“Is Gentry with you?” She looked at me, then out at Gentry’s truck, then at Leon again.

“No. I just brought his truck back,” I said.

As soon as I passed the keys to her, I turned around and walked to Julia’s car. I opened the back door and got in. That worked, because Leon jumped in after me. As Julia pulled away, Bernice was standing on the front porch with her cellphone pressed to her ear.

At Mom’s house, I had Julia pull in behind my car. She stared at the disaster in Mom’s front yard, but I pretended like it wasn’t even there. I took out the half ounce of weed and the hundred dollars I’d promised her and passed them over the front seat to her.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem. You know, after all this dies down, I’m sure Lance will be okay with you coming back to the restaurant.”

“That’s okay. I don’t think I’m coming back.”

I walked Leon over to my car and, while I was unlocking the door, I thought about how Gentry and I had stood next to it, and how I’d been a coward or a weakling. If I’d been braver or stronger, when he asked if I wanted to go alone, I would have said “Yes” instead of dragging him with me.

I opened the front passenger door for Leon, and he got in without any fuss. When I drove away, Julia was still parked there, staring at the mess in Mom’s front yard.

I went down Broadway until I came to one of those run-down motels with a sign that said PET FRIENDLY. Leon had been happy enough riding around in the car, but to get him into the motel room, I had to drag him by the collar. He acted like he’d never been inside before. I ordered a pizza, and while I waited for it to be delivered, I put Leon in the tub and washed him with motel soap. He didn’t fight me, but he stood under the running water with his head down, not even looking at me. Once he was toweled off, he ran out to the room and hid between the bed and the wall, like he was worried I had something worse planned for him. After the pizza came, though, he jumped up on the bed without even waiting for me to invite him. I split the pizza with him, right down the middle.

Then I knew why I’d brought Leon with me. Because he needed to be taken care of, and I needed someone to take care of.

CHAPTER 47

Deputy Evangelista

   Three to the morgue, two to the hospital, and two to jail. A pretty typical headcount for a meth deal gone bad, except there was no meth lab. The only thing in the barn was a stolen SUV with half of a new paint job. We found a little weed in the house, but not enough for three men to end up dead over. We weren’t going to be able to question the two injured until they came out of surgery, and the woman wouldn’t say anything except, “I want a lawyer.”

The kid with the sword was an interesting possibility, though. We were thinking PCP at first, because he was wacked out, sitting in the interrogation room, covered in blood, talking to himself a mile a minute.

“I hear thee! I hear thee! What boon is it to me? Thou art as good to me as a bucket of water to a drowning man. Yea, I defied thee. ’Tis on my head. I hear! Yea, I pray thou art right, for if I am to go to hell, I shall not spend eternity in thy company.”

It went on like that for two hours. Zelker and I watched him, thinking eventually he’d wind down. Off and on the whole time, the kid kept clenching his shoulders up around his ears and cracking his neck. He’d do that for ten minutes, and then bang his head on the table. After the fifth or sixth time, I started to worry he was going to give himself a concussion.

Then he started saying, “Nay, it itcheth not,” and a lot of crazy stuff I couldn’t really understand.

“Seriously, what do you think he’s on?” Zelker said.

By then we knew we had those two escaped convicts from Kansas, one dead, and one in the county hospital trying to die. We were working on identifying everybody else, so we decided to take a run at this kid. Fingerprint him, swab his hands for GSR, take a blood sample, see if we could get a statement.

Once we were inside with him, I started with a trade-off.

“You got an itch you need scratched?” I said.

“Nay, it itcheth not,” he said. He was staring at the wall, with his jaw clenched.

“You sure? We could undo those cuffs, if you tell us your name.”

“I am called Gentry Frank.”

“There. Easy enough.” I unlocked the cuffs, planning to give him his right hand free.

“I pray thee, my lord, my left hand,” he said.

So I kept his right hand cuffed to the table. For a second, he rested his left hand flat on the top of his head. Then he brought it down to the back of his neck and started scratching. Ten solid minutes he scratched his neck.

“That can’t be good,” Zelker said, but the kid actually looked more relaxed the longer he scratched. He’d spent two hours shouting at himself and banging his head on the table, but after ten minutes of scratching, he was calm.

“Okay, Gentry Frank. I’m Deputy Evangelista and this is Deputy Zelker. Do you want to tell me what happened tonight?”

He took a deep breath and started in like he was reciting something.

“Sir Edrard and I gone there this night to rescue the lady LaReigne from the knaves that kidnapped her. He armed with his bow, I armed with my sword, we came upon them unawares, but ere we could make away with their captive, they would fight us. We fought and tho Sir Edrard be valiant, he was sore wounded.”

I looked at Zelker like Are you hearing this shit?

“That is one crazy-ass story,” Zelker said.

“’Tis no lie.” Most people tried to sell their lies with eye contact, but the whole time we’d been in with him, Gentry Frank never looked us in the eye. Like he couldn’t.

“Maybe we could try it again from the beginning,” I said. “Only this time in regular English?”

An hour later, it was pretty clear we weren’t going to get that. If he was lying, it wasn’t to protect himself, because he admitted that he’d stabbed two men with the sword we had in evidence. He couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us about how anybody else had ended up dead.

“What about this guy with an arrow in his leg, an arrow in his shoulder, and a bullet in his head?” Zelker slid the picture across the table to Gentry. The look on the kid’s face never changed, but he kept squeezing his right hand into a fist.

“I know not. I was not there when he was slain.”

“What about this guy? Conrad Ligett. Two bullets in him. Were you there when he was slain?” I said.

“Nay. I know not how he was slain, but Barnwell, I slew him, and another man.”