The Killing Vision

FRIDAY, JULY 6

3:23 AM

Joel sat in the dilapidated recliner in the living room, watching the lightning flash outside. An hour ago, the power had gone out, leaving the house in utter darkness. He had awoke in the sudden blackness and fumbled for the battery-powered weather radio in the bedside drawer, and when he was sure there were no tornadoes heading his way, he tried to go back to sleep. But the crashing thunder kept rousing him, and he finally got out of bed and shuffled to the living room to wait out the storm.

Sometimes he wished during one of these big storms that the wind would just suck up this house where he had grown up and everything in it—the furniture, the knick-knacks, the memories. He hated the place. He hated the old life it represented, the way things were before his mother and stepfather got killed. It was as if the house had held on to all the hate and oppression and now leached it back out like some deadly radiation, a force that had weakened him so that he could never get away from it.

Mama and his stepfather Clifton had been dead for five years now. They had been killed when Clifton had pulled in front a train at a crossing in town. The stupid bastard. He had been trying to outrun it, to save a couple of minutes, but he had misjudged the distance. The freight train, hauling seventy-three loaded coal cars, had slammed into the pickup truck and dragged it a mile before it could stop. Mama and Clifton were both dead at the scene.

In a way, it was a relief. The f*cker was dead. He could never hurt anyone anymore.

Clifton Roberts had come into their lives when Joel was three and Wade was seven. Their real father, Paul Coffman, had died a year earlier in a mining accident. Mama seemed to waste no time in finding another man; hell, she knew she needed a man if she and the boys were to survive. She and Clifton dated a few weeks and were married one day on Clifton’s lunch hour. By the time she discovered the monster he really was, he had already adopted the boys and taken control of all their lives. It was too late.

When Joel was ten, Clifton lost his job at the quarry. As time passed with no other job prospects in sight and money becoming tighter, Clifton grew increasingly irritable, increasingly violent. Any cross word or transgression by the boys, no matter how unintentional, resulted in immediate and merciless punishment.

Clifton’s favorite method was surprise. He would come at you without warning, without any indication that you were a target. The first time Joel could remember was when he had spilled his milk at the dinner table. Clifton stood up and slapped Joel so hard that he fell out of his chair.

“Clean that mess up,” Clifton spat. “You know how expensive milk is. We’re barely makin’ it, and you go spill all that.”

With the side of his head stinging in pain, Joel got to his feet and grabbed a dishcloth from the kitchen counter. He sopped at the milk, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Stop that goddamn blubberin’.”

Carefully, Joel wiped up the rest of the milk.

“Now sit down and eat.”

Joel looked at his empty glass. “Can I get some more milk?”

Rage flared in Clifton’s eyes. “Hell, no. You’re gonna have to do without.”

The hatred, the anger in that voice pierced Joel to his very core, and the tears started up again.

Suddenly, Clifton was on his feet, pulling his belt from around his waist. “I said stop that!” The belt came cutting through the air with a whistle, striking the side of Joel’s head. He screamed and fell to the floor. He lay on the hard floor like a slug, his mind spinning toward a circle of black. Mama had not moved an inch, had not uttered a word of protest.

When Clifton found work, the tension over money subsided, but Clifton’s violence remained. Wade and Joel were often whipped with the belt, sometimes so hard that whelps were left on their skin for days.

Joel began to put on weight in his teens; he’d never understood why, since he was active and healthy. In any event, Clifton’s random punishments grew more frequent, more violent. Clifton seemed to hate the sight of him.

Not long after his sixteenth birthday, Joel was heading through the house toward his room when Clifton grabbed his arm. It had been almost a year since he’d discovered his strange ability, and Joel had learned to steel himself against the torrent of sensation, both physical and mental. Most of his encounters were the result of accidentally brushing into someone, catching a fleeting thought like a short blast from a passing radio. This was different.

The sensations rushing through him from Clifton were black and brutal, a wave of hatred so strong it nearly knocked Joel to the floor. A roar flooded his head, a mixture of screams both male and female that morphed into one agonizing wail that was asexual and almost harmonic, terrifying yet strangely beautiful. Images streaked past his vision—blood and naked limbs, Mama’s face twisted in agony. Then, somewhere in the midst of the seizure, a tiny spark of pain ignited and began to grow. It loomed before him, drowning out all his other senses, a pain so intense, so sickening that it penetrated every fiber of his being. And then the words exploded into his head, Clifton’s voice yet not Clifton’s voice but the voice of the devil (YOU FILTHY STINKIN’ PIG F*ckIN’ QUEER BASTARD SHOW YOU HOW FAT QUEERS LIKE IT) and the pain! The pain was excruciating. And then he realized that Clifton was gripping his testicles, crushing his balls in his filthy, nicotine-stained fingers and Joel was screaming and crying but there was no one there. Mama was gone. Wade was gone. They were alone in the house.

And then, miraculously, Clifton let go, leaving Joel to writhe on the floor in pain, clutching his bruised testicles as wave after wave of nausea washed over him. He fought against the urge to vomit. Clifton was looming over him, his voice drawn out and slow as he said, “The next time you play with yourself, I’ll cut the goddamn thing off.” He stomped out of the room, his worn leather workboots scuffing the wood floor.

Joel did not know what to think. It was the one incident he had never spoken to anyone about.

Throughout all of this time, through all of Clifton’s violent and unexpected outbursts, Mama seemed to ignore everything. Joel had hugged her once after he attained his ability and saw that she was deathly afraid of Clifton. She was terrified of what he might do to the boys, but she was more fearful of what he would do to her. He had seen everything—unspeakable acts of perversion in the solace of their bedroom, sudden eruptions of anger and humiliation—all directed at her. He had been simultaneously outraged and sickened. Though at first he couldn’t understand why their mother refused to take up for them, he finally understood. It was all there in her head. She was afraid he would kill her, knew he would kill her if she dared take a stand against him.

He had wondered countless times how different things would have been had their real father not died, if Clifton had never shown up to tear their lives to shreds. But it was pointless to think about that. The past was the past, and there was nothing about it that could be changed.

Now, as the lightning flashed and the thunder grew distant, Joel lit a cigarette and let it smolder in the blackness, dangling from his fingers, his feet drawn up in the chair. He was not surprised that his cheeks were wet with tears. He rarely thought of Clifton without crying.

He sucked on the cigarette and stared at the blackness outside the windows. The rain had stopped, but the lightning continued to flash, brilliant bursts of light that showed the sky to be a whirling, boiling gray mass.

* * *

10:45 AM

“All right, so explain this to me again.”

Scotty swiped a sweaty fan of gray hair off his forehead and laid a computer-printed photograph on top of the clutter on his desk. “This is a microscopic picture of the McElvoy girl’s skin cells. The tissue is damaged. Not in a normal way. This is how cells look after a body has been subjected to extremely cold temperatures. The kind of cells we find when somebody’s frozen to death, after the cells have died and then thawed.”

Halloran shot a glance at Chapman, then looked back at Scotty. “But the temperature hasn’t been below sixty probably since she disappeared.”

“I know.”

Chapman took the picture of the cells from Halloran and studied it. The reddish-pink ovals were ringed with rough brown outlines. “So are you saying that somebody killed this girl, kept her body frozen, and then just dumped her in the river a couple of days ago?”

“So it would seem.”

“For what purpose?”

Scott shrugged. “Who knows?”

Halloran blew out a breath and reached for his cigarettes.

“You know you can’t smoke in here, Mike,” said Scotty.

“Come on,” Halloran said, cramming the pack back into his shirt pocket, “you’re stressing me out here. Don’t you have anything else that might help us?”

Scotty shook his head. “I wish I had more. There’s not even anything under her fingernails. They’ve been scraped. Probably by whoever killed her.”

Chapman leaned forward. “Any prints from where she was strangled?”

“No. Perp wore gloves, apparently. I tried to determine the size of his hands from the bruises, but that was inconclusive.”

“What about DNA?” asked Halloran. “Any saliva? Surely there’s blood or semen.”

“Nothing.” He stopped.

“What?”

Scotty cleared his throat. “She was violated with some object. Something blunt and wooden. There were splinters in the vaginal walls. It was done after she was dead.”

Chapman blew out a sigh. Halloran glanced at him, then stared above Scotty’s head at the anatomical charts on the wall. “Do you think that this guy kept her for a while so he could…” He couldn’t bring himself to say what he was imagining.

“Yes,” Scotty said without hesitation. “That’s exactly what I think.”

Halloran rubbed his dry lips, wanting— needing—a smoke. “Holy Christ.”

* * *

11:35 AM

Marla sat at the kitchen table, staring out the screen door to the back yard, across the overgrown field, to the woods beyond. Before her sat a full, untouched cup of lukewarm coffee. Beside it a small piece of notepaper lay unfolded displaying a penciled phone number. On top of the paper, holding it flat, was Wade’s Smith & Wesson thirty-eight revolver, fully loaded.

She had found the paper accidentally this morning while doing the laundry, routinely checking pockets as she always did. She had pulled out the note and laid it in the stack with the coins and other objects she had found in Wade’s and Derek’s clothes, not really paying attention to it until after she had started the washer and began sorting through the discarded items. There was almost a dollar in change, some wadded gum wrappers, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, Wade’s container of Skoal he was always misplacing, and the note.

She unfolded the note and stared at it for a second. 555-8344 Missy. A girl’s writing. At first, she thought she must be confused, that the note had come from one of Derek’s pockets. But she remembered pulling it from Wade’s work pants. She smoothed it out on top of the dryer. Missy.

At first she was numb, trying to decipher it like it was some secret code. And when she realized it was a phone number, she felt the first sparks of hurt and anger. But not surprise.

She carried the note up to the kitchen and dialed the number, and when a groggy, young female voice answered, Marla said, “Is this Missy?”

“Yeah.”

“Hi, Missy. This is Wade Roberts’s wife.”

The line went dead.

It wasn’t as if this had been the first time. Wade had been cheating on her for years, practically since they had been married. The few times she had confronted him, he had at first denied it, then admitted it. Then flaunted it. Then punished her for it.

At first she thought maybe she was to blame, that if only she were a little more inventive, a little less prudish, a little more willing to give him the things he wanted... And gradually she began to understand that it didn’t matter. No matter how much she did for him, he would want something different, more and more extreme. He would want to push the envelope. That was one of his favorite expressions. “That Dale Earnhardt— he knew how to push the envelope.” Or, “Come on, baby, let’s push the envelope tonight.” Once, when they had been married just a few months, he had pushed the envelope too far, and she had bled for two days. After that, she started to become unavailable. Always sleepy. Or sick to her stomach. Not that she had to pretend to be reviled by him; the thought of his touch was enough to revolt her, to disgust her. Little by little, he asked her for it less often, and by the time she realized what was happening, it was too late. She had pushed him away. Driven him to the sluts and whores he now used to satisfy himself.

They had been married two years when she found the first evidence. She had gone out to the old Buick for the checkbook (she was always leaving it in the glove box), and when she opened the driver door, something peeking from beneath the back seat caught her eye. She pulled it out and stared at it. It was a pair of pink panties with a lacey waistband. A size smaller than her own.

That night, when Wade returned home from work and two-year-old Derek was safely in front of the TV in the other room, she flung the panties onto the dining room table. Wade was nursing his second beer of the evening, and it took him a moment to register what he was seeing in front of him. He stared at them. Took another sip of beer.

“Whose are those?” Marla said, her voice quivering with anger.

He looked at her, his gaze steady. “None of your goddamn business.”

Her breath left her, and she stared at him. “It is my goddamned business. If somebody else is f*cking my husband, I want to know who it is.”

She never saw the fist coming until it connected with her jaw. She was suddenly sitting in the floor, dazed, the room spinning away, blood dripping from her mouth. She held out both hands to steady herself, not believing he had actually punched her. She moved her tongue, not surprised to discover that a couple of her teeth were loose.

He towered above her, his chest heaving. “I said it’s none of your goddamned business.”

Later, when he rolled into bed beside her, he said softly, “I’m sorry. But you hardly ever let me touch you anymore.” She lay there with her back to him, silent. In a few minutes, he was snoring, and she realized she had been holding her body rigid since he had come into the room.

It was not the last time he exploded. Over the years she had learned to stay out of his way, to not provoke him. She had learned how to hide bruises and cuts, how to lie about how clumsy she was and how she kept bumping into things. She had learned how to pretend everything was fine. People were always asking how she was—at church, at the supermarket; she learned how to say, “Fine.” She could even smile when she said it.

There had been a few times when she thought of leaving, when she thought of driving away some day while he was at work, but she knew she could never do that. She couldn’t do that to Derek. As much as she feared Wade, she knew she was the only buffer between his temper and their son, and if she weren’t there to take the blows, Derek would be the only other target. And even though he was a big kid, more than capable of defending himself, she did not want to put him in that position.

And what kind of life could she make on her own? She was a high-school dropout with no marketable skills and no money of her own. What little she had managed to save (socked away for Derek’s college education), the a*shole had blown on that damned Mustang.

She knew she certainly couldn’t go back to her parents; they had made that perfectly clear when she became pregnant. “If you’re gonna lay with a dog, you gotta live with his fleas,” her father had told her.

But she did have a choice. She looked at the gun and took a sip of coffee, not tasting it. She could be ready when he came home. She could be sitting right here at the table, pointing it at him when he came through the back door. She could shoot him right between the eyes and he would never know what had hit him. She could already see the blood and brains sprayed all over the walls and the window. It would be one mess she wouldn’t mind cleaning up.

But she might miss. And if she did… If she missed, God help her. He would kill her. She had no doubt about that. There would be no hope for either her or Derek then.

She rested her head on her hands and wept.

* * *

3:35 PM

Sarah Jo McElvoy’s mother was not doing well today. Not well at all.

She met Halloran and Chapman at the door with red eyes and tousled hair, looking like she hadn’t slept in days and smelling faintly of whiskey. She made no move to let them in, said nothing to them as she looked at them blankly. She had been forty when Sarah Jo had been born, Halloran remembered her telling them, which would make her fifty-four now, but she looked at least seventy this afternoon.

Halloran licked his dry lips. “Mrs. McElvoy?”

“What do you want?”

“I’m Detective Mike Halloran,” he said, holding up his badge. “This is my partner, John Chapman. Remember us?”

She continued to stare at them.

“May we come in and talk with you for a minute?”

She moved aside and they stepped into the dark house.

The living room was dusty and cluttered and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cat urine. Halloran took a seat on a ragged sofa, and Chapman sat tentatively beside him. Mrs. McElvoy slumped into a grimy vinyl recliner opposite them and continued to stare.

Halloran swallowed and took a memo pad from his shirt pocket. She was beginning to unnerve him with her glazed expression. “First of all,” he said, “I just want to let you know how sorry we are for—”

“You caught him yet?”

Halloran looked up at her. “Excuse me?”

“The bastard that killed my little girl. Have you caught him yet?”

Halloran managed a grim sympathetic smile. “Not yet.”

Mrs. McElvoy was shaking her head. “Sumbitch is gonna pay. He’s gonna pay for what he did to Sarah Jo.”

Halloran glanced at Chapman, then leafed through his notepad. “Mrs. McElvoy, when Sarah Jo first disappeared, you told us that you didn’t know anyone who might have taken her. Is that still the case?”

She looked at him squarely. “I don’t know anybody that would have wanted to hurt Sarah Jo.” One tear, fat and round, squeezed from her eye and slid silently down her lined cheek. “She was sweet. Such a sweet girl.”

“What about Sarah Jo’s father? Have you heard anything from him? The last time we talked to you, you said you hadn’t spoken to him. Has any of that changed since…” He started to say “since the body was found,” but decided that was a bit cold; the poor woman was just now coming to grips with the fact that her daughter was officially dead, not just missing. He cleared his throat. “Has he contacted you since Sarah Jo was found?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t heard from the sumbitch in seven years. Don’t expect to now.”

Halloran glanced around the cluttered room. Pictures of Sarah Jo lined a shelf along one wall. One of them—the same photograph that had been repeatedly plastered in shop windows and left to fade on telephone poles the last three months—showed a smiling, fresh-faced girl on the verge of womanhood, her large blue eyes staring into the camera lens into infinity, into the unlucky and damnable fate that awaited her. Chapman was staring at it, too, and Halloran quickly looked back at his notepad.

“Mrs. McElvoy,” said Chapman, “just now you said ‘that bastard.’ Do you think it’s a man?”

She snorted, a wretched, ugly sound. “It’s always a man, ain’t it? Ain’t no woman that would kill a little girl and leave her floatin’ in the river. Ain’t no woman alive would do that.”

Halloran folded up his memo pad and stuffed it back into his pocket, glancing about the house. “Mrs. McElvoy, do you have anyone staying with you? Any family?”

“Nope.”

“Friends?”

“Nope. They’ve come by and stayed for a bit, but I sent them on home. Ain’t nothin’ they can do.”

“Do you want us to send someone over for you? A counselor or anyone?”

She shook her head. “I’ll tell you what I told everybody else. I just want to be left alone now. I want to be by myself. Just let me grieve in private.”

He nodded, then rose from the sofa. Chapman, taking the cue, practically leaped to his feet. “We’ll be in touch,” Halloran told her. “Call us if anything changes.”

He made to give her a reassuring touch on the shoulder as he passed, and she grabbed his arm. She looked up at him with pleading, dazed eyes. “Tell me one thing before you go. Tell me the truth. I want to know. I need to know.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

She swallowed and looked away. “Was…was she raped?”

He saw no reason to keep it from her. “Yes, ma’am, she was. In a manner of speaking. She was violated with an object.”

Mrs. McElvoy, nodded, tears flowing freely down her cheeks now, her face contorted with agony. He patted her shoulder, and Chapman followed him out the door.

Outside, last night’s rain had made the heat more intense, the air heavy. Halloran’s forehead broke into an instant sweat. They reached the sedan, and he was just opening his door when Mrs. McElvoy’s voice surprised him. “She was comin’ home from band practice, you know.”

“Excuse me?”

She stood on the front porch, leaning against one of the peeling posts, her arms crossed over her chest. “The day she disappeared. She had band practice after school. She left the schoolhouse walking. Like she always did.”

Halloran nodded. He remembered writing that in the report himself. “She always walked past the water treatment plant and up by the cemetery, didn’t she?”

Mrs. McElvoy wasn’t listening to him. She was gazing at the sky. “She played clarinet.” She looked at him abruptly. “Did you ever find her clarinet?”

Halloran shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

Without another word, Mrs. McElvoy turned and disappeared into the house.

Halloran blew out a breath. It would be a two-beer night.

* * *

5:22 PM

When Joel dropped him off at home, Wade pulled the pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket, stuck one between his lips, and lit it. It was the first thing he did every afternoon when he got out of the truck, since the company wouldn’t let them smoke in the goddamn thing. Like it was made of gold or something.

He stood for a moment in the front yard, savoring the taste of the nicotine and the humid weight of the afternoon air. Part of him didn’t want to go inside, even though his stomach was growling for dinner. He just didn’t want to look at Marla today, listen to her bitch and complain, see whatever stupid thing she’d done today. He really just did not want to deal with it.

He walked past the house and down to the barn. Inside, he stripped the cover off the Mustang and looked at it. Ran his hands over the hood. He’d wanted one of these for so long, he could hardly believe he now owned one. A muscle car—that’s what it was, plain and simple. Like a body builder without one ounce of fat on him. Pure power.

Marla had sure bitched when he bought the thing. God, how she had bitched. But one pop to the mouth had shut her up.

His plan was to get the Mustang restored in time for Derek’s high school graduation. It sure would be a hell of a present. He could picture it parked out behind the house, all freshly-waxed and shimmering, with a big bow tied around it, and the look in Derek’s eyes when Wade dropped the keys in his hand, knowing how hard they had all worked on it together.

Maybe it would help the kid grow up, help him become more of a man. He sure as shit hoped so. His greatest fear was that Derek would grow up to be a faggot. That was just something he would not be able to live with. Hell, the kid was sixteen and still hadn’t ever had a girlfriend. Derek was a big kid. And good looking, too. He should have been surrounded by girls.

Wade sure as hell didn’t want Derek to turn out like Joel. Now there was a pathetic bastard. Twenty-nine years old, still living by himself, mooning over girls he couldn’t have, eating himself into an early grave. A freewheeling bachelor, able to play the field with as many women as he wanted, yet living alone without even a f*cking dog to keep him company. The poor ugly son-of-a-bitch had never had much luck with women, though, even in high school when he played football. But now that he was older and fatter and losing his hair, well… Wade knew he probably couldn’t get laid unless he paid for it.

Wade had never had a problem getting women, even as a zit-faced teenager. They just seemed to naturally flock to him. He knew he had the charm to make them feel special, to make them feel wanted. Hell, all he had to do was start talking to a woman and she practically melted all over the floor. Just a rare talent, he had decided.

Derek had been born when Wade was seventeen and Marla was sixteen. They were hurriedly married at Shy Flat Church, and then they moved into a mouse-infested trailer in the back yard of Marla’s parents’ house. Derek was born six months later. Wade had settled down for a little while and tried to be content with just one woman. That didn’t last long. Before their first anniversary he was already restless and bored, and before their second he had already slept with three other women. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Marla. He truly did back then. But there were times when what she could give him just wasn’t enough, or didn’t excite him, or couldn’t satisfy him. He needed variety, and Marla just wasn’t capable of providing it. And over the past few years Marla didn’t seem capable of providing anything. They never kissed, barely touched. Sex seemed to disgust her, and now he found fulfillment exclusively outside.

This job with the cable company provided him with ample opportunities to meet women, like some of those college babes lounging around fingering each other in the dorm or bored housewives whose husbands were at work and they were home alone just waiting for the cable guy to come install HBO. Joel was usually with him on installs, but occasionally he had the good fortune to be alone, and more than once he had been shown the kind of gratitude customers didn’t normally give their cable-TV installers. Most times he simply flirted, got a girl’s phone number, promised to call her, that kind of thing.

Like yesterday. Joel was doing some maintenance at the office and Wade was doing an upgrade by himself at one of the apartment houses in town. He had gone around in back of the building to check the service entrance, back beside the pool. There was a girl stretched out on one of the metal chaise lounges beside the blue water, spread out during one of the few intense breaks in the threatening clouds. He had immediately begun to sweat. The fluorescent orange of her bikini was a sharp contrast to her sun-bronzed skin and long dark hair, and the mounds of her breasts splayed out from beneath the edges of her top, her nipples pressing against the material like pointing fingers. She was wearing sunglasses, so it was impossible to see her eyes, but he smiled at her anyway, and when she smiled back, he knew she was watching him as closely as he was watching her.

When he had finished his work, he made his way over to her, leaning against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the pool area. “Hot day,” he said. “Gonna storm later.”

She rolled over and smiled at him. “I love the heat,” she said.

Wade was looking at her breasts, at the minute droplets of perspiration that trickled between them. He licked his lips. “Guess it’s not so bad if you got a pool,” he said. He placed his hands on the top of the railing, knowing she would look at his left one, looking for a wedding band that wouldn’t be there because he never wore one.

“I’m Missy,” she said.

“Wade Roberts.”

“Maybe you could come over and swim sometime. It’s okay if you’re a guest of a tenant.”

He nodded, feeling the bulge of his erection press against the hot metal. “I’d like that.” He looked around, hoping no one could see him practically humping the fence. “This what you do all day? Hang out by the pool?”

She laughed. “Not every day. I’m on vacation this week.”

“Oh.” He was making small talk, using any excuse he could to stand there looking at her glistening skin and the nipples poking against her bikini top. “I had you pegged for a student. Where you work?”

“I work for Dr. Seaver, the pediatrician. You know him?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Don’t have to ask what you do.”

He grinned at her, using that full-toothed smile that always got a woman’s juices flowing. “Hey, can I get your phone number?” He pulled a memo pad and a pencil from his shirt pocket and held them out to her. She took them and scribbled on the paper. 555-8344 Missy. “Great,” he said, tearing off the sheet and folding it into the pocket of his pants. “I’ll give you a call. Take you up on that pool offer.”

“Sounds good,” she said.

By the time he returned to the truck, his zipper was just about bursting open. He drove to a secluded spot in town and took care of himself. It was quick. There might be a no-smoking rule for the company truck, but nothing said he couldn’t jack off in it.

And as he thought about it now, about the orange swimsuit that barely concealed Missy’s golden curves, he felt himself grow stiff again. Ignoring it, he pulled the tarp back over the Mustang and closed up the barn.

He was just crossing the yard toward the house when Derek came flying up the driveway and roared to a halt on his four-wheeler. “You better slow down,” Wade told him. “You’ll end up in orbit.”

Derek grinned at him and hopped off the Yamaha, running a shirtsleeve across his sweaty forehead. “Ready for dinner,” he said.

“Where you been?”

Derek shrugged. “Just toolin’ around. Went through the woods into town, went by Chad’s house to see if he was home.”

“Was he?” Chad was Derek’s best friend—just about his only friend, so far as Wade knew. They hung out together sometimes, went camping out in the woods behind the barn, fishing down at the creek—all the shit boys usually do.

“Nope. His mom said he’d gone off with his dad somewhere.”

Wade grunted as they stepped up on the porch and he opened the back door. “You be careful riding that thing in town. It’s illegal, you know.”

“I didn’t get on the streets,” Derek said. “I went the back way, up through the woods, then through the park right up to his back door.”

“Still,” said Wade, “I don’t want to have to come bail you out of jail.”

“You think Chad could help us with the Mustang?” Derek asked.

“I don’t know,” Wade told him. “I was hopin’ just you and me would work on it. Maybe Joel.”

Derek nodded and slipped into the kitchen. “That’s cool.”

Inside, Marla stood at the stove, frying hamburger patties in an iron skillet. Derek peeked at them, then bounded off toward the living room.

Wade looked at her. “Hey,” he said.

She turned toward him and gave him an empty gaze, then turned back to the skillet. “Hey.”