“Yeah. But it doesn’t explain the most important thing . . .”

What the hell she was doing up here in the first place, Jordy thinks. Checking out the seismic geophones. Making sure they actually existed. Why the hell would she do that? If only I didn’t have a good idea. She found something about the fake readings and came up here to find out if we’d actually done any seismic testing at all.

“The drugs aren’t making her talk?”

“Nope. Just zoning her out. I can pull her off and then . . . you know, start up again.”

Start beating her again, is what he means. The longer Lacey’s silence persists, the more Milo’s become convinced something more went down inside that sheriff’s station. Something Henricks didn’t even know about. That’s why he’d insisted on tying up that loose end. Even if the dipshit had quit, he could still have asked for his job back, and in a town this small, maybe the threat of a lawsuit coupled with a call from Jordy’s dad would have been enough to get the tiny department to drop whatever bullshit review that bitch sheriff had threatened Henricks with. But given how quickly this had gone to shit, there’d been no bringing Henricks back in half-baked. Not unless he became a real foot soldier.

“All right,” Jordy finally says, “so let’s review. She comes up here to check out something, we don’t know what, but it’s gotta be the geophones because that’s really all that’s up here—”

“Which is not good at all,” Milo says.

“I’m aware of that. So because she doesn’t know the area, and maybe it’s getting dark, she falls. Hard. Maybe lands in that tree right there, face-first. Then suddenly decides she’s going to blame her injuries on me and walk into the sheriff’s station and tell them I need to be thrown in a cell because I’m beating on her.”

“Which might have been easier than trying to explain her injuries to you.”

“Maybe.”

“Jordy, you didn’t try to bring her in on this, did you? It’s your call, man, but she’s so damn unstable, I just can’t—”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, did she see something? Overhear something?”

Oh, how to answer this question.

The problem, as he figures it, is that almost overnight Lacey went from being a woman who didn’t notice anything to a woman who noticed everything. Sure, he’d told her if she went on the pills again, he’d give her the boot, but he hadn’t meant it. Not really. He’d brought her to Altamira because he was sure she’d fail again. And he liked it when she failed. He’d grown addicted to the sudden absences that let him do whatever he wanted, followed by the miserable apologies and the begging—begging for him. It was always magical, the moment when her need for the pills was replaced by her desperate, frenzied need for him. For his love, his approval. His body. The sex that followed was always explosive. The way she said his name during it, it sounded like a prayer for something she couldn’t go without and the invocation of an avenging angel who frightened her down to her bones.

Then the unexpected happened, right after he set her up in Trailer City.

She actually got sober.

Not in an organized, rehab kind of way. In a way that was messy and sudden and left her frazzled, but also as alert and reactive as a Chihuahua. The isolation had worked in a way he’d never really expected it to. Cut off from her roster of sham doctors, she hadn’t been able to fill any scrips, and little Altamira wasn’t exactly awash in street dealers.

Back in the day, she never would have noticed he’d had his tattoo removed. That’s how out of it she was most weeks. And that’s why he’d made the mistake with the photos.

He was ninety percent sure that was it. She’d caught him deleting all those old photos of them at the beach, the ones where his shoulder was exposed. And she’d gone ballistic in a way she never did when she was using. Not sobby and messy. Focused, angry, throwing things, and with good aim for a change. Accusing him of turning her into a prisoner out here and then trying to erase their past together.

But he can’t tell Milo any of this.

Milo had told him not to use that damn Bible verse to find field recruits. Not to use anything that could be so easily traced back to him. But didn’t Milo get it? You don’t pick the verses from the Good Book that light a fire within your soul; the verses pick you.

Please, God, Jordy prays. Tell me there’s a lesson here that will only make our devotion to you stronger.

“This is too much, too soon, friend,” Milo says. “We don’t even have materials yet, and we’ve only had sit-downs with four field recruits.”

“In four different states, though. That’s a victory.”

“A fraction of the dozen we’re gonna need to make the first wave matter.”

“Still, just don’t . . .”

“Don’t what, Jordy?”

“Don’t discount everything too quick, is what I’m saying.”

“I’m saying whatever this is, we need to nip this in the bud right away.”

“Didn’t we, though?” Jordy gestured in the direction of Henricks’s body.

“We can’t keep her alive forever. There’s no bringing her around to this now.”

“I’m not planning on either.”