Austin swore, glancing at the headlights that flashed red and blue in his rearview mirror. Braking, he eased the Charger across the rumble strip and onto the gravelly, weed-choked shoulder. Some of the weeds brushed the window, long dry stalks that seemed to quiver as the red-and-blue strobed over them. The patrol car eased to a stop behind us, and when I glanced back, the headlights blinded me.
My first thought was of Harold ‘Scotty’ Hanshew, the Highway Patrol Officer who, I was pretty sure, had been investigating Belshazzar’s Feast as a headquarter for drug running—and worse. Mertrice Stroup-Ogle insisted that his death had been a cover-up. She claimed that corrupt elements of Wyoming law enforcement had killed Hanshew when he came too close to the truth.
Had it been a night like this, I wondered. They wouldn’t have pulled Hanshew over—they wouldn’t need to. They would arrange a meeting. Maybe a quick conversation, only long enough to pull one car alongside the other and drop the windows. Maybe it had been a friend. Undoubtedly it had been someone Hanshew had trusted. And then they had—
—dragged him for twenty miles behind a car—
—killed him. I swallowed, and my hand tightened around Austin’s wrist. The shape that got out of the car behind us was large, blocking a wedge of the headlights and making me blink again to clear my eyes. Twenty miles, I thought. Twenty miles. How long before he’d been unconscious? How long before he’d been dead?
A flashlight blazed at Austin’s window and tapped against the glass. A hand appeared, thick and callused, and rolled in a motion that was meant to say lower the window. Austin hit the button, and the glass slid down. The flashlight twisted up, shining first across Austin’s face and then into mine.
“Boys, do you know how fast you were going?” The voice was familiar
When the beam of light moved away from my eyes, Sheriff Hatcher leaned into the window frame. At night, with only the spillage from the flashlight to illuminate his face, he looked different. I was used to the red-faced man with thinning hair who was constantly wiping away sweat. This man, though, was nothing more than a pair of deep, dark sockets, with his eyes glinting like frayed wires all the way down in that darkness.
“Seventy,” Austin answered. “Maybe just a little over.”
Sheriff Hatcher was silent for what felt like an eternity. The sparks deep in those dark sockets fixed on Austin. Then, with words so short and deep they might have been grunts, he said, “Eighty-five.”
Before either of us could react, the sheriff leaned inside the car. I had the momentary, horrified impression that he was going to bite Austin or maybe kiss him, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. But instead, the sheriff yanked the keys from the ignition and withdrew from the car.
“Go on and get out. I want to talk for a minute.”
Austin popped his door, but the sheriff nudged it shut and shook his head. All I could see was his outline and those hard glints, like light catching the edge of cut stone, where his eyes were. “Not you.”
It took both of us a moment to realize what the sheriff meant. Austin started shaking his head as I released my death-grip on his wrist.
“I don’t understand, Sheriff. I was driving. Why do you need to talk to him?”
“That’s ok, Austin. Your friend knows, and he’s going to do just as I asked and get out of the car. Isn’t that right?”
“Yeah,” I said, wishing my voice weren’t quite so shaky.
“Then I’ll come too,” Austin said. He opened the door again, and again the sheriff planted his weight against it and forced it closed.
“You stay right where you are. Put some music on. Smile a little. You’re young, you’re out here with your friend,” and put a sneer behind the word, even though I couldn’t see his face in the dark.
“I want to get out of the car.”
“That’s not going to happen, son.” The sheriff whistled, and the passenger door of the patrol car opened. A shadow moved between the cars, blocking the blaze of the headlights, and stopped next to the sheriff.
“Kaden?” Austin said.
Kaden looked at the sheriff. His uncle, I remembered. The sheriff was his uncle.
“Now,” the sheriff said to Kaden. “I’m going to walk a little ways with Vie and have a talk. I’ve asked Austin to stay in his seat. Kaden, I think you’d better make sure your friend doesn’t do anything stupid.” He smiled, and his teeth were a dirty gray, the color of cotton washed too many times. “You want to get the shotgun just in case?” Kaden shook his head, still mute, and the sheriff let out a laugh. “All right, then. You boys will get along just fine.”
“No way,” Austin hissed as I reached for the door. “You said it yourself. He’s part of this, or at least, he could be. Now he wants to take you somewhere I can’t see what’s happening. Vie, just stay here. I’ll call my dad.”
“He’s not going to let you do that,” I whispered back. “Just keep your head on straight. And see what you can get out of Kaden.”
“Vie.” Austin’s voice had tangled in fear and frustration.
“He’s not going to—”
—dragged by a car for twenty miles—
“—do anything. Not with you here. And I might be able to learn something if I can read him.”
“That’s enough fond farewells.” The sheriff rapped on the Charger’s roof with his flashlight. “Unless you two would like to have a drive to my office. We’ve got a couple of nice spots you could stay the night.”
“Watch Kaden,” I said again, kissing Austin on the cheek and bumping the door open as I backed out of the car. Across the Charger’s roof, I cocked my head at the sheriff and said, “Let’s go.”
He motioned me towards the patrol car, and gravel crunched underfoot as I paced the length of the Charger first and then the length of the sheriff’s car. The red-and-blue lights still swept across the high plains, spinning in long cones that grew fainter and fainter until the spot where the light ended and the darkness began became a fuzzy, wool-colored ring. For a wonder, the constant wind had quieted, but the October air hit my lungs like I was trying to swallow an icicle. The sweet exhaust from the cars coated my tongue, and then we had walked past the cars, and the smell of the dust and the dry, brittle sage mixed with a rotting, carrion stench. Something had been killed out here. A pronghorn, maybe, or a mule deer. Hit by a car and left to rot until someone picked up the remains. Jesus, I thought as the scent grew stronger, please let it be a mule deer.
“That’s all right,” the sheriff said. The cars sat at least a hundred yards behind us, cozied up in a pool of light, and it reminded me of a diorama, with everything copied perfectly and miniaturized, like I could pick up a shoe box and give it a shake and those two cars and those swirling lights would bounce and jumble. The thought made me dizzy, and my breath came faster, and with my breath came the smell of something dead and close to me.
Turning off his flashlight, the sheriff flipped it once and caught the handle, holding it now like a blunt weapon. The flashlight was steel. Thick. You could do some serious damage with it. Break somebody’s skull, for example.
I opened my inner sight, and the darkness came alive around me: instead of emptiness, the world became richer, deeper, as though woven of a thousand different shades of grey. The sheriff formed part of this tapestry, one more piece the world intangibly but inextricably connected to everything else. I reached for him, struggling to forge that psychic connection that would allow me to read his thoughts and feelings, to see what had happened in his past. Instead of the feeling of missing, though—a feeling that I had become used to—I felt a barrier.
Something was in my way. Something was stopping me from using my ability. I flailed psychically, and my breathing became shallow with nervousness and my efforts to focus, but I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t reach anything. It was like I had come up against a—
—glowing white door—
—brick wall and couldn’t get past it. I had felt this way before, but only with animals: this peculiar sense of being blind, of being vulnerable, like walking a tightrope with my eyes closed. I couldn’t reach animals with my gift no matter how hard I tried. Now, though, I was feeling it with a person. Was this Mr. Big Empty? Or Makayla? Or had Ginny damaged my ability?
“Something wrong?”
Shivering in the freezing night, I shook my head.
“You sound a little worked up.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s good. That’s really good. I’m glad to hear it.” The sheriff paused. He swung the flashlight once, and it the darkness, it was more the sound of its movement and the rush of air than anything else that told me what he had done. It felt like an experimental swing, as though he were testing how hard and how fast he could wield his improvised weapon. “Vie, when I met you, I told you how I felt about things in this town.”
My shivering had gotten worse, and very little of it had to do with the cold. I was unarmed. I had no access to my ability. If I could touch him, maybe I would have a chance at establishing that connection. If I moved any closer, though, I’d get brained by the flashlight, so I stayed where I was.
“What did I say?”
“You said I should stay out of trouble.”
“It was hot that day,” the sheriff said. “Hot and bright, a real Wyoming summer day. You remember that?”
I nodded.
In the darkness, he might not have seen, but he continued, “Where were we that day?”
We had been at a dumpy church in Vehpese. It had been the day I met Emmett Bradley. “We were searching for Samantha.”
“That’s right. I thought it was a little strange. You told me that you had seen Austin Miller hit her, and you wanted to help with the search. I thought you were new in town, maybe you just wanted to make some friends. Then we found you with Tony Galgano and Luke Witkowski. That was the night Luke Witkowski was killed. You’re the only one who really knows what happened that night. Oh, Tony wrote out his confession, but you and I both know it’s worth less than the ink it’s written in.”
“I told you what happened.” I had lied, of course. I had been lying to the sheriff almost since the day I met him.
“And then a few weeks later, people start getting killed again. Torn apart like a wild dog got at them. Throats slit. Horrible deaths. And one night, I get a call that there’s been a shooting at the Miller’s house. A woman dead after she shot and killed a drifter boy. You remember that boy?”
My half-brother. My insane, damaged half-brother. “I—”
“You told me he was missing, remember? A couple of days before. You wanted me to look for him. You seemed to know all the people who turned up dead. And there you were, the night those two were killed in Austin Miller’s basement. And once again, the only story I get is horseshit.”
I was silent. There wasn’t anything to say—at least, nothing that wouldn’t make things worse.
“This is your chance, son. I won’t give you another.”
“My chance at what?”
“I’ve got a bus ticket in my pocket. You get on that bus, and it will take you to Salt Lake City. That’s far enough that if I want to kick your ass, you’ll be just out of reach. And trust me, son, you want to take this ticket. You want to take it and hop on that Greyhound and you don’t ever want to look back because if you as much as sneeze in this town, I’ll have you wiping your nose with a juvie jumpsuit.”
Peering through the darkness, I tried to meet his eyes, but those crackling glimmers were cold and dead and didn’t acknowledge me. “You’re threatening me.”
The sheriff laughed, and it was so loud that I jumped and my right heel slipped out of my sneaker. “That’s not a threat, Vie. That’s the best deal you could get from a man in my position.” The flashlight swung again in the darkness, so close that the air displaced by its passage brushed my cheek, and I struggled not to flinch away. “You stay here, and there are people that don’t have an inch of kindness that will make sure you’re out of what’s happening. They want what you’ve got, and they won’t give you a bus ticket for it. You might be thinking that this is a civilized town. You might be thinking it’s the twenty-first century. And you’d be right, most days. But what’s coming—well, like I said, they don’t have so much as an inch of kindness, not amongst the lot of them. So whatever they want, you’d best hand it right over, quick as spit.” He paused, and his voice deepened, becoming so low and gravelly that it resonated in the back of my head. “Otherwise, could be a night just like tonight. Could be a man carrying something hard and heavy, and he goes after your face, and what’s left when he’s finished you could sell as strawberry jam.” The flashlight whistled past me once more, and this time I did jump because it clipped my ear. For a moment, the stinging pain was all I could think about, and then it faded into a puffy numbness that would ache later. “And that,” the sheriff said with what sounded like satisfaction, “is the gospel truth. So what do you say, son? Are you ready to see Salt Lake City?”
It might have been a full minute, a full minute of staring into the blackness, smelling the stink of decomposition, with my whole body flooded with endorphins and adrenaline telling me to run or fight. It felt like every hair on my body stood on end for that whole minute, and if there had been a breeze blowing, I think I could have felt the tip of every hair bend in that breeze. Sensory signals clogged my brain as my body responded to the threat at a primal level, taking in as much information as possible to try to survive this threat.
But it wasn’t a threat of the moment. At least, I was fairly sure it wasn’t. If the sheriff had wanted to kill me, he would have done it by now. He would have brought that flashlight down on my head hard enough to—
—make strawberry jam—
—knock me out, and then he could have finished me off. So this was a warning, but what kind? Did Sheriff Hatcher have my best interest at hearts and was only trying to help me get away from trouble? Or was this a final warning before Makayla and her gang resorted to violence? I wasn’t sure; I thought it was slightly more likely the former. Mrs. Troutt had already tried to kill me once, and in spite of Lawayne’s assurances that Makayla and the other Biondi agents were willing to leave me alone, I didn’t think they had any intention of letting me live.
But, on the other hand, maybe scaring me out of town was an easier option. There was less risk of being exposed. So I felt like I still couldn’t decide whether or not the sheriff was acting on his own.
“No, thank you.”
The sheriff flipped the flashlight once, and the smack when it landed in his palm made me take a step back. He clicked a button, and a beam of white light shot into my face. From behind that light, the sheriff made a hesitant, deciding sound like a man looking at birds on a wire and determined to shoot the fattest one. “Well, son, I figure you’re about as stupid as they come.”
“Maybe.”
The sheriff studied me under the light for another moment, and then he trudged back towards the car, leaving me in the dark. I followed at a distance. My ear was starting to hurt again, and I had no intention of being anywhere close to that flashlight.
When I reached the Charger, Kaden’s face was flushed, and his arms were locked across his chest. He didn’t say anything when he saw me, but he let out a breath, and some of the tension ran out of his body.
“Come on,” the sheriff called.
Kaden looked like he wanted to say something, but instead he trotted to the patrol car and got in. A moment later, the sheriff drove away. The blue and red lights whirled one last time and then darkened.
Inside the Charger, Austin gripped with steering wheel that his knuckles popped when he flexed one hand.
“I could have knocked the shit out of him. Kaden, I mean. He likes to act tough, but he’s a pussy.”
I nodded.
Shifting into drive, Austin slammed his foot onto the accelerator. We launched forward, tires squealing as the Charger gripped the pavement, and I rocked back into my seat.
“I could have broken his nose,” Austin continued. His foot dropped more, and the speedometer jumped. The pressure of our acceleration settled into my chest. “I could have kicked his balls into his stomach. I could have beat his head bloody on the Charger’s hood, and you know what? I never would have gotten those fucking dings removed. I would have loved having them there.”
“Slow down,” I said.
“But you know what I did instead, while I watched the sheriff of this stupid hick town drag my boyfriend off into the dark?”
“Slow. Down.”
“I talked. That’s what I did. I talked to that stupid, selfish, spoiled, self-important pussy named Kaden Decosse. That’s all. Maybe the sheriff was pounding your brains into the pavement, but I was ok. I was safe and warm and talking to my asshole buddy Kaden.”
I grabbed his arm, squeezed, and said, “Slow the car down, Austin.”
Grumbling, he eased off the accelerator, and slowly the Charger’s speed dropped.
“He didn’t hurt me,” I said. Then my finger went to my stinging ear, and I added, “Not really. He wanted to talk.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I mean, he gave me a warning. He said get out of town or you’re going to get killed.”
“That seems like a pretty good reason. What more do you want?”
“No, I mean, I don’t know why he warned me. Was he doing it because he knows there’s danger and because he can’t stop it? Or because he’s part of it and he’s giving me a last chance to get away?”
“Does it matter? Never mind, don’t answer that. Of course it matters.” Austin frowned. His knuckles still looked like they were going to split his skin. “Kaden said he was doing a ride along.”
“What?”
“You know, it’s like something kids do when they think they want to be in law enforcement. They ride along with the sheriff or one of the deputies and see what the job is like.”
“So? The sheriff is his uncle.”
“Kaden doesn’t want to be law enforcement. Last year, for his research paper, Kaden wrote twenty-two pages about why weed should be legalized and why the DEA should be disbanded. He got an A on it, of course.”
“Maybe he changed his mind.”
“He was stoned tonight, which doesn’t really fit with the whole ride along story. Anyway, the whole point is moot because Kaden is a terrible liar and I knew he wasn’t telling the truth. So why was he with his uncle? Why lie? And how did they know where we were?”
I blinked. “I just assumed he pulled us over because you were speeding.”
“The sheriff doesn’t ever do stuff like that. Sure, Highway Patrol will get you, but the sheriff doesn’t care. And it was too convenient. We had just left Emmett’s house.”
“And I had just talked to Lawayne,” I said slowly. “Last time the sheriff picked me up was when I was in Lawayne’s Dumpster. Lawayne called the sheriff.”
“That’s twice,” Austin said. “Two reasons to think you might be right about the corruption in the sheriff’s office.”
“Lawayne warned me to stay out of it. I told him I wouldn’t. Maybe he thought he needed to send a message and asked the sheriff to talk to me.”
“Or maybe he told Makayla and the others you weren’t going to stop and it’s time to take you out.”
“I don’t know,” I said, fingering the puffy cartilage of my ear. “Jesus, I don’t ever want to be caught alone with that man again, though. He looks friendly but . . . Jesus.” I paused, unsure of how to raise the next bit, and then I plunged in. “If Kaden is lying, it means he’s part of this too.”
“I know.”
“It means we have to watch him. We can’t trust him.”
“I said I know.”
“Austin, if you—”
“I get it, Vie. I get that he’s a danger, at least potentially. I’m not going to ignore that just because I think he’s cute.”
It was more than that, I wanted to say. Kaden was Austin’s first crush, just as Gage had been mine. There was something strong about that, something that recoded the brain and taught it to pump out all sorts of silly chemicals, and willpower and common sense and even suspicion weren’t enough to fight it. But I didn’t say any of that because it wouldn’t help.
“How do you feel about take-out?” Austin asked, breaking the silence.
“Fine. Why? Don’t feel up to all the stares?”
“Oh fuck that,” Austin said with a snort. “I’ll kiss you in public, eat with you in public, and dance with you in public if you get me drunk enough. No, it’s just that we don’t have time to sit down somewhere.” He waved his phone in my direction. “Becca texted.”
“What does she want?”
“She wants us to pick up an order of lo mein. And then she wants to tell us how we, in her words, screwed the pooch on this from the beginning.”
“That sounds like Becca.”
“Doesn’t it?”