It was close to half an hour before Rhys and Tiffany came out of the motel room. I wondered if he’d called the cops, or Gentry’s parents, or Rosalinda, but when he came and stood at the truck window, I didn’t ask him any of that.

“If anything has happened to them, it’ll be your fault,” he said. “Girls like you, it’s how you operate. Take a nice guy like Gentry and use him. But if something happens to him, you’ll have to live with that.”

“I know.”

He got into Tiffany’s car and they drove away.

Girls like me. I wished I was the kind of girl Rhys thought I was. Girls like me, though, girls actually like me, we weren’t master manipulators. We were garbage fires of failure.

I went back in the motel room and finished packing. After I loaded the bags into Gentry’s truck, I wiped down the room and the keys, and left them on the dresser. Then I stripped the sheets off the beds and bundled them up. The housekeeping cart was parked a couple rooms down, so I carried the sheets over and stuck them in the laundry bag.

The housekeeper came out of the room she was working on and gave me a funny look. She was an Indian lady in a sari and a Justin Bieber shirt. By the time I got in the truck and started it, she’d gone back into the other room.

At the Walmart, I bought what I’d promised Dirk: rubbing alcohol, bandages, and aquarium antibiotics. Plus a case of beer and a frozen lasagna.

Standing in the checkout line, I was behind a woman with two daughters. Like some fantasy version of Mom, LaReigne, and me. I looked at the family-sized lasagna in my cart, and it seemed stupid and sad to me. My family was smaller. Again. Pretty soon maybe a single-serving lasagna would be all I needed.

CHAPTER 45

Alva

   I figured I’d best get rid of that burner phone, but before I could, it gone and rang again. Shot me bolt upright in bed, even though I’d knocked out half a bottle of bourbon trying to get to sleep. My cough was always worse at night. The clock said it was half gone two. I got the phone outta my night table and that no-name Fury said, “What the hell happened? What did you get me into? I thought your people were going to negotiate. Ransom, that’s what you said.”

“That’s what I said.” My heart was hammering in my chest, but my brain was like a mess of cotton.

“I’m hearing there are men dead down there. What did you get me into? What am I supposed to do if folks start asking me questions?”

His voice gone up higher and that, more than anything, shook me. He sounded like Dirk, young and scared. Men dead, and I hadn’t heard nothing from Dirk nor Zhorzha one.

“I didn’t get you into nothing,” I said. “You got your money. I don’t know your name.” He didn’t answer, but he went on breathing heavy in my ear. “If you got any sense, you’ll hide that cash and ditch that phone, just like I’m gonna do with this one.”

“I never talked to you.”

“No, sir.”

“Okay,” he said, but he was on the line breathing til I hung up.

I put my boots and sidearm on before I went out to the shed. I didn’t know too much about cellular phones, but I took a screwdriver and a hammer to it, until I got it separated into a bunch of little electronic parts. I took the whole mess out into the woods and buried it.

By the time I was done it was near four o’clock. I stood out on the porch, listening to an owl down by the creek, thinking how the world had got bigger and shrunk up at the same time.

Didn’t reckon I was likely to get back to sleep, so I gone into the house and put the kettle on, brewed up some coffee. Then I took down my mam’s Bible and done what she always called witching. Stood it up on its spine and let it fall open where it would.

The verse I got come from the Book of Joshua: And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him.

The story of Jericho wasn’t nothing to set my mind at ease, and I done what I always did, gone looking for some kind of comfort out of the Psalms.

Around nine o’clock, I brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and I was drinking that and reading the Bible when Dirk pulled up in the drive. He’d left alone and he come back alone, wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, with blood dried down his left arm.

“What happened to you, boy? And where’s your cousin?” I said.

“The motel. She’s coming later.”

Men dead, that’s what the Fury had said.

“You need to get that arm seen to.”

“Later. I just wanna sleep for a while.” Dirk gone into the front room and a couple minutes later, I heard Patsy Cline on the record player. That was always one of my mam’s favorites. I wondered if he remembered that, or he’d been told enough times he thought he remembered. Family stories were funny that way, how they carried on long after they stopped being facts. When I gone in the front room, he was lying on the sofa with his arm over his eyes. I left him be.

Zhorzha wasn’t too much further behind him, looking tired but not bloody. She come in carrying grocery sacks and a case of beer, like we was set to have a barbecue.

“I guess Dirk told you what happened,” she said.

“Dirk ain’t said ten words to me, but that Fury called me in the middle of the night. Said folks got killed. Truth be told, I ain’t had the stomach to turn on the news for fear of what I might see.”

She wouldn’t look at me. Spent a good ten minutes fussing around lighting the oven and putting a tinfoil pan in there. When she finally come to the table, she put a can of beer in front of me and opened up one for herself.

“I almost got Dirk killed. He got shot. Did you see?” She dug around in another of the grocery sacks and pulled out some first-aid supplies.

“Yep, he’s in there bleeding on your grandmam’s good divan, I reckon.”

“When he wakes up, I’ll clean up his arm,” she said.

“And your man?”

“I left him. His friend who went with us, he was pretty badly hurt, so Gentry stayed.”

“You think them Klansmen are gonna deal kindly with them?”

“He and Dirk took care of them.”

“Sweet Jesus, girl. You gone in there and killed them boys?”

“We didn’t plan to. We tried not to. They shot first. Anyway, I hope they shot first, because otherwise it was Dirk.”

“Well, he ain’t the brightest, but he don’t got a hair trigger, neither. That’s more Dane’s style,” I said.