’t need to get to the car. He can just call nine-one-one. He’s never been on this end of an emergency call. If he can get Thompson on the line everything will be okay.

Everything will be fine.

Henry throws Maggie into the truck and gets in after her. She looks through the back window at her daddy. She hasn’t seen him in forever and there he is. He’s lying on the gravel. He’s on his right side and his chest is bleeding and his head is tilted down to the gravel and red blood is flowing from his nose and down his face and his eyes are closed. He isn’t moving at all. His right arm is stretched out before him. It’s flat on the gravel, palm up. Several feet from it is a gun. Maggie wishes he would pick it up and shoot out one of the truck tires. He could still stop Henry. Unless he’s dead. He isn’t moving.

‘Sit down, you little bitch,’ Henry says. He grabs her by the shoulder and shoves her down into a sitting position.

The truck roars around in a half circle, spitting gravel, and heads out of the driveway. Past a man with no face. A policeman with no face. She can tell by the uniform that he’s a policeman, but he has no face. And past another policeman whose chest is a red bowl filled with a thick black liquid that can only be blood.

‘Henry, I’m bleeding,’ Beatrice says.

‘I know it, Bee.’

‘Why am I bleeding? What happened?’

‘Not now.’

‘But why am I-’

‘Not now. Just hush up. I need to think.’

The truck screeches out to Crouch Avenue, burning black rubber onto the ancient gray asphalt as it hooks right.

‘But why am I bleeding?’

‘Would you shut the ever-loving fuck up?’

‘Oh,’ Beatrice says. ‘Okay. Sorry.’

She looks out the window.

Maggie looks down at Beatrice’s right ankle. It is sliced open and pouring blood. The blood is pooling on the floorboard. It makes Maggie sick to look at, but she can’t look away. She almost escaped.

‘Fuck,’ Henry says.

Maggie looks at him, but he’s staring straight ahead.

In another five minutes they’re headed west on Interstate 10.

Diego rolls down the driveway, dread heavy upon him. Based on the call Ian made, things went bad, very bad, and he’s anticipating some ugliness. But a moment later, as he rounds the last turn in the driveway and is facing it, he knows he wasn’t ready for it. He was not at all ready for this kind of ugliness. There’s an ambulance on the way, but he radios for a second before he steps from the car.

Chief Davis lies on the blood-soaked gravel with a missing face. The fingers on his left hand twitch spasmodically, but Diego cannot tell whether the man is conscious and trying to accomplish some goal or if the movement is merely the result of his dying brain emitting a last few electric impulses before going silent as stone.

A few feet beyond him lies Bill Finch. He is flat on his back. His chest is concaved and filled with blood, air bubbles rising from within him and popping on the dark surface. His open eyes stare at the blue sky. The wide open blue sky, lighted by a white sun.

He does not move at all.

Nor does Ian, further down the driveway, lying on his back with a cell phone in his hand and a bullet hole in his chest. His eyes are open, red-rimmed slits in a pale face translucent with exhaustion and clenched into a grimace. He is looking at Diego. Beside him, in a pool of blood, lies a dead dog.

‘Ian, what the hell happened here?’

‘I think they’re dead.’ Barely a whisper.

‘How are you?’

‘Not. . dead.’

Diego nods, then walks toward Chief Davis and looks down at the man. His face ends just below his upper lip in a line of shattered teeth like the serrated edge of a bread knife. Diego could toe the roof of the man’s mouth if he wanted to. He does not want to. The skin on the upper part of Chief Davis’s face has been wiped off completely, and one eye is gone, replaced by a steak-red hollow, half-filled with black liquid. The other eye, brown and alive with fear and pain, shifts toward Diego, and Diego has to fight the urge to step back from him.

‘Ambulance is on the way, Chief.’

A gurgle from the hole at the back of his throat. A slow ooze of blood runs down onto his neck and is soaked up by the collar of his shirt.

‘You’re not gonna die.’

Another gurgle.

Chief Davis’s eye twitches left, toward his hand. His ring finger twitches.

‘Betty knows you love her, Chief. I’ve got to check on the others.’

Diego steps away from him. He walks to Bill Finch, and though he’s never liked the man-he stole a friend’s wife-he likes the blank stare he’s throwing at the sky even less.

Diego leans down.

‘Bill?’

Silence. His chest neither rises nor falls. There is no movement in his extremities. No sound escapes his throat. What now lies before Diego is nothing more than a wax replica of a man he once knew.

‘Dead?’

Diego nods.

Ian closes his eyes and lets his head rest on the gravel.

‘You okay, Ian?’

No response.

Diego turns in a circle, feeling helpless and overwhelmed, and falls to a sitting position in the middle of the driveway as in the distance sirens wail.

Paramedics load Ian and Chief Davis into ambulances and declare William Francis Finch Jr, age forty-two, survived by wife and two children, dead. Diego wonders if he should call Debbie. It might be better to hear it from a friendly voice than from Sheriff Sizemore. The thought of having to put those words into the air makes him sick. Your husband is dead. With four words a world destroyed. And she’s already been through so much. He reaches for his cell phone. He has to call her. She’ll need a sympathetic ear.

But before he can dial, Henry’s brother Donald is coming down the driveway in a primer-gray El Camino with an expressionless expression on his face: blank as unmarked paper. He passes the ambulances as they wail their way out to Crouch Avenue and then the Mencken Regional Medical Center. The car comes to a stop behind Diego’s and Donald steps out.

‘What the hell-’

Diego walks up to him, grabs him by the arm, and leads him to his car. He yanks open the back door. He shoves Donald toward it. ‘Get in.’

‘What for?’

‘Get in the fucking car.’

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Do you want to be?’

Donald looks at him over his shoulder for a moment, tonguing the inside of his cheek. And he must see the scene behind Diego as well: blood and bone splattered across the driveway, several police cars, a covered dead body, a dead dog. And the absences: Henry’s truck and the man himself. He must be able to piece at least some of it together. After a moment he nods and steps into the back of the car.

Diego waits till he pulls in his left leg and slams the door shut on him.

‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Are you and your brother close?’

‘He’s twenty years older than me. Old enough to be my father.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘No, we’ve never been close.’

‘But you eat dinner at his house.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘You eat a lot of dinners with people you don’t like?’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I said we weren’t close. And except on weekends he ain’t there anyway.’

‘But you eat dinner at his house.’

‘Yeah, sometimes. I already said I do.’

‘Ever notice anything unusual?’

‘Unusual like what?’

‘Unusual like unusual. Use your brain.’

‘Henry and Bee have always been unusual.’

‘Like how?’

‘I don’t know.’ Donald scratches at his beard stubble. ‘Look, if you’re asking if I ever noticed anything criminal, the answer is no. I haven’t.’

‘Nothing?’

‘No.’

‘You never suspected they had a third person in their house?’

‘I don’t know. I guess not.’

‘Don’t guess.’

‘I never thought about it.’

‘Well, think about it now.’

‘No. I mean, I seen kid stuff around now and then, but I guess I thought it was from their own kid.’

‘They had a kid?’

‘Died over twelve years ago.’

Diego scratches his cheek. He remembers hearing this story before, maybe at Roberta’s, but he’s only spoken to Henry half a dozen times over the years, so it didn’t mean much to him-till now. ‘Boy or girl?’

‘Girl.’

‘How old was she?’

‘Not even one.’

‘How’d she die?’

‘Drowned in the tub.’

‘You only saw kid stuff that could belong to an infant?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’re searching the house.’

‘I know.’

‘And if we find stuff all over the house for a teenager we’ll know you’re lying.’

‘I know it. I’m not lying. I never thought about it.’

‘You don’t do much thinking, do you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t seem to know much either.’

Donald shrugs and exhales through his nostrils.

‘You never heard any noise?’

‘Not that I noticed.’

‘You really expect me to believe you lived in a trailer not twenty yards from Henry and Beatrice, that you ate dinner there sometimes, and you never had any idea that for seven years they were holding someone captive? That’s what you want me to believe?’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘And you don’t know where he might be headed?’

‘I already told you like an hour ago.’

‘And if you told the truth you should be able to remember what you said.’

‘I said I didn’t know but if I had to guess, Juarez by way of El Paso.’

‘Is your brother that fucking stupid?’

‘Well, he ain’t a Mensa member.’

‘But you think he’s dumb enough to try to cross a border with every cop in the state looking for him?’

‘I don’t know. It was just a guess.’

‘A pretty shit one. Your brother’s not that stupid and you know it.’

A knock at the door, and then it squeaks open.

Diego looks over his shoulder. Sheriff Sizemore pokes his Stetson-topped head into the room. He wipes at his mouth with his palm.

‘Officer Diego.’

‘It’s Officer Peña.’

‘Let’s talk.’

Diego nods, then gets to his feet and follows the sheriff out into the empty front room of the police station, making sure the door is locked on the younger Dean brother.

‘What is it, sheriff?’

‘You’ve been going in circles for over an hour.’

‘I know, but he’ll slip. I’m wearing him down.’

‘Look, this is our case. A county case. You don’t have the resources. I agreed to the hour outta courtesy for what happened to Officer Hunt’s daughter. For what happened to the chief. I know it means something to you guys. And, yeah, I thought maybe you’d be able to get something we could use. But one of ours got shot too, died, and the fucking hour is up, Officer Diego.’

‘Officer Peña. And I just need another thirty minutes.’

‘You can’t have it.’

‘I can’t have it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, what the fuck?’

The sheriff shrugs, seeming suddenly bored by the conversation. ‘That’s just the way it is,’ he says. ‘I got a manhunt going on and I’m done letting you dance in circles with our only possible source of information.’

Diego watches Sheriff Sizemore lead the younger Dean to the back of his car and put him into it. Then Sizemore looks back at Diego and nods. Diego does not nod back. Sizemore gets into his vehicle and drives way, taking Donald to the sheriff’s office down the street.

Diego tries to roll a cigarette, but his hands are shaky. He cannot seem to keep the tobacco in his paper. It shakes from the paper and falls to the asphalt. Finally, after his third try, he balls the rolling paper in his fist and throws it to the ground. He turns around and heads inside.

Didn’t really want a cigarette, anyway.

Picture a calm sea of oily black. Horizon to horizon: only this sea, flat and featureless. An entire planet covered in liquid midnight. A moon overhead like a silver dollar, and a few stars, but nothing more. There are no islands or trees. No fish or whales. Just a dead calm. Nothing other than one man floating on his back in the middle of it: Ian. Ian, floating in darkness. Arms and legs spread like the Vitruvian Man. Eyes open. He looks toward the heavens expecting God, but all he gets is the voice of the darkness between the stars: a hollow call like a desert wind.

Then something touches his left hand. Someone touches his left hand. It is human. He is not alone. He tries to turn his head to the left but he cannot. Someone is stroking the web between thumb and index finger.

He doesn’t understand why he can’t turn his head to the left.

Open your eyes.

They are open: the moon like a silver dollar and the points of stars.

Open your eyes.

He does and the night sky gives way to a white ceiling, first out of focus and soft, then gaining sharpness. He blinks several times and turns his head to the left.

Debbie looks up from her lap. Her face is thin. She looks old, somehow, and tired. He has never thought that of her before, but he thinks it now. She is not wearing makeup and her eyes are red and the skin beneath them is blotchy and dark gray and the corners of her mouth are turned down.

‘Hi,’ he says, but it is little more than a whisper.

She says nothing at first, just looks at him. She wipes her nose, her red-rimmed nostrils, with the back of her wrist. Finally: ‘Bill’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Then he coughs, and there is that strange feeling like trying to breathe underwater. He coughs and coughs, and feels like phlegm or something should come up, but nothing does. His muscles tighten as he coughs and pain ripples through his body from the dropped-pebble point where the bullet said hello. He hears a strange liquid sucking sound from beneath a thin blanket which covers his torso. He lifts the blanket. A clear tube, a catheter about as big around as a woman’s pinky finger, sutured into his chest just under his armpit. Thread stitched through his flesh and then wrapped around the catheter to hold it into place. The skin pursed around it like lips around a straw, like some strange alien tulip. In the tube, blood and pus combined to form a thick pink liquid. A knot of it flows down the catheter to a small box on the floor with PLEUR-EVAC written on it.

He coughs again, and more liquid flows from his chest and into the tube. It hurts to cough. It hurts even to breathe.

‘Jesus,’ he says when he gets his breath back.

‘You were shot.’

After a moment, after he manages to get his breath back, he says, ‘I know.’

‘You had a collapsed lung.’

Ian nods.

Debbie frowns and looks down at her lap once more.

‘The twins are too young to remember Bill. They’ll grow up without any memories of their father to look back on.’

Ian is silent for a long time, lost on a strange raft of wooziness. Then what Deb said registers and he says, ‘Maybe-maybe that’s for the best. If it had to happen. Maybe you can’t miss something you don’t remember.’

Debbie shakes her head. ‘I don’t think it works that way.’

He squeezes Debbie’s hand. ‘I’m sorry about Bill. He made you happy. You deserve happiness.’

Debbie nods but says nothing. Instead she turns to look at an empty chair in the corner. She looks at it for a long time.

‘Did they get him at least? Is Maggie safe?’

Debbie shakes her head.

‘Bill’s dead, Chief Davis is in critical condition, he has no face, he’ll have to eat through a tube for the rest of his life, if he lives, and you’re here-yet that son of a bitch still has Maggie. It’s not right. It’s not fucking-’ Her voice chokes off and she looks down at her lap, and her shoulders shake.

‘We’ll get her back, Deb.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, but we will. I’ll think of something.’

He squeezes her hand again, but then another coughing fit overwhelms him, sending pain through his body like poison, and more blood and pus drain from his lung and into the catheter flowing from his chest.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he says. Then, once he’s caught his breath, ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll think of something and I’ll get her back.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Yes.’

Debbie nods. ‘Then I’ll believe it too.’

The sun, partially hidden behind the western horizon (looking to Maggie like a grapefruit-half laid face-down on a table), spills pink light into the evening sky. The Ford Ranger rolls along the road toward it though Maggie knows if that’s their destination they’ll never make it. This thought reminds her of a conversation she once had with her daddy. She asked him why moths like light bulbs so much and Daddy said they thought light bulbs were the moon, that moths at night used the moon for guidance and flew toward it constantly, though they never reached it, and that they did the same with light bulbs, but once they’d reached the light they had no idea what to do with it. The moon had taught them that they would never have to worry about actually reaching their destination.

‘That’s kind of sad,’ Maggie said.

But Daddy just shrugged and bit the end off a cigar.

Henry glances over her head to Beatrice. ‘How you feeling?’

‘I’m still bleeding. I feel dizzy. I don’t even know how I cut myself. Did you see, Sarah?’

Maggie shakes her head and looks down at the pool of blood on the floorboard. Then she looks to Beatrice’s pale and sweaty face. She almost escaped. Beatrice collapsed as Maggie’d imagined she would, dropped like a felled tree, screamed and went down, but Maggie forgot her plan to wait for Henry and tried to run by the woman to get upstairs, and Beatrice reached out and grabbed for her. She grabbed her ankle and said, ‘Sarah, what happened?’ and Maggie went sprawling forward and hit her face on the third step and felt a strange bending in her nose, and blood flowing down her face. Everything went gray, a gray fog swept in, and by the time it cleared Henry was downstairs, helping Beatrice up the stairs and locking the door behind them as they left the basement. A moment later he came down for her, picked her up, and brought her outside where her daddy lay bloody in the gravel with a hole in his chest.

‘Look up yonder,’ Henry says.

He points to a small brick house about a quarter mile from the road. A few horses graze on brown grass in the pink evening. The house looks quiet, a single window illuminated. A gray Dodge Ram pickup parked by the side of the house, under a carport made of weather-grayed four-by-fours and plywood. A tire swing dangles still and lonesome from a big oak tree in the front yard.

‘We’ll stop there,’ he says, ‘get you fixed up and get rid of this truck. We ain’t safe driving it.’

‘I still don’t understand what happened, Henry.’

‘I know it.’

‘I don’t know why we had to leave the dishes.’

‘We’re in some trouble with the law, Bee. I explained that already. Hell, you seen-’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘You seen the cops in the-’

‘I didn’t see nothing. I was in a lot of pain, Henry.’

He looks at Beatrice for a long time, an unreadable expression on his face. Maggie has no idea what to make of it. Nor of the conversation itself. Beatrice must have seen the blood, she must have seen the policemen lying motionless in the driveway. You can’t not see something like that. Yet she says otherwise.

‘How you feeling, Sarah?’

Maggie turns and looks at Beatrice. ‘Okay,’ she says.

‘You know we’ll get through this, right? You know we love you?’

Maggie does not respond. She looks up ahead to the house they are quickly approaching. She looks at the light in the window and wonders what kind of people live within it. She imagines a cowboy hat with salt-white sweat stains on it hanging from a rack by the door. A man in dirty coveralls sitting on a couch. A woman mending socks. A baby playing in the middle of the floor wearing nothing but a cloth diaper. She wonders if they’ll be able to help her. If Henry stops there maybe she can get help. She can move her mouth silently when Henry’s looking the other direction. Help. Me. If she could just get help she would get away.

‘You better mind your behavior, too, Sarah, you hear?’

Her face goes hot. She feels as if she has been somehow caught. As if he has read her mind. As if he has shuffled through her thoughts like index cards and spied everything that was written there. As Borden so often did.

But Borden wasn’t real and Henry is.

Real enough to shoot her daddy, to leave him bleeding to death in a gravel driveway.

It’s her fault. If she hadn’t called him none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have come and he wouldn’t have gotten shot. None of the policemen she saw would have gotten shot. They’d be eating dinner with their families instead of in the hospital or dead.

‘Sarah?’

She looks up at Henry.

‘You hear me?’

She nods.

‘If we go in there and take care of business and nothing goes wrong, whoever lives in that house will still be alive when we leave. But if you try any funny business, they’re dead, and you’re not any better off than when they was alive. You hear?’

She nods again.

‘Good.’

‘You’re not really gonna kill nobody, are you, Henry?’

‘Quiet, Bee.’

‘But Henry.’

‘I mean it. Hush up.’

Beatrice looks out her window.

Henry reaches into his pocket and comes out with a kerchief. He spits on it and thrusts it toward Maggie. She takes it hesitantly, not knowing what to do with it. She can smell his spit and it makes her stomach turn.

‘Clean your face up,’ he says. ‘We can’t roll in looking like something from a horror movie.’

Henry pulls off Interstate 10 and rolls down a single-lane stretch of gray asphalt. The window is cracked and though evening is coming on quick the air is still unpleasantly hot.

He pulls to a stop in front of the brick house. A gate blocks the driveway. He steps from the truck to swing it open, so he can drive on in, but the gate is padlocked. He walks back to the truck, reaches into the open door, and honks the horn. It sounds very loud in the still evening air. He’s unsure about what he will say to whoever’s on the other side of that door, especially about what happened to Beatrice, but he’ll think of something. He usually does.

He briefly considers tucking the Lupara into the back of his pants, but decides against it. He won’t need it. It can stay on the floor of the truck, beneath his seat, for now.

The front door swings open and a man of about thirty-five, fellow looks like a scarecrow in Levis and a T-shirt, comes out to the front porch in his stocking feet. He squints at the driveway. Henry raises a hand in greeting and smiles. The skinny guy waves back, then grabs his boots from the porch by the door and slips into them, hopping around on one foot then the other as he slides each heel down into place. That done, he walks out to greet his visitors. As he approaches a dart of brown tobacco juice shoots out from between his lips with a sound like a wet fart. The spit hits the dirt in a stream and the dirt absorbs it, forming a hard bead around the liquid.

Henry smiles and holds out his hand above the gate.

‘Howdy,’ he says.

‘Howdy,’ the man says and shakes the proffered hand. ‘You lost?’

‘Not hardly. Just run into a little trouble.’

The skinny guy takes a wary step back and squints at him. ‘What kinda trouble?’

‘Wife got herself hurt.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. We stopped at the side of the road so she could, well, so she could do her business, and she done fell over backwards. I laughed my ass off when I seen it-I know it ain’t nice to laugh at a fallen lady, but I done it-but turns out she cut her ankle pretty awful. Don’t even know on what. Didn’t stay to find out.’

‘Cut bad?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘All right, come on in.’

He unlocks the gate and lets it swing open on its own. It slides into a well-worn groove in the driveway and stops when it hits the edge of the driveway and the grass grown tall there. Then he walks away from them and toward the house, sparing but a single look at the sun sinking behind the horizon.

Henry wants to tell him to enjoy it; it’ll likely be his last.

The skinny man, whose name turns out to be Flint, helps Beatrice inside and kicks a wooden chair out from the dining table and gets her sitting in it. His wife Naomi, a pretty woman in her early- or mid-twenties, paces back and forth wringing her hands and then stops and says, ‘What can I do, Flint?’

‘Call Doc Peterson.’

‘No,’ Henry says, maybe a bit too forcefully.

Flint squints at him. ‘No?’

‘I. . I’d rather we just take care of it ourselves. Ain’t so bad it requires a doctor.’

Flint continues to squint at him for a moment, tongues the wad of tobacco tucked under his lip. He picks up a Coke can from the dining-room table and squirts a stream of brown spit into it. Then wipes at the bit that dribbled onto his chin and sets down the can.

‘How’d she really hurt her ankle, friend?’

‘Just like I said she did. You calling me a liar?’

‘I ain’t calling you anything.’

‘Sounds like you are.’

‘What d’you got against doctors?’

‘Can’t afford ’em.’

‘Peterson’s just a vet. Prolly won’t cost fifty bucks.’

‘If you got some needle and thread I’ll just stitch her up myself. Or even a fishhook and some line. Clip the barb off and it’ll work fine.’

‘I don’t know,’ Flint says.

‘Can you move your ankle, Bee?’

‘I think so.’

‘Try.’

Beatrice straightens her leg and tries to turn her ankle. She cringes, but she manages some movement as well. ‘Yeah,’ she says.

‘I still think she should see a doctor,’ Flint says.

‘I appreciate your help and all, Flint, but this ain’t a debate.’

Flint scratches his cheek. ‘Get my tackle box, Nam.’

Ian puts the off-white telephone into its cradle, letting it simply slip off his fingertips and rattle to a resting position. He feels numb.

‘What’s wrong?’ Debbie says.

He swallows. It hurts to swallow.

‘Help me up,’ he says. ‘I don’t have time to lie around.’

‘What did Diego say?’

‘He said Sheriff Sizemore released Henry Dean’s little brother. Didn’t find anything incriminated him at Henry’s house or the mobile home-at least not till lab results come back-and he didn’t slip under questioning so they let him go. Told him to stay in town in case anything came up, but that’s all.’ Ian pushes the blankets off himself and puts his legs over the edge of the bed. His feet feel very cold and look very white.

He looks around the room. ‘Do you know where my clothes are?’

‘Ian, you’ve been shot.’

‘Donald is lying. He as much as said it was his brother when I talked to him at the liquor store the day Maggie called. I should have realized it at the time. He knows something. I can’t just lie around waiting for someone to find Maggie’s mutilated body on the side of the road somewhere between here and-’

The words are cut off by coughing. It’s a deep lung-cough that brings up blood which splatters into his palm and runs down his chin. He looks at his palm, then wipes it off on the bedding. He wipes at his chin with the back of a wrist. The pain, though constant and worsened by the coughing, is tolerable. He must still be full of painkillers. His swimming mind is evidence of that. He closes his eyes to try to center himself.

‘Jesus,’ he says.

‘You should lie back down.’

He opens his eyes and looks to Debbie. ‘That’s not gonna happen.’

‘Ian.’

‘Do you know where my clothes are?’

‘They threw your clothes out. They cut your shirt off of you, and your pants were covered in blood.’

‘Shoes?’

‘Ian.’

‘Shoes?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Wallet? Phone?’

She reaches into her purse and removes a clear plastic bag with a wallet, a cell phone, some loose change, a book of matches, and a watch inside. He must have left his keys in his car’s ignition.

‘Good,’ he says.

He looks at the IV bag hanging from a pole by the head of the bed. The tube twisting off it, the needle stabbed into the back of his hand and taped in place. He has no idea what it is. Fuck it. He yanks the needle from his hand and scratches at the hole. A small bead of blood grows there. He smears it into the skin, then pushes himself off the bed and onto his feet. The floor is cold. His head swims. Everything goes gray and small black specks float before his eyes. For a moment he thinks he’s going to lose consciousness, but he doesn’t. He manages to hold on to it. Just.

Once he’s sure of himself he looks at Debbie and smiles.

‘Your car’s in the lot, right?’

‘I’m not doing it.’

‘Do you want to get Maggie back or don’t you?’

‘Don’t do that. You know I do.’

‘Then let me get her back.’

‘This isn’t about that. Don’t make it about-’

‘That’s all this is about.’

The car is quiet as they drive from Mencken down to Bulls Mouth. Ian looks out the window at the sun sinking into the earth. Just the top of it is visible above the horizon. He is cold and hot simultaneously. He believes he has a fever. The Pleur-evac chest drainage system sits on the floor between his feet. He can feel Debbie glancing at him as she drives but refuses to look back. If they make eye contact she might see how sick he really is. If that happens she’ll try to stop him. He will not be stopped.

‘You can drop me off at the police station,’ he says. ‘I reckon that’s where they moved my car to.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Whatever I have to do,’ he says.

‘What the hell does that mean?’

Ian doesn’t respond. Instead he cracks the window and says, ‘Still hot out, isn’t it?’

She pulls the car into the police station parking lot and drives around to the back where Ian’s Mustang is parked. She brings her Toyota to a stop beside it and puts the transmission into park and simply sits there. She stares straight ahead at the brick wall that is the back of the station, both hands gripping the wheel.

‘I’ll get her back,’ Ian says.

Debbie says nothing. She does not even nod. She simply continues to stare ahead.

‘Deb?’

After a long moment: ‘Just go, Ian.’

He nods and pushes the door open and steps barefoot onto the asphalt. He grabs the Pleur-evac drainage system by the handle at the top with his left hand and painfully uses his right to push himself to his feet.

‘My stuff.’

She pulls the plastic bag with his things in it from her purse and hands it to him.

‘Thank you.’

He’s about to slam the door home when the sound of Debbie’s voice stops him.

‘Ian,’ she says.

He looks at her.

She tilts her head up and sideways to look at him. Her eyes sparkle in the fading light.

‘Be safe,’ she says.

He stares at her for a long time, but does not say anything. He doesn’t really think there’s anything to say. Instead he simply nods and pushes the door shut. He stands there and looks at her through the glass. After a moment she reaches down, slides the transmission into reverse, and backs her car out of its spot. Then she is out in the street.

He watches the red taillights shrink as she recedes.

Armando Gonzales is sitting at the dispatch desk and clicking through a game of computer backgammon, saying, ‘You would roll a fucking six, you cocksucker,’ when Ian glances in on him. Ian walks unnoticed past the door. He walks to Chief Davis’s desk and pulls open the top right drawer. There he finds his keys as he knew he would. Car key, apartment key, police station key, and a small fob with a mechanic’s logo and phone number printed on it. He pulls them from the drawer and pushes the drawer closed.

Then he walks to the back of the station, past the interrogation room and the small kitchen, and into a storage room. The room is about fifteen feet wide and twelve feet deep and filled with rows of metal-framed shelves. On the shelves are boxes stacked upon boxes, loose file folders with last names scrawled upon them, stacks of photographs, orange cones, hand signs suggesting people YIELD or SLOW or STOP, yellow vests adorned with reflective tape, yellow tape for cordoning off crime scenes, Sam Browne belts, loose bottles of pepper spray, loose speed loaders for service revolvers they no longer use, old clips, handcuffs, and PR-24s. And against the wall to Ian’s left sits a locker about the size of a grandfather clock. Inside is a clutter of guns the Bulls Mouth PD has confiscated over the years.

He walks to it and unlocks it and pulls it open to take a look at what’s available: not much, as it turns out. But he does find a pump-action Remington shotgun with a six-inch barrel and the stock cut down. He grabs that and continues to look through the stockpile. He’d like something for long-distance shooting, but there’s nothing here for that purpose. He’ll just have to stop by Sally’s Gun amp; Rifle.

He walks back down the hallway, shotgun in one hand, Pleur-evac system in the other. He glances in at Armando before heading out, but Armando doesn’t notice him.

Once outside he allows himself to lean against a wall and cough. Just doing this has worn him out, and he still has a long night ahead of him.

He pushes himself off the wall and walks to his car.

At home, he changes into a pair of Levis and a button-up shirt, letting the catheter in his chest feed out the bottom. Then he straps a satchel over his shoulder. He extends the strap to hang as low as possible so there will be no backflow to his lung. Then he puts the Pleur-evac system into the satchel. He’s going to need both his hands free.

Twenty minutes after arriving he leaves his apartment.

Sally’s stays open till eight, and it’s seven forty-five when Ian pulls his Mustang into the lot on the corner of Crouch and Reservoir.

She’s standing behind the counter, the most anomalous thing you ever saw, like a tiger sipping tea. Look at her: five feet eight inches of Italian sucker punch ready to send you into the fourth dimension, wearing a Versace dress and fuck-me pumps, lips smeared red, breasts spilling out, hips cocked to the right and waiting for someone to pull the trigger. It’s unbelievable that she owns a gun shop in Noplace, Texas, and though Ian’s asked she’s never told him how it happened.

‘Ian Hunt,’ she says as he walks through the door. ‘I am surprised to see you.’

‘The rumors of my death,’ he says, ‘are greatly exaggerated.’ He coughs into his hand, then wipes it off on his Levis. ‘Slightly exaggerated, anyway.’

‘How are you, honey?’

‘Like two hundred and twenty pounds of offal.’

‘Come here.’

She walks around the counter and holds out her arms.

‘Be careful,’ he says as he walks to her, ‘I’m delicate right now.’

They hug, painfully for Ian, and Sally plants a wet kiss full on his mouth.

‘You look good for a dead man.’

‘You look good, period.’

‘Then how come we never hooked up?’

‘You’d kill me, Sally. It’d be like a teddy bear trying to cuddle dynamite.’

She laughs long and loud. ‘Then what can I do for you?’

‘Two things. First, I need a rifled shotgun that’ll shoot deer slugs accurate up to a hundred and fifty yards.’

‘Done.’

‘And second, I need a long-distance rifle.’

‘How long-distance?’

‘I dunno, thousand yards. Fifteen hundred.’

‘Oh.’

‘You got something like that?’

Sally purses her red lips and a smile glimmers behind her eyes. ‘What kind do you want?’

After a few minutes of discussion she decides she’ll lose a DPMS Panther.308. She sets it on the counter, beside a Remington 11–87 with a rifled barrel, and then gets out three boxes of ammunition and stacks them one on top of the other.

‘Are you shooting tonight?’

Ian shakes his head. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘Tonight will require more intimacy than that.’

Sally smiles. ‘Well, then, I wish I could be there.’

‘No,’ Ian says, thinking of his plans for the evening. ‘I don’t think you do.’

Maggie sits at the foot of the dinner table. Across from her, at the head of the table, Henry sits hunched over his plate, fork gripped in his fist. Flint and Naomi sit side by side to her left. Beatrice to her right. They all have pieces of chicken on their plates and mounds of mashed potatoes from which slices of roasted garlic jut and piles of buttery peas. Maggie pokes at the peas with her fork, trying to only get them onto the leftmost prong. One by one she gets them onto the fork, lined up like a string of pearls. Once she has six of them skewered she sucks them off the fork one at a time.

With a mouthful of mashed potatoes Henry says, ‘I gotta tell you guys, we sure do appreciate your hospitality, don’t we, Bee?’

Beatrice nods, but keeps her head down and her eyes on her plate.

‘Not a problem,’ Flint says.

‘Well, it’s damn neighborly of you.’

Flint nods.

‘And this is a real fine meal. Fine meal, ma’am.’

‘Thank you,’ Naomi says, smiling slightly before picking up a glass of Coke with cubes of ice floating in it and taking a drink. The ice clinks against the glass.

‘No,’ Henry says, ‘thank you.’ He picks up a chicken leg and sucks the skin off it. It flaps against his chin, smearing grease on it, before it vanishes into his mouth. Then he takes off a piece of meat and chews.

‘Flint made the rub for the chicken.’

‘Damn fine, Flint,’ Henry says through a mouthful.

‘I saw your tire swing,’ Maggie says.

‘Hush up, Sarah.’

‘Kids are allowed to talk at my dinner table, Henry,’ Flint says.

The two men stare at one another for a long moment, but when Henry says nothing, Flint turns to her and smiles. ‘What was that, Sarah?’

‘I saw your tire swing.’

‘Yeah?’

She nods. ‘Did you. .’ she licks her lips, ‘did it come with the house?’

‘No, we have a six-year-old.’

‘Is he in bed?’

‘Spending the week at his grandparents’.’

‘Oh.’ She goes back to poking at her peas for a moment, and then looks up again. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Samuel.’

‘That’s a nice name.’

‘Thanks,’ Flint says. ‘It’s Naomi’s dad’s name.’

‘Six years old?’ Henry says.

‘Yeah,’ Flint says coldly.

‘Naomi’s a little young to have a six-year-old, ain’t she?’

‘Naomi’s twenty-eight, Henry, not that it’s any of your business.’ He sets his fork down beside his plate. ‘You reckon you guys’ll be leaving right after dinner?’

Henry takes another bite from his chicken leg, chews slowly, swallows. Then he sets it down on his plate and picks up a napkin from his lap and wipes his face off with it and then his hands. He sets the napkin down on his plate.

‘Well, no,’ he says finally. ‘I don’t guess we will be leaving right after dinner.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Why, you fart or something?’

Maggie looks from Henry to Flint, and though neither man has said anything precisely confrontational, and though neither of them has used a tone that suggests anything but pleasantness, she can feel that something is happening: the temperature in the room has changed: the weather’s gone bad. It makes her stomach feel tight and her appetite has vanished. She looks at the two men to see what will happen next while simultaneously dreading it.

Flint sucks at an eye tooth. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I been awful generous with you and your family, Henry.’

‘I know it.’

‘Let me finish.’

Henry extends an arm and bows his head slightly. ‘You may.’

‘I know I may. It’s my goddamn house.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting your panties in a bunch about, Flint. I know it’s your house. Go ahead and say what you gotta say.’

Flints hits the table with the flat of his hand and while Maggie, Beatrice, and Naomi all jump at the sound Henry does not. Flint exhales heavily through his nostrils, closes his eyes for the length of a breath, and then opens them again. He looks at Henry.

‘I been generous with you and your family, Henry,’ he says, ‘but truth is, I just ain’t comfortable with you guys staying the night. You get on the interstate and drive west another fifteen, twenty miles you’ll come across a perfectly nice motel where I’m sure they’ll be happy to put you up. If you leave after dinner you can get there before bedtime, no problem.’

‘Well, if it was just a matter of sleeping quarters that might be okay, but it ain’t just a matter of sleeping quarters. There’s more to it than that.’

‘We’ve been plenty hospitable. Whatever more there is to it ain’t my problem.’

‘Unfortunately, Flint, it is your problem.’ Henry reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a roll, thumbs a round tablet into his mouth, and chews. ‘I’m making it your problem.’ He tongues at a molar.

‘You’re making it my problem?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘You know what,’ Flint says, taking his napkin from his lap and throwing it to the table, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna wait for y’all to finish up. I’m asking you to leave right now.’

‘Now, honey,’ Naomi says.

Flint doesn’t even glance toward Naomi. His eyes stay locked on Henry. ‘I’m asking you to leave,’ he says again.

‘Well, shit,’ Henry says, smiling, ‘you’re feisty.’

When for a moment Henry does nothing Maggie hopes, despite what she knows of him and his temper like a loaded gun, that he will remain calm. He won’t do anything crazy. He’ll stand and walk to the door and call for Maggie and Beatrice. He’ll open the door and they’ll walk through it. They’ll all head out and Flint will slam and lock the door behind them. They’ll get in Henry’s truck and drive away. That could happen. There’s no reason for it to go any other direction.

But as Henry gets to his feet it does go another direction. He grabs a steak knife from the tablecloth where a moment before it lay beside his plate and lunges at Flint.

Maggie slides down her chair and hides beneath the table. She puts her hands over her ears, but that does not block the sound of Naomi’s scream. She closes her eyes, but not before she sees blood splatter to the floor.

‘Well, shit,’ Henry says, smiling, ‘you’re feisty.’

His stomach is a tight knot of hatred, and despite the antacid he just ate he can feel bile burning the back of his throat. He tried to play the smiling fool for this son of a bitch, but the man saw through him, same as the cops did earlier. The cops had already seen past the facade-some doors can’t be closed-but Flint, well, maybe he didn’t try very hard with Flint. There was no reason to, really, not when he knew he’d have to kill him. He thought he’d kill Flint and Naomi while they was sleeping, but it’s come to it a little sooner than that. He needs their vehicle and he’s not leaving without it, and if they’re dead they can’t report it missing.

He grabs the steak knife from the tablecloth and lunges at Flint. The man’s eyes go wide and his mouth becomes a black zero-and that is what comes out of it: nothing and nothing and nothing-but he still manages to get an arm out in front of him to block the attack. Arms and flattened palms, however, aren’t much protection against a stainless steel blade. Henry sticks the knife into the palm once, the serrated blade sawing at the bone of the ring finger’s knuckle, twice, into the meat of the thumb, and a third time, severing a pinky finger that just dangles from a single piece of flesh like a macabre keychain fob. Then he pushes in close and stabs the man in the arm and the shoulder.

But Flint grabs him by the wrist with one hand-Henry can feel the loose pinky brushing against his skin like a ghost-and punches him in the neck with the other, and suddenly Henry can’t breathe.

He staggers backwards, gasping for air, and Flint rushes him. This is a mistake. He overestimates the damage his blow has caused Henry. As Flint rushes him Henry simply turns the knife out and ducks his head to the left as a fist swings past it. Flint rushes onto the blade. Henry jams it into his belly further, till his fist is buried in stomach and the tip of the blade grinds against spine at the back of him, and then yanks upwards as if trying to lift the man by the blade’s handle, and in fact he does momentarily lift him off the ground, until his weight causes him to slide back down it, splitting him open.

When Henry was ten or eleven his family had a cow. One of his chores was to feed her every morning, and it was a chore he took very seriously. Over the course of a year he began to feel that she was his friend. He named her Moo and sometimes after school, if he’d had a particularly bad day, he’d sit on the fence and tell her about it. She would sometimes lick his hand with her fat, coarse tongue. Then one day, as Henry walked up his long and winding dirt driveway, books under his arm, he saw his dad cutting off Moo’s head with a meat saw while Uncle Fred cut slits in the Achilles tendons and slid in a gambrel. They used a winch to hoist Moo into the air. Blood thick and dark and full of bubbles drained from her neck and into the dirt. It ran down the driveway in a stream. As Henry walked up the driveway his dad stuck a blade into the cow’s stomach and dragged it down toward the neck. He had never seen so much blood before in his life. It was frothy and rich as crude oil.

As Flint falls to the floor and blood pours out of him Henry is reminded of that day.

He reaches down and pulls the knife out of the man.

He looks toward Beatrice. She is staring down at her lap and rocking herself gently and saying, ‘This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.’

But it is happening, of course, and it’s happening for Bee.

He looks toward Naomi.

Her face is white and her eyes are wide. She is very pretty, especially when frightened. Dishwater-blond hair, lips full, fine wide hips. It’s a shame, really, what he has to do. But he does have to do it.

She is, apparently, frozen with shock. She has not made a sound since that first scream, nor has she moved. Her mouth is open slightly, and there is a strange twitch at the side of her left eye, but otherwise she is motionless.

‘I guess you know what’s next,’ Henry says. ‘I don’t suppose it’s no consolation, but we’re Christians and we’ll bury you with a prayer.’

A small groan escapes Naomi’s throat.

Then he rushes her.

But something strange happens: halfway there his feet lose contact with the floor. His feet stop while the top half of his body continues forward. He flies through the air, turning midair from a vertical position to a horizontal one. And then he hits, chin first. His teeth clack and he bites the side of his tongue. The steak knife is knocked from his hand.

He glances back over his shoulder with watery eyes and sees Sarah hunched beneath the table, one of her legs still extended.

‘Run,’ she shouts at Naomi. ‘Run and get help! Run before he gets you!’

The words seem to snap the woman out of her paralysis.

‘Oh,’ she says.

And then she turns and runs toward the back door, grabs the knob and pulls. The door doesn’t budge. She looks over her shoulder, eyes alive with fear, unlocks the door, pulls it open, and rushes through it, disappearing into the night.

Henry pushes himself up and backhands Sarah.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

The slap opens a split in her lip, and blood trickles down her chin, but she does not make a sound, nor does she look away. She simply stares at him and bleeds.

He gets to his feet and drags her out from under the table. He raises a booted foot, fully intent on stomping her fucking face into mush. Stomping till she’s unrecognizable. That’ll teach her to pull shit like this. It’ll teach her to fuck with-

‘Henry!’

Beatrice limps around the table and wraps her arms around Sarah and strokes her hair and says, ‘He didn’t mean it, Sarah.’ She looks up at him. ‘Tell her you didn’t mean it, Henry. Tell her you didn’t mean it.’

‘Don’t let her leave the house.’

He turns around, grabs the bloody knife from the floor, and runs out the door after Naomi. If she makes it to a neighbor’s house they won’t be able to use Flint’s pickup truck, and he really doesn’t want to have to go through this shit again with someone else.

He scans the horizon. In the distance a yellow light in a window. And running toward it, Naomi. She falls as she runs, then pulls herself to her feet, and continues on.

Henry runs after her.

Ian sits in darkness. A hatchet rests on his knees. His car is parked behind Donald’s trailer so that, when the man finally arrives in his El Camino, he will not be alerted to Ian’s presence. Ian now simply sits and waits. There was a time, and not long ago, when he would not have been capable of doing what he plans on doing here tonight, if he has to, but that time has gone, a small moment in his past that gets smaller as he moves further from it and into the future.

He thinks of Andy Paulson, of realizing that he was capable of following through on his threat. Capable, yes, but he did not do it. This, he may follow through on. But even knowing what it will make him, he believes the price will be worth paying. He can’t be certain until he has actually paid the price, and held what he purchased in his hand, but he believes it will be.

Car tires crunch on gravel outside. An engine goes silent. A door swings open and then slams shut. Footsteps come nearer, first on gravel and then on the steps outside the door. The doorknob rattles. The front door of the mobile home swings open and a shadow enters.

Ian grabs the hatchet by the handle and gets to his feet. He turns the blunt edge of the hatchet forward and swings it down. It hits the shadow on the side of the head. A soft thunk, like someone tapping a melon to check ripeness.

The shadow collapses to the floor with a dumb grunt.

Ian reaches out to the wall and finds the light switch and flips it. An overhead light comes on. The light is in a ceiling fan. The fan’s blades spin lazily. Ian looks down at Donald. He’s lying unconscious on dirty green carpet, bleeding from a split in the skin just inside the hairline behind the left temple. He smells of cheap beer. Several flattened cardboard boxes he carried in are lying beneath him. Apparently he was planning on packing when he got home, packing and leaving town, most likely. That won’t be happening now.

Ian sets the hatchet down on an end table and gets to work.

He’s sitting in an easy chair watching TV when, thirty minutes later, the first groans escape Donald’s throat. He picks up the remote from the arm of the chair and hits the power button. The sound of a sitcom laugh track is cut off and the screen goes blank as tomorrow. He looks over at Donald. He is naked, hands and feet taped to a wooden chair. His head hangs down, chin resting on his chest. A bit of drool hangs from his mouth and drips upon his hairy belly. His greasy hair hangs down from his head. Blood has dripped from his hairline, run down the side of his face, and begun to dry to brown. He groans a second time, lifts a head he momentarily can’t seem to hold steady, finally does manage to hold it upright, and looks around. His face is twisted with pain and confusion. After a moment, his eyes meet Ian’s.

‘Donald.’

‘What the fuck are you doing h-’

But the last word catches in his throat, the question apparently no longer of concern now that he realizes he can move neither his arms nor his legs. He looks down at his wrists. They are held in place by duct tape. As are his legs. He is still a moment. Then he shakes violently in the chair, trying to pull himself loose. His face purples in concentration and exertion, his hands form fists, his toes curl. He cannot get loose. His body relaxes again and his chest heaves. He swallows and looks at Ian.

‘So what do you want?’ After that display of violence his voice is surprisingly calm.

‘A man after my own heart,’ Ian says. ‘Skip the chit-chat. How about that weather, did you hear what Cora did to an eggplant at Albertsons, John Roberts has been arrested again. I want information.’

‘What?’

‘Information. You know what that means?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘If there is one, I suspect you’ll get there first.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Where’s your brother headed?’

‘What?’

‘Your brother. Henry Dean.’

Ian pushes himself up to his feet, feeling lightheaded but trying not to show it. The pain is tremendous, the pain-killers pumped into him at the hospital finally wearing off. He stands motionless a moment, thinking he may be sick. He isn’t.

Once he’s sure of himself he picks up the hatchet from the end table on which he set it and walks toward Donald. He simply lets it hang from his fist.

Donald looks from the hatchet to Ian.

‘You can’t do anything with that.’

‘No?’

Donald smiles, shaking his head.

‘And why is that?’

‘You’re the police.’

‘I’m just a dispatcher these days.’

‘You still can’t-’

‘There may be consequences, but I can do whatever I want, Donald, because those come later, and right here, right now, tonight, it’s just you and me alone with an axe.’

Donald swallows, the smile gone. ‘I don’t know anything.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘But I don’t know-’

Ian sets the hatchet blade down on Donald’s bare leg. Donald flinches. It must be cold. Ian drags it gently across the pale skin from the inside of his thigh to his knee. It’s not quite sharp enough to draw blood from pressure of its own weight, but it draws a thin pink line across the flesh.

‘Thing is,’ Ian says, ‘what you know and what you don’t know-that’s less important than what I think you know. Less important for you, I mean. You may be telling the truth right now, Donald. It’s possible. But I don’t believe it. And what I believe is what matters. Again, it’s what matters for you. Because I’m going to take you apart one piece at a time until I get the information I want. The information I believe you’re hiding from me in that thick fucking noggin of yours. Do we understand each other?’

Donald licks his lips. They’re dry and chapped. He looks from the hatchet to Ian’s eyes. Ian looks back. He can tell Donald is sizing up the situation, deciding what he will say, and Ian hopes, for Donald’s sake and his own, that the man says the right thing.

Instead what he says is, ‘Maybe I don’t believe you either. Maybe I think all you got is talk, and maybe talk don’t intimidate me.’

‘Questioning my sincerity right now would be a mistake, Donald.’

‘You’re lying. You don’t have the sack to-’

Ian slams the hatchet down into the floor, and lets go of it. It stays there at an angle, held by the wood into which it’s been imbedded.

Ian watches Donald’s face. For a moment he does not seem to realize what’s happened. Then he looks down at the floor. The hatchet’s blade is stuck between Donald’s right foot and his two small toes. The small toes lie on the green carpet looking like grapes that have been hiding under the couch for the last six months, shriveled and ancient, practically yellow raisins. Then the blood begins to flow.

Donald’s breathing gets strange and heavy. He does not scream, but his breathing gets labored and a series of groans escapes him, and he looks at his foot unbelievingly.

‘You can’t do that!’

‘Do what?’

‘You just cut off my fucking toes!’

‘I was just trying for the pinky toe. Hatchet isn’t exactly a precision tool.’

‘Put them back. You can’t fucking do that. You’re the police.’

‘That’s the kind of thinking that’s going to get you into trouble tonight, Donald. You need to understand that I can do whatever I want, and you need to understand that I will.’

‘I don’t. .’

He closes his eyes. He breathes in and out.

Ian watches him, feeling strangely detached from everything that is happening. There have been times when merely seeing an old man struggle down the sidewalk while pushing a walker in front of him has broken his heart: thoughts of the man sitting alone at some cockroach-infested diner eating a three-dollar bowl of soup, the only dinner he can afford on his pension; the pictures of his dead wife that surely litter the small house in which he lives; the house itself in disrepair; the lonesome bed; the going to sleep without knowing if tomorrow will come; the hope that it does not. Nothing more than a liver-spotted hand gripping a walker has broken his heart, but here he is staring down at fear welling in a man’s eyes and he feels nothing but contempt. Contempt and hatred. This man knows where his daughter is and he’s not talking.

Soon he will be.

He leans down, picks up the toes, wraps them individually in torn pieces of paper towel, and sets them in a glass bowl into which he’s broken several ice cube trays. Then he pulls the hatchet from the floor. Blood drips from the blade.

Very soon he will be.

‘Sooner you talk,’ Ian says, ‘sooner you help me get back what I lost, sooner I stop chopping-and you get to the hospital and have a chance of getting back what you lost.’

‘Go fuck yourself,’ Donald says.

‘Have it your way,’ Ian says.

He swings the hatchet.

Ian stands in the bathroom staring at his own reflection in the toothpaste-spotted mirror above the sink. He looks very tired. He looks very sick. He’s having a hard time breathing. He turns around and looks over his shoulder at his back in the mirror. There is a red spot about the size of a dime on his orange button-up shirt. The place where the bullet came out. He tore the stitches while swinging the hatchet. It hurts like hell, especially since whatever they gave him for pain at the hospital is wearing off, but mostly he’s glad he did not tear the catheter from his chest.

He sits on the toilet lid and puts his elbows on his legs and his face in his hands.

He has taken all of Donald’s toes and the man has still not talked. He has to start on the fingers next. But first a moment of peace.

He sits silently and thinks about nothing.

Somewhere a tumbleweed rolls through desert sands.

‘Okay,’ he says after a few minutes, and gets to his feet. He opens the medicine cabinet and looks through the bottles there, knocking several into the sink below before finding some 50-milligram tramadol tablets in an orange prescription bottle. ‘Take one tablet by mouth every four hours, as needed, for pain.’ He thumbs the cap off and pours three or four pills into his mouth. Then turns on the water, brings a palmful to his lips, and swallows. He pockets the bottle and wipes at his chin before heading back out to the living room where Donald waits and bleeds.

‘For all I know he went down to Florida to try to catch a fishing boat to Cuba.’

That’s the sentence that loses Donald the pinky finger on his right hand-the hatchet also cutting halfway through his ring finger. He swings the hatchet down into the arm of the chair, taking off a small chunk of wood along with the finger. The finger drops to the carpet like a dead bird.

Donald groans and clenches his teeth and grimaces with cracked, bloody lips. The groan stretches out, becoming a sob. Tears stream down his face.

Ian picks up the finger, rolls it in paper towel, and sets it among the other digits. The ice is beginning to melt, making a bloody soup in which pieces of Donald float. Ian thinks of going to the fair when he was a kid, of bobbing for apples. His stomach clenches.

Turning back around to Donald he says, ‘Did you try that one on the police, too?’

Donald doesn’t respond. He simply glares at Ian through bloodshot eyes.

‘Do you want to try again?’ Ian says.

‘You’re no better than he is,’ Donald says between labored breaths as tears stream down his face from bloodshot eyes. ‘You’re no better than he is.’

‘Then you know what he is.’

‘He’s my brother.’

‘He’s a piece of shit.’

‘What are you?’

‘I’m a man trying to get his daughter back.’

Donald actually laughs. Taped to a chair, toes hacked off, fingers on his right hand now gone too, naked in a pool of his own blood-he laughs. ‘You think Henry doesn’t have justifications for what he’s done? You’re everything he is.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ve done nothing. I’m just a man protecting his brother.’

‘Then you made your choice too.’

Ian brings the hatchet down on the left arm of the chair, taking off the two middle fingers on Donald’s left hand. Donald clenches his teeth. Blood merely oozes from the wounds. When Ian began this thing there was much more bleeding, but now most of the blood is already on the outside, and what little Donald has left is hesitant to leave him. Each new wound bleeds less than the one before. Donald is pale. Weak and pale. He’s already momentarily lost consciousness once. Ian doesn’t know how much longer the man can hold up. But he’ll find out.

Donald glares up at him, defiant.

‘Tell me where he is and I’ll call an ambulance.’

‘Don’t try to lay what you are on me.’

‘What?’

‘You motherfucker,’ Donald says. ‘You relentless, heartless motherfucker. Don’t you try to lay on me what you are. Saying I made my choice. I didn’t choose for you to come in here with a hatchet. I didn’t choose to be bound to a chair. I didn’t even choose to have Henry for a brother. At least admit what you are. You’re. .’ he stops talking, breathing hard, and his chin drops briefly to his chest before snapping up again, ‘you’re no better than he is. You’re just as willing to. . just as willing to hurt. . I hate. . Fuck you both.’

Donald’s chin drops to his chest again, but just as it drops his head snaps up once more. For a moment his eyes are lost. Then they find focus, and Ian, and Donald glares at him.

‘I’m not the same as your brother,’ Ian says.

‘You’re no different.’

‘My daughter is an innocent. All those little girls were innocents. You’re no innocent. You might try to tell yourself you are, that you never did anything, but we both know different. You know what he is. You probably have always known. But you never stopped him. You could’ve stopped him but you never did. That makes you an accomplice. He stole my daughter, my life, and you knew. You knew and you did nothing. Every day I saw you and you said nothing-for years.’

‘That doesn’t make you right.’

‘I don’t care if I’m right,’ Ian says. ‘I want my daughter back.’

Donald’s eyes flutter and start to roll back in his head, but he manages to hold on to consciousness. Just barely, by all appearances.

‘I gave her books. I even gave her lessons when I could. History, math. I checked on her. To make sure she was okay.’

‘But you didn’t do what you should have.’

‘I did what I could without betraying my brother.’

‘I want her back.’

Silence for a long time, then: ‘Fine.’

‘Fine what?’

‘I’ll tell you. He doesn’t. . he doesn’t deserve to be protected from the consequences of what he. . I’ll tell you where he’s headed, but you have to tell me some-’ He stops here a moment, closing his eyes and swallowing. ‘You have to tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?’

Ian is silent for a long time, in part because he is not certain of the answer. He knows he told himself he would only go this far if he absolutely had to, but he doesn’t know whether or not he was lying.

You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?

He licks his lips, and after a while he nods. ‘Yes,’ he says.