Novels

Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

“Keys!” Jill hissed.

I blinked stupidly for one second, and she rattled the handcuffs against the bench. I turned and rolled Batten over, searching through her pockets until I found the ring of keys. I tossed them to her and she snatched them out of the air with her free hand.

“Keys to the truck!” she said as she unlocked herself and launched into motion.

I spun and dug through Aggrieved’s pockets, coming up with a set of keys. I climbed to my feet and scanned the room, looking for the Glock, but couldn’t see it anywhere. With a muttered curse I knelt again and took Batten’s gun from her holster, checking the safety and stuffing it into my waistband. I paused to listen to the silence, searching for any sign of alarm. There was nothing. I figured they’d sent Jill in to be tortured, so some scuffling was to be expected. Chewing Gum or whoever might be listening in the main house wouldn’t think twice about a few shouts, a couple of thuds.

I turned to find Jill returning from the darkness with my father literally in hand—two fingers pinched his ear, the old man stooped low and wincing as he struggled to keep up. He was sweating; the tape hung from one end of his open mouth as he breathed rapidly. I had no more anger for the old man. I’d believed him dead for fifteen years. The man I’d known was dead. The huge, loud presence I remembered was just a shrunken thing, and I couldn’t be mad at this small, sad man.

Aggrieved’s truck was the beat to shit Ford with an extended cab, but it started up with a slick hum that whispered of oil changes and frequent tuneups.

“Just drive,” Jill said from the rear seat, where she sat with Mats. “There’re trucks all over the road.”

I nodded. “You don’t know guys. They know each other’s trucks. It’s like fingerprints,” I said. “This thing’s thirty years old. These guys make small talk about spark plugs, trust me, and they know every inch of each other’s vehicles.”

“Go slow,” she insisted. “You burn rubber, they’ll be on us immediately. And put on the lights. A fucking truck creeping along dark is gonna be suspicious.”

I grimaced, but flicked on the lights and put the truck into gear. “Yes, boss.”

“Dude, if you’d followed the plan and just let me run your life, you wouldn’t be out in Bumfuck, North Dakota kidnapping your own father.” She leaned forward. “Fucking slow down!”

I shook my head. “These assholes are out tearing it up. They’re hunting, excited. Most fun they’ve had in ages. We crawl around we’re gonna be noticed.”

Pills couldn’t be objective about shitkickers, because she was a shitkicker, still. I’d pulled back, I’d had the chance to observe our kind from a distance. Got some objectivity. She was still buried in it.

She chewed her lip and glanced at the old man. I looked at him in the rear-view mirror. He wasn’t doing well. He sat with his mouth open, staring ahead, breathing hard. “You know where you’re going?”

My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I was disoriented; I couldn’t make the road sync with my mental map of Paradise.

“Lights,” Jill whispered.

We were coming up to an intersection, a pair of too-bright headlights approaching from the opposite way. Before I could react, the other truck blasted past us, honking its horn.

The night closed in around us.

“Take a left,” Jill said.

“You sure?”

“Nope.”

I turned left. The houses were all identical. There were no street signs.

“Maddie,” my father croaked from the back seat. “Hey, Maddie. We gotta go back. I gotta get—”

“Shut up,” I muttered, leaning forward.

“Lights,” Jill said.

Another set of headlights—two sets—crept over the rise in the road. I could see at a glance there wasn’t enough room for all three trucks to pass. I gripped the steering wheel and kept my foot on the gas.

“Maddie,” Mats slurred from the backseat. “It was your mother, you know. Your mother wanted a kid. A daughter. You know how she gets.”

I blinked, heart pounding. You know how she gets. I wanted to steer the truck into a pole and turn around to punch him in the face, but I forced myself to watch the road.

As the trucks approached, they flashed their lights. I glanced down, but couldn’t locate the highbeam lever. My eyes raced over the dash and the truck swerved just slightly. I snapped my eyes back to the road as the two trucks roared past us.

Jill whipped her head around, peering out the back window.

“Maddie,” Mats said, his voice thick.

“Shut the fuck up,” I hissed, eyes on the rearview watching the brake lights. I started counting in my head. One, two, three—

One set of brake lights glowed brighter, and then the truck swung around, its headlights coming into view behind us.

Fuck.

“You missed the secret handshake,” Jill said.

The lights settled in behind us and matched our speed. We rolled up to a T-junction, the community wall looming up in front of us. I turned left, figuring I could follow the perimeter road until I found the gate.

The truck behind us followed.

“You see radios?” Jill asked, turning to study Mats, who sat loose-limbed and open-mouthed, looking gray.

“No,” I said. “But they have them, right?”

Jill nodded. “Of course.” She frowned at my father. “Mr. Renik, you okay?”

The older man shook his head. “Maddie,” he said, “Maddie, listen to me.”

“Shut up,” I hissed again. The lights remained precisely three car lengths behind us, and I could imagine the conversation being held, the radio calls going out, trucks maneuvering along the streets of Paradise to block our way.

I pressed my foot down further on the gas and the truck jumped forward smoothly. Our only chance was to get to the gate first. The truck lights behind us faded for a moment, then raced up behind us.

“Maddie, you gotta get me out of here,” Mats said in a shaky voice, breathing hard. “You don’t understand. They’re fucking vampires. I had to get out of town, I had to get away from a … a lot of things. You don’t know what it took to support you and your mother. You don’t know. I did what I had to, and I pissed off a lot of people. I needed a place. I needed someplace to hide out. And these bastards, they held out their hands and said, come on in! Just pay us rent! But they don’t tell you you gotta pay and pay and pay, until you’re bled white, and when you’re whited out they just turn you out and all the fuckin’ sharks who’ve been waitin’ on you are right there. You gotta get me outta here. So we gotta go back.”

He was breathing hard by the time he finished. Behind us, a second set of headlights had appeared.

“Lights!”

I dragged my eyes back to the road ahead, where a pair of bright white lights had appeared. “Fuck,” I muttered. “They’re gonna pin us up. Hang on!”

I jerked the wheel and hit the brakes, taking the truck on a sharp left onto an intersecting road. Jill and Mats were slammed against the side of the cab, then rocketed back as I hit the gas again, tires squealing.

“You know where you’re going?” Jill shouted, shoving Mats away from her. The old man slumped against the narrow rear door.

“No time to be smart! Gotta come at the gate on a straightaway! Brute force it!” I shouted back, watching as two sets of headlights swerved into place behind them. We were out of time. Any moment now they’d find a way to block the exit, and then we were fucked.

I pushed the gas pedal down and the truck began to shake.

“There’s no seatbelts back here!” Jill shouted, sounding delighted at the discovery. “What kind of fucking deathtrap do Midwest shitkickers buy?!”

“Fix or repair daily!” I shouted, feeling crazy, a strange, shaky mania sweeping through me. I leaned forward and scanned the road ahead for a right turn that would take me parallel to the perimeter again. The houses, shrouded in darkness, flashed by like shadows.

“Lights!”

Two more pairs of headlights appeared up ahead. I glanced back at Jill and saw that expression again, that smile, calm in the eye of any storm because the storm was so fucking entertaining.

Do it, Maddie!

“Hang on!”

I turned around, scanned the row of houses to my right, and put the gas pedal to the floor.

“Old man!” Jill shouted, grabbing hold of the fold-down handle on the roof of the car, “might want to hang onto something!”

I killed the headlights and took a deep breath. The trucks raced towards us. I stared into their lights and counted, silently, to myself. When my vision was completely filled with the cold white light, I jerked the wheel to the right and let up on the gas. The truck hit the incline of dead grass and took to the air for a moment, a sudden calm as gravity twisted around itself. When we landed all three of us slammed up and down violently, and the truck fishtailed, sending a plume of dirt and dead grass into the air.

Then it stabilized, and we shot past the two trucks.

I hit the gas again and steered back onto the road, bottoming out with a spray of sparks. The truck handled like a rock, like it was requiring physical effort from me to keep it moving. A moment later I saw a break in the line of houses, a narrow alley. I didn’t think. I knew if we stayed on the roads, eventually enough of the guards arrived to box us in. We had to break out, and it had to be now.

I spun the wheel and the truck bounced as it hit the incline of the front yards. Dirt flying, we sped towards the gap.

“It’s too tight!” Jill shouted.

“No,” I said. I didn’t sound too convinced.

We had inches to spare, sparks flying on each side as we threaded the needle. We smashed through a row of garbage cans, trash shooting into the air and splattering the windshield, and then we were in the backyard, the sudden openness unnerving.

“Holy fuck,” Jill said, leaning forward between the seats. “Are you a fucking wizard?”

I floored it, the truck fishtailed, and then we were bouncing across the yard. The wooden stockade fence separating it from the next block loomed up. We crashed through it with an explosion of noise, a chunk of wood smashing into the windshield and starring it, breaking my view into a million tiny universes. We raced across the second yard towards the opposite alley, scraping along stucco walls until we burst onto the next street, fishtailing again as I swung the truck around.

The entry gate was two blocks away, directly in front of us.

I hit the gas as two guards stepped out of the little guardhouse, pulling handguns from holsters and leveling them at us. As we neared the gate, the sound of gunfire was comically distant and tiny, like little pops. I sensed more than saw headlights approaching, fast, from my left and right, trying to cut us off.

As we smashed through the chain link gate, Jill let out a screech that sounded like pure joy.

I hit the brakes and jerked the wheel, but the gate was trapped under the truck and we went skidding into the tree line trailed by the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire. We hit a tree going sideways, just hard enough to feel a shudder go through the chassis, but the truck’s engine didn’t die. I turned the wheel again and hit the gas, and we jerked forward, fishtailing back up the shoulder and then bouncing onto the blacktop.

Jill twisted around to look behind us. My eyes flashed to the rearview. Two sets of headlights immediately appeared.

“I see them,” I growled. At the intersection I jerked the truck o the left, heading up to the old mine road. I put the gas pedal to the floor and the truck began to shake again, every pothole in the old road sending us into the air and then down again with a bone-rattling impact. When the turn loomed up on our right, I took it at speed, coming within inches of flipping over or smashing into one of the trees. I hit the gas again, a half dozen lights blooming on the dash as the engine began making a curious grinding noise.

When we reached the parking area, I swung the truck to the left and slammed on the brakes. We spun into the dark, empty space, and the engine finally stalled.

We sat in the darkness, listening to the engine tick.

“How long do we wait?” Jill whispered. Then she eased the Glock out of her pocket and held it against her belly.

“If they’re on our ass, we’ll know in a minute,” I whispered back.

We waited.

“Well, if we’re about to die, I guess it’s time for truth talking,” Jill said quietly. “So here goes: Mads Renik, you’re a fucking terrible driver.”

There was a moment of tight silence, and then we burst out laughing. In the back seat, Jill collapsed onto herself, swallowing the laughter with effort. I punched the seat next to me, mouth clamped shut in an effort to control the outburst. Slowly, silence crowded in again. I took a deep breath.

“I guess we lost them.”

Jill nodded. “They assumed we made for the highway,” she said. “Now what?”

I turned the key in the ignition. The starter screeched, and after a few seconds the engine roared back into life, running choppy, the whole truck vibrating. I put it into gear and crept back out onto the road, gingerly adding speed. The old mine road led us back to the narrow local roads, and I made my way to the highway by instinct. The road turned into a winding two-laner framed by towering stalks of corn on either side.

After a few minutes, the engine began to knock and wheeze. The lights on the dash were joined by others. When the truck gave up, it coasted to a stop in almost perfect darkness.

“Shit,” I said.

Jill didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally she said in a small voice, “Maddie.”

I twisted around and looked back at her. We stared at each other in silence, the quiet deep and insulated, the only sound the wind moving through the corn. We might have been the only people in the world, stranded on some far off planet of wind and corn and darkness.

After a moment, I sighed and looked down, then turned to look at Mats. The old man lolled in his seat in a loose, unnatural way, his mouth open, his eyes staring up at the roof of the truck.

He was dead.

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

In the distance, shouts and horns. Only two trucks were left parked outside, the enormous black monster and a beat-to-hell Ford. I took the short drop onto the garage roof and crossed to a dormer with a window that rose up like a mistake. Peering into the window I found a small, empty room set up as a mother-in-law suite with a tiny kitchenette and a small three piece bathroom. It looked dusty and unused.

I tried the window and it lifted with a groaning protest. I climbed into the tiny apartment and paused, listening.

Then I allowed myself to get angry.

I’d spent most of my life tamping that anger down, controlling it, employing every trick I could to pretend it wasn’t always there like a molten core. Now I dived into it. I let my hands clench up into fists and imagined my father a few feet away, behind a few walls, miserable but still alive. For the first time in years I allowed myself to consider how my father—and my mother—had fucked up my life. Purposefully fucked up my life. I’d always known, on some level, that my parents regarded me as an inconvenience, an afterthought. That any tokens of parental concern or responsibility they’d ever offered had been compulsory, performative—to avoid CPS scrutiny, to avoid neighborly concerns, to appear normal.

And when they needed to save their asses, they fled without even leaving me a note. They let me think I was an orphan for 15 years. And when I replayed the moment I’d walked into Mats’ house a few hours ago, I could tell that that it was the first time my father had thought of me in … 15 years.

And the worst of it was that I’d been a great fucking kid. A dream. I went to school. Got good grades. Excelled at sports. Stayed mostly out of trouble. Just sort of moved through my life on autopilot. I made it easy for them. Until they’d ruined my life.

I shook myself. I had to focus. Batten was in the garage. I couldn’t be certain there was no one else in there with her, but I had to take the chance. The longer I left Jill in there the more danger she was in. The longer I was delayed in bringing Mats back, the more danger Elspeth was in. I was the guy who was supposed to keep all the bad stuff outside.

I crossed to the door and opened it, slowly. A narrow staircase led down to the garage. It was mercifully carpeted. Pulling the gun from my pants, I crept down, finger along the barrel. As I neared the bottom where the wall opened up, I crouched down and peered through the balusters.

The garage was largely empty. Plastic sheets had been spread on the floor, and what looked like a weight bench sat in the middle of the space, two pairs of handcuffs hanging from the back. Framed against the open door, Sheriff Batten squatted over a rusted, red metal tool chest, rummaging through the implements within.

I swallowed bile. I’d spent enough time around the hard cases and wannabes at Queenies to know what plastic sheets on the floor usually meant.

I scanned the rest of the garage. The big door was closed. There was a door leading into the main house. I had Batten cold—but I waited.

Take a breath, take your time, Uncle Pal had said in the backyard. You miss every shot you rush.

It was the same at the bar. The assholes, they always rushed. Tried to talk fast to get past me, tried to move fast to get past me. Like it was a game they could win. It was my job to show them there were only degrees of losing. Here, I wanted to move just because moving felt better—felt like I was doing something. But I was outnumbered and in unfamiliar territory. Better to have as many of my enemies in sight before I tipped my hand.

I settled myself, gun ready but finger anywhere but on the trigger. Batten began laying out tools, and I watched in mounting horror as pliers, knives, and what looked like surgical instruments appeared one by one, placed in a precise pattern near the weight bench. You think, after two encounters that ended in threats and violence, that you know someone, and then they turn out to be capable torturers.

Take a breath, I thought. Take your time.

The door opened and Jill and Mats appeared, shoved along by two guards. One I immediately dubbed Clown Hair was tall and painfully skinny, his red hair like a cloud of cotton candy rising off his head. The other was dark-skinned and serious, a natural-born frowner. I’d seen his type before at Queenies: The Perpetually Aggrieved. The Perpetually Aggrieved were always full of complaints, always convinced they were being disrespected.

They shoved Mats, making the old man stumble. Aggrieved took Jill by the shoulders and pushed her roughly to the bench. “Andy says he needs a name.”

“Honey,” Batten said, picking up one end of the handcuffs. “I ever fail to get a name?”

“No ma’am.” Aggrieved said as Batten cuffed one of Jill’s wrists to the bench.

I watched Jill, because I knew she would move.

I felt a familiar excitement, because Jill always moved. She was the one person I knew who’d never frozen up. She believed pretty strongly that when in doubt, the best ting to do was move, to do something, anything. That the element of surprise was the most powerful thing in the world, and the moment your enemies thought you were stuck was exactly the right moment to just do anything. I loved her for it, and as I watched her silently coil up, ready to spring, I wondered how in the world I’d let her drift so much. She was a goddamned force of nature.

As I watched, Jill studied Aggrieved, who had his attention on Batten.

Sensing motion, Aggrieved turned just in time to meet Jill’s fist as she surged forward, knocking Batten backwards and launching herself at the guard. They fell to the floor, the cuffs jangling as the bench followed her, falling down on top of them as she grappled with Aggrieved, both their hands on his handgun.

Clown Hair spun, hand going for his own weapon. I shook off the shock with a surge of electric adrenaline and moved, leaping down the last few stairs. I charged at Clown Hair and hit him with the gun, swinging my arm in a wide arc. The shock of the impact sent a lightning bolt up my arm, the Glock flying. I spun and threw myself at Batten, wrapping my arms around her as she tried to pull her sidearm.

The Sheriff was surprisingly strong. I locked wrists, trapping her arms at her sides. She snapped her head back and tried to tip me over, but I was too heavy.

I thought of Elspeth and closed my eyes. I squeezed tighter until I heard something crack.

Batten tried to howl. She stiffened and thrashed, but all she managed were strangled, choking noises. This was when a lot of amateurs relaxed, gave up. But I knew better. My early days at Queenies, I’d fucked up and gone soft on assholes when they seemed sedated, only to see them spring up with a sudden surge of Asshole Energy, the most destructive force in the universe.

I held on and turned my head. Jill had straddled Aggrieved and was punching him methodically in the face. The bench was still attached to her left arm, so she just pounded at him with her right, her hair hanging down, her breathing heavy and phlegmy. She paused, staring down at him. He was no longer so much aggrieved as unconscious. She turned and looked at me and Batten, who was still struggling and trying to free her arms. With a shake of her head, Jill climbed to her feet and dragged the bench over to us, punching Batten once in the face. The sheriff went limp and I relaxed, breathing hard as she slid to the floor.

The silence was eerie.

“You okay?” Jill asked, sitting on the overturned bench, sweat streaming down her face.

I shrugged. How do you answer that? “You?”

She nodded. “I gotta start some cardio, though.”

I laughed. For a few seconds, it seized me and I couldn’t stop it. I struggled to contain it, to stop the braying, insane giggling my body wanted to do. I looked at Jill and she smiled and looked away.

“Jesus, man, not now,” she said, choking on her own laughter. She glanced back at me and we stared at each other. I wondered at the gulf that had sprung up between us, how huge and insurmountable it had appeared just a few moments ago. Now it was gone and we might have been sixteen again, getting high in the parking lot and plotting to rob some house where we knew the family was on vacation.

Then my father shuffled past us at what I belatedly realized was a run, his hands flopping uselessly behind him as he grunted through the tape on his mouth.

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

13.

“What’s this?”

Uncle Pal holding up the shitty revolver. Standing in my room, holding it like it might explode at any moment. I remembered offering him the blank expression I’d learned from Pills. When in doubt, she always said, act like you’re congenitally retarded and simple concepts confuse and enrage you.

“Come on, then.”

I was shocked that Uncle Pal knew how to handle a gun, but then I remembered that Uncle Pal for all his fancy manners and diplomas on the walls was my father’s brother. Sometimes it seemed like the two men couldn’t be any more different, but there would be these flashes—a turn of phrase, an expression, the way they salted their ice cream or put butter and brown sugar in their coffee—that confirmed their connection. Their similarity.

He’d set up a firing range in the backyard, a bunch of cans on stumps.

“All right,” he’d said, breaking open the revolver and shaking out the bullets. “I’m not going to ask you where you got it, or why. And I’m not going to waste my time telling you not to get another one. I know you’re the son of Mats Renik. So, first things first. This? This piece of shit? This piece of shit is worse than having no gun at all.”

When Uncle Pal produced a gleaming 1911 from his coat pocket, I couldn’t maintain the blank look. I was genuinely amazed, and felt that my uncle had earned it.

“You’re eighteen,” Pal said. “So you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do. But you’re going to learn the right way to handle a weapon, got it?”

Looking back, I wished I’d given Uncle Pal a break a little bit sooner.

####

It had been easy to follow the shitkickers and Jill; they were loud, joking around with each other, proud of their catch as they leered at her and joked about assaulting her. I recognized the type; you ran into them all the time at Queenies. Performers. Everything was a pose, everything was done at maximum volume. Confrontation only made them louder. The best thing to do with the Performers was to egg them on, keep turning up the volume for them until they were shouting themselves hoarse.

I could see Jill folding in on herself, becoming denser, the pressure building. I thought the first asshole to touch her was going to get a big surprise.

They pushed her and Mats into a house four doors down. Dozens of trucks were parked haphazardly out in the yard, as if this was the world’s worst house party. Most of them were rusting old behemoths, but a few were newer. One was enormous, a brand new commercial pickup, jet black with tinted windows. It loomed like a tank over the rest of them.

I followed, crouch-walking on the roofs, the wind pushing through me and making me shiver. I couldn’t see any difference between this particular house and the others. I squatted for a moment. I could hear voices. Turning around, I saw a square of light in the middle of the roof—a skylight, cranked open. I walked over to it and lay down on my belly. I could see down into the living room.

Jill walked in, proud. I knew she could feel them leering at her, and I knew she wanted to hug herself, make herself small, less of a target. But she wouldn’t. That wasn’t the Pilowsky Way. Instead, she kept her head up and walked easy, as if a pleasant ramble with the surprisingly not dead Mr. Reniks and a dozen armed shitkickers was exactly what she’d had planned this evening.

The house reminded me of every shared house I’d ever lived in. It smelled like old Chinese food, body odor, and piss in equal parts, and looked like it had the vaguely sticky, greasy surfaces of a place where a lot of people touched everything and never cleaned or washed their hands.

The living room was already crowded when they arrived, the shitkicking guard staff all wild-eyed and excited, grinning and making jokes, carrying their rifles and shotguns like their dicks. I had the impression Paradise was usually a pretty sleepy job. A lot of aging crooks paying to retire in peace, their many sins and legions of enemies held at bay outside the walls.

Sheriff Batten was there, looking tired and angry, her uniform sloppy, her eyes red. She looked at Jill and shook her head, then turned back to a tall guy with slicked-back hair and a leather jacket, chewing a wad of pink gum with an enthusiasm that was kind of terrifying. He was middle-aged, the sort who’d once been pretty fresh-looking but was now kind of pickled. He’d been handsome—was still handsome, really—but there was a deep-lined roughness to him now.

I immediately knew the enormous black truck outside was his. He was exactly the type to feel the need for an enormous black truck.

He kept snapping his gum. It was weird—the gum made him. Him chewing away like a little kid did more to sell him as a tough guy than all the fucking posturing going on around him. When Chewing Gum turned to look at Jill, following Batten’s gesture, he smiled and winked, mouth working. I knew Jill Pilowsky better than anyone. The expression on her face told me that Chewing Gum could probably get it. And pretty easily.

Him, I worried about. Batten, too, I thought. The rest of them looked like the same old assholes who hung around Queenies, who ran with the crews out East. Wannabes. Tough guys. Shitkickers living in trailers and spending all their money on beer and meth and telling themselves they were connected because they had jobs as glorified security guards.

For a few seconds the room buzzed with excited conversation. Then Chewing Gum turned away from Batten with a friendly nod and looked around, snapping his gum.

“Y’all happy?”

He didn’t shout, but his voice carried, and there was something in its tone. The room fell quiet in about two seconds, and Chewing Gum looked around, his expression bemused.

“Y’all proud? Of the job you’ve done?” He inquired. It was a challenge, and I could see at a glance that no one was going to step up and take it. Chewing Gun nodded, holding up three fingers on his right hand. “Three.”

The shitkickers waited a beat, then began looking around in confusion.

“The good Sheriff says there were three,” Chewing Gum said, smiling as he chewed. “Y’all are in here giving out handjob participation trophies, and your job is two-thirds done. So what the fuck are you doing in here?”

There was a perceptible reduction in the levels of testosterone and exuberance in the room. I watched Chewing Gum work. He wasn’t a big guy. Not scrawny, but not big. You could tell he had a gun in a holster under his jacket, but I got the vibe that it hadn’t come out of that holster except to be cleaned and maintained in a long time. His hair and the jacket indicated a man who cared about what he looked like, about his brand, but he wore both with such comfort and confidence I wasn’t mad about it. This guy, I decided, was connected. This was management.

After a second, Chewing Gum pursed his lips and looked down at his boots, which were sturdy biker boots that were also, I thought, a choice, but one that he somehow managed to pull off. “I’m gonna look up in five seconds,” he said. “Anyone still standing here with their dick in their hands is gonna have their card pulled. There’s one more out there, or on the run. Get out there and drag their ass back.”

The room exploded into activity as the guards hustled out, all of them wearing expressions I was comfortable interpreting as fucking terrified. When the crowd was gone, Six people remained. Chewing Gum and Batten, Mats Renik and Jill, and two other guards who looked like they’d recently checked their pay grade and were unhappy with the results of their investigation. Very fe wpeople enjoyed being reminded of their true position in life.

“Shoulda taken my advice,” Batten said to Jill. She looked tired and disheveled, her uniform shirt unbuttoned, her face puffy. “Could have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

Chewing Gum turned to her. “Bats, do me a favor and get the garage in order in case we need to kick this into a higher gear.”

Batten nodded, staring at Jill. “Sure,” she said. She turned and walked towards what would be the kitchen if the house had the same layout as my father’s.

Chewing Gum looked up at Jill, then gestured at the broken-down old couch. “You two, have a seat. Let’s have a chat.”

They sat. Good girl, I thought. Know your audience. Read the room. Chewing Gum seemed cheerful again, smiling as he sat down in the overstuffed chair across from them, leaning forward and steepling his hands.

“Now what,” he said cheerfully, “am I gonna do about you?”

Mats leaned forward, trying to speak through the tape. Chewing Gum held up a hand.

“Not you, for fuck’s sake. You we got squared away. You’re three months back on your rent and you were gonna get the eviction notice soon anyway. This just accelerates that a little.” He glanced at Jill. “No, I mean you. What’s the story? Why are you here helping Old Man Winter here scam out? Daughter?”

She made a face. “The fuck.”

I suppressed a sudden, deranged laugh.

Chewing Gum smiled. “Well, I know it ain’t money, ?cause Old Man Winter ain’t got none. So why are you risking life and limb to spring him?” He leaned back and pointed at her. “Unless he’s got money?”

A chill went through me. The last thing we needed was for an actual professional to start thinking there was fucking dollars involved. That kind of energy could scale up fast, and we needed to keep this local. But then, it would be just like Mats to have something stashed away. An emergency fund, something he could run with. Something he would deny until the moment came.

Jill sneered. “I look like someone does shit for money?”

Chewing Gum’s smile was bright and charming. He was a guy who never doubted himself. He might admit fault later, but he never doubted in the moment. “Lady, you look like your whole life is doing shit for money.” He snapped his gum. “Let me tell you something. Me, I’m an accountant. I count things, and I tell people higher up the food chain how many there are, if there’s too many, not enough. That’s what I do, because this is a business. That’s all it is. Old Man Winter here, he made a deal. Maybe it was a bad deal.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He made the deal. I’m just here to hold him to it. That’s fair.”

Jill nodded. “You and two dozen shitkickers.”

Chewing Gum laughed. He pointed at himself. “Like I said, a business, an accountant.” He smirked. “These guys, they think they’re tough because they carry a rifle, get to swing a dick around here.” He shrugged. “But they jump when I say jump. That’s because tough is a tactic. Power is a strategy. Trust me when I say this: I’m the person you need to worry about, okay sis?” He looked away, rubbing his chin, then looked back at her sideways. “I got just one question. You here on behalf of Abban Spillaine?”

Jill kept her face blank. She reached down and toyed with a piece of duct tape repairing a tear in the couch.

He nodded, shifting his weight. “Yeah, you see, I’m thinking maybe you are. Because, first of all, Abban and that dopey kid of his are just the right kind of old-school stupid to do it this way. And just the right kind of timeless greedy to do this the wrong way. So: You wanna buy him out?”

Jill blinked. “What?”

What? I echoed in my head.

Chewing Gum shrugged. “Like I said—an accountant, a business. Old Man Winter is in arrears, which means we take the hold off the buttons that have been out on him for the last fifteen years. He’s out, and we don’t owe him any protection any more. Normally, we’d just dump his ass outside, let the fates take him by the hand. But, shit, you’re here. If you’re bein’ staked by the Spillaines, take this back to them. Make a call. Get me a number. I’ll see if it’s enough to get you premium access to his bony old ass. I’ll hand him over to you and you do whatever you want with him.” He clapped his hands together softly. “What do you say? A fuckin’ bargain. Everybody wins.”

I admired Chewing Gum’s good cheer. He seemed like good company. I marveled at Merlin Spillaine’s incompetence. It sounded like one phone call would have spared us all the fucking trouble.

“Bonus,” he said, lifting his eyebrows as if this was a sudden, startling thought. “You buy out Old Man Winter’s rent, we stop looking for your third wheel. You walk away. I guarantee it.”

I wondered if he was being serious, or if he was just probing, seeing what her reaction was. If we had the money to buy him out, we would have. But then I didn’t understand all the rules of this place.

Jill shook her head. “No deal,” she said. “I came here to rob the place. I’ve never met this old bastard before in my life. I’m in his place, picking through the trash and shit everywhere, and this disgusting asshole comes tottering out and starts chasing me.” She shrugged. “I figure he wanted to fuck me, right? Seeing as any guy over the age of fifty always seems to think he’s just my type—and the older they are, the fucking worse it gets—so I’m busy checking to see if his pants are on—because pants off is kind of their signature move, these assholes, right?”

Chewing Gum smiled, eyes shining like this was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

She shrugged. “As if the sight of their shriveled little weiner is going to just drive me mad with lust—and so I don’t even notice he’s tied up and gagged until he’s following me out the door and across the goddamn yard.”

I smiled. Jill was a fucking gem.

Chewing Gum seemed to agree with me. His smile kept widening as she spoke. When she finished he blew a big pink bubble and then collapsed it with his teeth, chuckling. He looked at his hands, studying his cuticles. “All right.” He looked up over her shoulder. “Take ?em both to the garage, tell Batts to find out who we need to blame for this little clusterfuck.” He winked at Jill. “And tell her to be thorough.”

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12

“Maddie,” Jill said slowly, reaching out one hand. “Let’s not—”

I didn’t hear her, not really. Everything had gone still and muted. I surged forward and leaped onto my father. I took hold of Mats’ shirt and lifted him up out of the recliner. For a moment, I stood there, trembling, breathing loudly through my nose while my father just stared down at me in shock.

The feel of the old man—how light he was, how frail and insubstantial—knocked the rage out of me. This wasn’t the man I remembered. The Mats Renik I remembered filled rooms. His booming voice was a constant source of jokes, insults, and provocations. He had been in constant motion, and he’d been strong. I remembered how strong my father was—his thin arms wiry, all tendon and willpower.

This was a shriveled, grayed remnant, and I couldn’t be furious with it.

I let Mats drop back into the chair. “You’re alive,” I managed to choke out.

“You call it that,” Mats croaked. He stared up at me. “Look at you,” he said with a faint sneer that was familiar and terrible. “All grown up.”

Jill bent down and retrieved the duct tape. “We don’t have time for this, Maddie. We got to go.”

Mats glanced at her. “Who the hell are you?”

I surged forward again, lifting him up out of the chair and spinning him so that he faced me. Jill stepped forward and slipped two pairs of zip ties onto the old man’s wrists. “She’s the person who saved my life when you skipped out on me,” I hissed. But then the rage leaked out of me again, just as suddenly as it had come. He was so small.

“So shut up and do everything she says,” I muttered, feeling exhausted.

Mats stood for a moment studying me. Then he relaxed, grinning. “All right, all right,” he said. “Pleased to meet ya, girlie. Don’t mean to be rude. Things been a bit tense around here—but you are both a sight for sore eyes. What’s the plan? Mexico? I got some leads there. Been laying some groundwork.” He looked at me, face darkening for a moment. “But thanks to your Ma, I’ve been workin’ with limited resources while they prepare the fucking firing squad. Listen, I gotta go upstairs and get somethin’”

Liùsaidh. Tall, loud, beautiful. My memories of her were dominated by moments when she walked into a room and everything paused a moment. As a kid I hadn’t quite understood, but looking back I knew it was all the men in the room pausing to look at her, and all the women in the room pausing to hate her. At home, it had been one infinite, endless fight—a spitting, acidic war.

I nodded, understanding. “She bailed on you.”

Of course she had. Liùsaidh’s main priority had always been Liùsaidh.

Mats nodded. “And Lucy took just about every red cent I had,” he said heatedly. “This ain’t a fucking charity, Maddie. We had heat on us—the fucking Spillaines. Her idea to rob ?em blind, and it worked, Maddie—oh, it was glorious!” He chortled. “We took those suckers for a haul. How I wished I coulda told you all about it, but we fucked up and got fingered. Her fucking idea, we get here, she hates the place. Hates the house, hates being cooped up, hates me.”

Jill flashed me a look and tapped her wrist, but I couldn’t stop himself. “She robbed you,” I said wonderingly. A weird sort of dark glee flowed into me. My grifting mother convinced Mats to rob the Spillaines, then to pay her way into life insurance in the form of Paradise. And as soon as the heat had died down, she robbed him blind and left him for dead. This was what I’d missed over the last fifteen years. I was lucky.

“She fucked her way out of here like usual,” Mats said, voice dripping with anger. “Took almost every red cent, boned a guard until his brain melted and he got her out. She probably strangled the poor sap fifteen minutes down the road, who the fuck knows. I been scraping by on fumes, Maddie. I’m almost busted, and around here if you don’t pay your rent they hand you over.” He looked at me. “You get me? I don’t pay my rent, I’m a dead man. You’re saving my life, son.”

The word son hit me and I caught my breath. My hands clenched.

“I just gotta go up—”

“We ain’t saving your life, old man,” Jill said, snapping off a length of duct tape. “We’re spending it.”

She whipped the tape over his head and wrapped it around his mouth. Mats’ eyes bugged out and he tried to shout through the thick tape, staggering back from me. Jill danced back and leaned forward, wrapping a second line of tape around his head.

“We got fifteen minutes,” she said, looking at me. My father’s breathing was loud and irregular through his nose. “We got to go.”

I nodded. I spun Mats around and gave him a push towards the backyard. “Move.”

Mats continued to moan and howl through the tape, and I had to shove him every few feet to keep him moving. I kept trying to reconcile this thin, gray ghost with the loud, braying man I remembered. Son. He couldn’t remember my father ever calling me son. Kid, pal, buddy, fucking piece of trash, numbnuts—those were the endearments I remembered from my childhood, oscillating between queasy flattery as if I was a lazy employee or necessary colleague and outright abuse and disdain.

Son. The word echoed in my head and blotted out my thoughts. It made me angry.

At the sidewalk, Mats stopped and planted his feet, his muffled voice hoarse as he tried to force it through the tape.

I looked around. Paradise remained silent as a tomb, the streets abandoned. The windows facing us were all either dark or covered up, the light behind them weak and filtered. No way to live. I did the math as we walked, realizing that if Merlin Spillaine had waited just a few more weeks, Mats Renik would have lost his lease in Paradise and been up for grabs, and none of this would have been necessary. That was most criminals, I thought. They were mostly not very smart. Twice the trouble and danger for half the payout—Merlin Spillaine wanted to show how dangerous he was, how powerful his family remained, and didn’t care who got hurt or killed as long as he managed it.

“Come on,” I hissed, grabbing my father’s arm.

Mats tried to pull away, but Jill shoved him from behind and he stumbled into the street. A second later, a high-pitched alarm sounded from inside the house.

Jill and I looked at each other.

“Fuck,” Jill snapped, stepping over to the old man and leaning down. She hiked up one pant leg, revealing a small black box strapped to his ankle. She looked over at Mads. “Fucking invisible gate. Guess he’s a flight risk.”

Noiselessly, all of the street lamps suddenly flared into bright light. A siren began wailing.

“Move!” Jill shouted, grabbing Mats by the shoulder and shoving him into motion.

We ran down the still-deserted street, dragging and pushing Mats between us. The old man staggered and breathed unsteadily through his nose, sweating and groaning. When we turned the corner and had the wall in view, we staggered to a halt.

“Fuck me,” Jill hissed. “We are officially pear-shaped, in case there was doubt.”

A truck was parked in the street, headlights illuminating the ladder and blanket where we’d climbed over. Three men dressed in jeans and T-shirts, each carrying a pump-action rifle, stood in the grass gesturing. One was talking into a phone, looking around.

“Back!” I hissed, leading my father into the shadows of the nearest house. We knelt down in the dead grass, each of us with a hand on Mats’ shoulders. A second later another truck roared past, two armed guards in the bed hanging on for dear life.

“The yards,” I whispered. “Stay off the roads.”

By the time we got to the fence in the back, Mats was struggling to keep up. The old man kept falling, letting out piteous whines whenever he did so, his breathing ragged, his nose running, snot all over the tape. I considered removing it, but I knew I couldn’t trust my father—we didn’t know all the details of this place, of his deal with the Outfit, all the moving parts. If Mats screamed for help we’d be done for.

We lifted Mats over the low fence between the yards, the old man grabbing ineffectually at us with his hands, then dragged him into the dark, dead expanse behind the next house over. We cut directly across the dark yard. The siren was muted by distance, but I could hear more trucks on the road, and now there were shouts as Paradise came alive, disgorging a hidden population into its desolate, empty streets. Then, distant, police sirens—Sheriff Batten bringing her badge to the party.

I thought of Elspeth and Carolina. Whatever it took, I was going to bring my father back to trade for them.

We pressed ourselves against the stucco wall of the house, breathing hard. I held onto my father and looked at Jill, who gestured up and mimed climbing. The rooftops, she meant. I looked up, considering. There were two choices: climb up and try to make our way to the front gate, wait for a moment when we might make a run for it, or hold up inside an empty house. The place looked rotten with them. If we could hide out long enough, the Outfit’s guards might decide we’d slipped off and move the search. Or begin a door-to-door that would eventually drag us out.

Suddenly, there were lights and voices at the other end of the yard.

That made our decision easy. I nodded back at Jill, pointing up. She took hold of Mats, and I turned to examine the house. A few feet away a rotting trellis crawled up the rear wall of the garage. It looked about as strong as Papier-mâché, but I threw myself up against it and began climbing, the gun digging into the small of my back. Every other slat broke free, but I kept climbing even as it disintegrated beneath me. When the lip of the roof—cracked, ruined rubber and tar—came into view, I threw one arm up and over, hauling my body up by sheer strength.

I spun around and leaned down, extending an arm. As I did so, shouts erupted from below as a dozen men and women, heavily armed with rifles and shotguns and handguns, converged on the house and formed a semicircle around Jill and Mats.

Jill glanced up at the roof and our eyes locked. As they crowded in around her, she shook her head slightly. Stay, she was saying. Hang back.

I watched as they spun her and Mats around, disarming her and making no move to remove the tape or the ties from the old man. None of them looked up.

“Jesus, Renik,” one of the guards said, giving the old man a shove. “This was your fuckin’ escape plan?”

The rest laughed. Another one said, “A man, a van, and a plan!”

They laughed again.

“Take ?em to the House,” the first one said. “Bats and Andy will want to have a chat about the rent.”

I watched as they shoved Jill into motion. She didn’t glance back, which made it worse to watch. I sat with hands clenched, hidden up above. She knew I was there. Knew I would follow. Knew she could trust me.

I imagined Ellie and forced myself to take a deep breath and hang back. To think. To make a plan. To burn Paradise to the ground if I had to.

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11.

The drive out to Paradise was dark and quiet. Jill drove with the headlights and radio off, following the prompts from her phone. I sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead and trying to imagine what my father looked like now. I still had some old photos here and there, but I couldn’t quite picture him anymore—or, more accurately, I could picture parts of him. The smile, crooked and charming, the one snaggle tooth always exposed on the left. His fingers, long and dexterous, capable of concealing playing cards and coins. His nose, because as a little kid I’d been able to look straight up and be shocked and horrified at the sheer amount of bristling nose hair.

But it wouldn’t come together into a complete person. And I couldn’t even begin to age him up by fifteen years. I thought it wasn’t impossible that my father might walk past me and I wouldn’t even notice.

My phone buzzed, a new text from Lisa: What up doc? You OK?

Fine, I typed back. Taking care of some family business. How’s the 293?

Good. Marcus called 911 a dozen times yesterday. Cops came once, told us we’re blacklisted.

I smiled. That’s my boy.

Carrie and Ellie OK?

I hesitated a moment. Fine. Visiting a relative.

You home soon? This whole place falls apart without you. And you know you got friends here. We’re all worried.

Soon.

Kinda scary. The 293 is all alone here, no one else around. Wish our Bouncer was back.

I didn’t respond, and pocketed the phone. I loved that building. It wasn’t the shitty old apartments, the permanent smell of curry or something in the halls, the suffocating heat in the summer and the frigid chill in the winter. It was the people. My neighbors had become a family. I felt responsible for them; this was the longest I’d been away from home in years, and it weighed on me.

I let my mind wander. Sometimes at the 293 I woke up worried. I would lay in bed for a few hours and stare at the pipes snaking along the ceiling, and then it was time for the rounds, the endless list of repairs and requests, complaints and chit chat the other tenants needed.

Lisa, her apartment wallpapered with police department recruitment posters, shooting range targets, and photos of her uncles and cousins in uniform, needed her toilet snaked regularly. I had no idea what that woman put down her toilet, and I didn’t want to know. The Bekvalacs, always pushing pršunates on me, had a faulty thermocoupler on their gas-on-gas heat and it needed constant adjustment. Mrs. Pino, dark bags under her eyes, worked double shifts down at Carepoint changing colostomy bags and sometimes just needed someone to sit with Marcus and play games with him, stop him from filling the tub until it overflowed. Kid loved doing that for some fucking reason. Or Mrs. Cortês, eighty-six and still making her own coffee, just needed checking on because she once left the burner on her stove on for three days straight.

Or Ivan, who shaved his head every day and sometimes played Descendents records way too loud, was constantly re-arranging his son’s part-time bedroom, trying to win invisible divorce points with the ideal mystical arrangement of Ikea furniture.

Or the Quinones family, who had to communicate through their seven-year old daughter Loki because she was the only one who spoke English, and had a kitchen faucet that leaked unless the washers were replaced regularly.

Or Tony Butageri, seventy years old and sleeping off six decades of work on his hands and knees as a plumber. He’d apparently made a personal oath to never, ever do any plumbing work again.

They were a constant pain in my ass, and I missed them all. Coming home every night, walking out every afternoon, there was always someone on the front steps, and they always smiled, always asked me how I was doing, always thanked me for everything. I felt incredibly lonely, moving through the darkness in fucking South Dakota.

We found the access road precisely where Terry said it would be. It was covered in brush that had been tossed haphazardly everywhere; I thought it was probably pretty effective in obscuring it from the road. I hopped out and cleared enough away for Jill to steer the van carefully past.

The old Mine Road was a dirt track just wide enough for the van to creep along. After a few minutes we passed a wide clearing, an old gravel parking lot that overlooked the surrounding landscape. The Moon lit up the broken glass and crushed cans like jewelry; this was where the local kids came to get high and seduce each other. When I’d been seventeen, this was exactly the sort of place I would have been lord and emperor of.

Jill kept creeping along at five miles an hour with the lights off, the dirt crunching under the wheels. I forced myself to unclench my hands again. After a few more minutes we crested the top of the hill; the road continued to wind downward, but Jill stopped the van and let it idle for a moment.

Paradise was laid out below us.

There was no obvious or easy way down to the walls, but we had sufficient elevation to peer down over them and into one section of the development. There was no gate, but also no guards that I could see.

“Looks quiet,” Jill said.

I nodded. It sure didn’t look like a gangster paradise, a refuge from the law and vendettas. It looked like a deserted assisted living space. “Kill the engine. Let’s watch for a bit.”

We sat in silence. After a few minutes, I saw a pair of guards walk along the wall. They looked like every low-level grunt in a crime gang that I’d ever seen in Queenies or working a job: Slouchy, potbellied guys with beards and mustaches, rifles slung over one shoulder, cigarettes dangling from their lips. They chatted amiably as they patrolled, barely paying attention to their surroundings.

Situational Awareness. These guys had zero. They assumed no one would dare take on the Outfit, no one would dare piss off every organized crime group in the country. And they were probably right, but it didn’t change the fact that they were lazy.

I noted the time and settled back to wait.

There was no movement between the houses I could see, and only a few lights on. It was quiet; I could hear the wind swirling around us. I glanced at Jill, who appeared to be asleep, one leg propped up on the dashboard. I studied her for a moment. It was strange to know someone so well and yet not know them at all, really.

“I can see you, weirdo,” she said.

I smiled and said nothing.

My phone dinged softly. I glanced down and saw a photo of Ellie. She looked miserable—caught in a crying fit, face red, mouth open in a wail. I caught himself before I crushed another phone, but my whole body stiffened, my heart skipping a beat. For a moment I felt like my soul was leaving my body. I could feel her in my arms, her little warm body, so alive, so energetic. She’d been safe with me. Until she hadn’t been.

I took a deep breath, forcing the air into my lungs. See you soon, I typed.

I settled back and watched the town. I wondered what it was like to be trapped in a place like this. Step outside, get your head blown off, or a van rolls up and FBI agents jump out to arrest you. But then you’re 24-7 behind a gate, peering out through your blinds and all you can see is the asshole across the way peering back at you through his blinds.

Thinking of my father, I hoped it was miserable.

I glanced back at Jill.

Do it, Maddie!

####

Frank always wore loafers. He’d been a tall, skinny guy, and he’d moved with a snakelike smoothness that had fascinated me as a teenager. His skin was dark and seemed thick, somehow, hairy and heavy. He was balding and kept his hair shaved down close to the scalp, making his hairline look like a gray smudge all around his head. He’d favored loose, billowy khakis and no socks, bowling shirts and loafers. I’d never seen the man wearing any shoe that required lacing.

Frank was fastidious. Hanging out at Jill’s house was always surreal, her mother drinking vodka tonics in the kitchen while cooking—and Jill’s mom was always cooking—music in the air, loud, and Frank always primping in the bathroom. The man shaved twice a day and spent what seemed like hours studying himself in the mirror, snipping stray nose hairs and rubbing in lotions and Lectric Shave. I could still smell it. There’d been so much of it in the house it was probably still there, embedded into the molecular structure of the place.

Do it, Maddie!

The precise events that led to me being on Jill’s roof, holding Franke at the edge by the lapels of his bowling shirt were fuzzy. I’d lost some time.

After the fork incident, after she’d declined to come with me, she and Frank had settled into a new cold war. He didn’t come into her room any more, but outside her room was fair game, he’d decided.

There had been the months of Jill’s silence, her tight, self-hugging awkwardness, her bottomless anger and exhausting determination to never sleep in her own bed. There had been the late night calls for rescue, Jill sliding out a bathroom window and racing for the car, Frank shouting drunkenly from the front door, snarling and waving his arms. There had been the final, tear-filled breakdown when she’d admitted to being terrified, and there’d been the trip home for clothes and supplies and Jill fleeing up the stairs with Frank in pursuit and that’s when I lost a few minutes of time.

When I’d come back to myself, I was on the roof and the only thing keeping Frank from a very unfortunate fall was the quality stitching in his purple and pink bowling shirt.

And Jill, standing a few feet away, hugging herself. She’d looked at me and nodded. And said Do it, Maddie.

That day on the roof had been the start. I saw that now. Nothing had happened immediately. Nothing happened for a long time. I’d backed away from the roof and set Frank down. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. I just walked away, leaving them up there, Jill calling after me. I went home to Uncle Pal’s and went to sleep. I went out that night with Jill and we’d gotten wasted, running through the park climbing trees, neither of us saying a word about what had happened. What she’d encouraged me to do. And so one and so on, for years and years.

But that day on the roof lingered. I found himself thinking of it a lot, usually when I’d let my temper get the best of me. I would stare down at my scabbed knuckles, head pounding from a hangover, and picture Frank’s terrified face. And after a while, after hundreds of those nights and mornings and blurry afternoons when I wasn’t even sure of the time, I started to think I needed to change.

####

“They’re circling back.”

I turned to look back down at Paradise, watching two guards stroll past going in the opposite direction.

“Same guys,” I said.

She nodded. “My guess is they just loop around their whole shift. Fucking jumbo softies.” She glanced at her phone. “Thirty-three minutes.” She chewed her thumb. “Too easy.”

I shook my head. “They don’t need much. This place is protected by, what did Mick call it—a consortium. Every big crime organization in the country guarantees this place’s security. No one’s gonna fuck with that. And the people here are hiding from shit. They’re free to go any time they want, right? It’s just that as long as they pay their rent, they can’t be harmed. Not by anyone connected, anyway.” I nodded. “Nope. These guards are for the occasional shitkicker or high school kid gets a hair up his ass to come cause some mischief. They don’t need anything heavier.”

She licked blood off her thumb where she’d torn a hangnail off. “Because no one would be stupid enough to piss off every fucking family, gang, and guild in the country.”

I nodded again. “No one’s that stupid. Or desperate.”

We waited. I dozed, forcing myself to think about nothing.

“Thirty minutes,” Jill said, her voice a rusty croak. “They’re not exactly Pinkertons, these guys.”

I shook myself alert. “That’s a lot of slack.”

She nodded. “I don’t think they’re gonna tighten up as the evening progresses, hoss,” she said, stretching. “You want to sit a night and make sure, or do we just go and snatch your piece of shit father?”

I thought for a moment. The guards might be back in half an hour, twenty minutes, or never—any time would be a risk. And every minute I waited was a minute my wife and daughter got further away. Properly, we would sit out here for a week, chart their routines, make notes. But I didn’t have time for properly.

“Go.”

“Hot damn,” Jill said, opening the door and swinging herself out, leaving the keys in the ignition. “Finally, some good fucking action.”

I climbed out of the van and soft-closed the door. I met Jill at the back of the vehicle and watched as she transformed, becoming all business, pulling the cargo doors open and rummaging in the bags we’d brought. That she’d brought; this was her area of expertise.

“Like old times, huh?” she said, voice muffled as she dug into the equipment.

Jill had been a thief for as long as I’d known her. It was little wonder the hobby had bloomed into a profession. As I watched her extracting a heavy mover’s blanket, a rolled-up, durable-looking rope ladder with heavy weighted ends, and two flashlights from the bags, I wondered what Jill Pilowsky might have been if she’d had a normal life. If she’d gone to college, drafted a resume, gotten a fierce haircut and a designer suit.

She dropped the stuff on the ground, turned back to the van, and emerged holding one of the Glocks out towards me. I reached out slowly and took it, feeling its weight. She didn’t ask if I knew how to use it. Shaking himself, I checked it over. No external safety. I popped the magazine and checked the spring, then slid it back into place. Pushing the gun into my waistband, I nodded at her, not saying out loud that I had zero intention of using it.

I grabbed the blanket and the ladder and followed her down the incline. The walls loomed up larger and larger; what had looked so inconsequential from up above seemed really high when we were standing at the base. It was dark and quiet, though, and Jill didn’t hesitate. She took the ladder and unrolled it. Picking up one of the weighted ends, she took a few steps back, judged the distance, then ran forward like a shotputter and launched the end up and over the wall; once it cleared the top gravity brought it down, pulling the rest of the ladder with it.

She tossed me a flashlight, stuck the other between her teeth, and picked up the blanket. She scrambled up the ladder in second, tossed the blanket over the wire, and was up and over in a blink.

I stared for a moment. What was it about the people who did nothing but drugs? They were always like Olympic athletes. Jill hadn’t eaten a proper meal in years and her only exercise involved carrying liquor bottles from the store. Yet the only sweat I’d seen Jill break was from a hangover, but she’d just scaled a wall like she’d been taking lessons.

I took a deep breath, put my flashlight in my mouth, and leaped for the ladder, praying I didn’t pass out halfway up.

The ladder felt insubstantial and flimsy, and it wriggled under me like a living thing—but it held my weight, and I was able to swing myself across the blanket and clamber down the other side. We were on a small island of overgrown grass between the wall and the road, everything silvery from moonlight. Jill held up a hand and rolled up her sleeve to read the house numbers she’d written there, along with a crude map. She turned slowly, glancing up and down, and then pointed up the street.

We took off at a run.

It was eerie. I remembered being seventeen and racing through rich neighborhoods at night with her—suburban islands of trees and blacktop that were just like Paradise. It was townhomes in rows, each identical—three stories, Juliet balconies, bizarre rooflines, dead and yellowed front lawns that were too small and too sloped to be anything but decorative, or the precise opposite of decorative. Each house had a driveway, but they were all empty—there were no cars anywhere, giving the street a strange, wide-open feeling.

This was hell.

The people living in Paradise might be safe from debt collectors and assassins, from revenge and arrest—as long as they could pay their rent—but the idea of living in such a place was horrifying. Never leaving. Being trapped with other people just as awful as you were. Trapped.

At the first intersection, Jill turned right. I followed.

The only sound was our breathing and the soft tap of rubber soles on the pavement. I began to see how run down the place was. The streets were cracked and crowded with potholes. The siding on all the houses was stained with mold and sagged. There were broken windows and garage doors that sagged outward like something was swelling behind them, pushing against the cheap hollow-body wood.

In the middle of the street, Jill stopped and turned. Hands on hips, breathing hard, she regarded one of the townhouses. I stopped next to her and squinted at the address: 83.

I looked at her and fifteen years fell away, shed like a snakeskin, and we were partners in crime again, in sync and communicating via subtle facial expressions and gestures. We ran towards the narrow alley between the houses leading to the backyards. It was like I was about to raid a medicine cabinet and then go pound some lite beers in the park with her.

The backyard was small and dead, a square patch of dirt with a rotten, half-collapsed wooden picnic table and a barbecue grill that appeared to be made of rust and dirt. There were lights on in the house. We ducked down and waited, watching, but there was no movement that I could see. Jill shrugged off her pack and extracted zip ties, duct tape, and the Glock. I left my gun in my waistband. One thing I’d learned bouncing at Queenies: A gun in the hand almost always went off, whether you wanted it to or not.

We walked to the glass sliders off the loose-stoned patio in complete silence. I leaned in close and peered through the glass; the kitchen was dark and empty. Jill reached out and tried the door, but it was locked. She stuffed the gun back into her own waistband and pulled a large folding knife from one pocket. Unfolding it with her teeth, she jammed it into the sliders’ simple locking mechanism and with one savage twist popped it open.

The slider didn’t want to move along its track. I put some shoulder into it and managed to get it open far enough to push through.

For a moment we stood in the kitchen. The smell was sub-optimal; it reminded me of the bathrooms at Queenies on a Sunday morning when Ramon and Bert failed to wash them down after closing—stale piss, smoke, the tangy bite of vomit. It wasn’t hard to see where the smell was coming from; the kitchen was a nightmare. Takeout food containers were everywhere, stacked on every available flat surface, on the floor, in the sink. The cabinet drawers were all broken, and the refrigerator door was kept shut with a piece of duct tape. Over the stove there was a toothless gap where the microwave should have been. Every step crunched under my boots. The whole place seemed to be moving in an insectoid wriggle, and I envisioned a billion squirming segmented bodies in the walls.

Jill put a finger to her lips and nodded towards the living room. Stale blue light flashed from a television, the sound of a laugh track skimming through the air like glitter. I took point, following the wall around, one arm bent backwards to keep a hand on the pistol as I moved.

As I turned the corner, the smell, improbably, got worse.

The carpet in the living room was an off pink and deep, a crunchy shag that hadn’t been shampooed in a long time. More garbage was strewn everywhere—plastic bags overflowing with it, piles of it in every conceivable place. Bottles had tipped over, liquor and beer and mixers soaking into the already-ruined carpet. The television was old—two decades ago it would have been the top of the line, a flat screen model with an enormous, bulbous back—and tuned in to the local public access channel, where a sweating, balding man in a red and white checkered flannel shirt stiffly recounted high school football scores with funereal gravitas.

It soaked the oft-repaired recliner in silvery light that flashed and danced. The recliner had been patched with duct tape in several places, and the lever controlling the recline and footrest had been replaced with a large wrench tightened onto the nut.

The old man in the recliner looked dead.

I froze at the sight of him. He was both obviously my father, Mats Renik, and simultaneously not him. My father had been vibrant, winking, always in motion, his dark black hair slicked back and perfectly combed. He’d been rail thin, his large nose and Adam’s Apple preceding him into every room by several minutes.

Mats Renik had never fallen asleep in a recliner his life. Mats Renik never slept. He was a restless man, always striving, plotting, sketching out plans and working stolen goods with tools at the kitchen table, or sipping a drink, or slipping out the back window onto the fire escape with a wave and a grin. When he’d sat down at home, after a bender, after being gone for days, he would make himself a drink and sing the same fucking song over and over again.

It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me! But my darling when I think of thee!

Even sitting down, my father had been a ball of noise and restless energy.

The old man in the recliner was fast asleep, his mouth open, his yellowed teeth crooked and ugly. His hair was thin and gray and stood up in random cowlicks the way old people’s hair did. He was too thin and wore a pair of cheap work pants and a blue shirt, both too large for him, which made him seem even more shrunken.

“Jesus Christ,” Jill said, dropping the duct tape and zip ties onto the carpet. “He’s fucking alive.”

The old man snorted and sat up with a strangled cry, his eyes opening. He started to settle back, then stiffened, leaning forward, his hands tightening on the chair’s arms.

“What—” He blinked rapidly, his mouth working. He looked confused. Time had taken my father and ruined him, made him old.

I stared, the anger welling up inside me a terrifying thing, an alien intelligence I didn’t understand, that I didn’t think I would be able to control. My hands were fists again, the knuckles creaking. “Hey pop,” I managed to say, my voice so tight and flat Jill glanced at me in sudden alarm.

Mats stared for a moment. His mouth worked, as if his teeth had gotten loose and he was trying to suck them back into place. His whole face seemed to twitch and undulate.

“What—Maddie?”

He sagged back into the chair and put a hand over his face. After a moment, I realized the old man was sobbing—jerking, shaking convulsions.

This was confusing. I looked over at Jill. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, flicked to me. She shrugged in confusion.

“Oh fucking thank god,” Mats Renik said between gasps. “Thank fucking god.”

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10.

“What will you say to him? Your Dad, I mean.”

I shrugged. I was sprawled on the hard, aggressively stained couch, my arms spread along the back. The room was done in reds and oranges as if someone had wanted to hurt the eyes of anyone stupid enough to stay there; the carpet was a particularly offensive pattern of red octagons and orange circles, punctuated by green flowers of some sort.

“Nothing. If I can help it.”

There was a huge mirror on the wall across from me. It was tarnished and cracked in one corner, and I avoided looking at myself in it. All I saw was a shitbag who’d let his wife and baby girl be kidnapped.

“Dude, you have to come up with something. After what that son of a bitch did to you? You gotta script something ice cold. Or you’ll hate yourself.”

I looked at Jill. She was seated at the crummy desk, her boots up. A bottle of bourbon, still in the brown paper from the restaurant attached to the place, sat under the light. I estimated the bottle was half empty, and she still had a supply of ice in a bucket. I’d seen drunks like her plenty of times in meetings; they were clear and bright right up to the moment they fell over. This was the ?functioning’ part of ?functioning alcoholic.’

I looked down at my hands, scabbed and swollen. “If I say something to him, I make him real,” I said. “I kinda want to keep him a ghost, for a while.”

I’d considered a meeting. I’d even searched the burner for local groups. But meetings had never been my thing. I went for a while, met Miguel and absorbed the man’s wisdom, but I remembered that feeling of being trapped, the certainty that everyone in the room knew exactly what I was about to say. I couldn’t handle the feeling of exposure.

Now I wished I’d found one, gone and soaked up the bitter coffee and the country-song stories, because watching Pills sink into that bottle was just as nerve-wracking.

She swirled whiskey in her plastic cup. “You’re lucky you got rid of old Mats. I got stuck with Handsy Frank for fuckin’ years. Had to fucking stab him to keep him out of my room.” She snorted. “And Mom got mad at me because of the emergency room bill. She told me it took all her arts of persuasion to convince him not to press a charge, send me to juvie.” She lifted her cup into the air. “But he never came into my room again.”

“I remember,” I said, smiling. A fork. She’d stabbed him with a fork, in the meaty part of the thigh. Got it in real deep, using her freaky unexpected strength. I remember her showing up at Uncle Pal’s, red in the face, delighted, delirious, certain she was going to jail for the rest of her life.

And I’d pulled out the grimy old yellow envelope and I’d said, let’s go.

“Where? What?”

I showed her the money. “Let’s go,” I’d said. “Let’s get out. Head West, maybe. We’ll find a place to live, we’ll get jobs, we’ll get away from Frank and all this bullshit.”

And for the first time in my life, I’d seen Jill Pilowsky scared. Fucking terrified. She’d stabbed her stepfather in the leg with a fork and walked away bright-eyed and excited. Now she was paralyzed. The idea, so bright and alive for a second there, died in the air between us. My inheritance went into a bank a few years later, and a few years after that it paid for my wedding.

I tried to trace back how I’d lost track of Jill, despite the fact that she’d never been more than a half mile away. Despite the fact that we saw each other all the time. But that was still a drift, wasn’t it? There’d been a time when Jill Pilowsky’s voice woke me up in the morning, barking at me that it was time for a wake and bake, a time when I’d spent most days with her just wandering the earth, a time when I’d fallen asleep whispering to her on the phone again as Uncle Pal prowled outside my bedroom.

I knew Jill felt it, too. She knew I was keeping her at arm’s length, and I felt her anger beating against me like a hot wind, unspoken but potent. She was an anchor. I’d been swimming for years, trying to break the surface, and if I let her grab an ankle I’d drown. But there was no way to explain that to her. It was a language she hadn’t learned yet.

She laughed suddenly, sloshing whiskey into her cup. “Remember that show we saw in the City? I took that off-brand speed and thought I was having a heart attack.”

I nodded. “And for some reason you thought you had to keep moving or your heart would explode. Like a human version of that movie with the bomb on the bus.”

She laughed again, animated. “Man, that fucker in the mosh pit was pissed off. And he grabbed me, and, shit, you came out of nowhere and physically lifted him off the ground. I can still remember the fucking expression on his face. Bug-eyed in fucking shock.” She sipped whiskey. “I miss that guy,” she said, then shook herself and stood up. “We’re going to get Ellie back, Maddie. I promise you that. We’re going to collect your shitpeel of a father, haul his ass back to BC like cargo, and cash his old, skinny ass in for one adorable little girl. You got my word.”

She took her cup, opened the door, and stepped outside. I chose not to point out that she’d forgotten that my wife was also being held prisoner by gangsters. Everyone had their blind spots.

I stared at the bottle on the desk. I felt useless and heavy; I needed to be doing something, to be working towards the goal of bringing my daughter home safe. Sitting in a motel room was just wasted time, and made me want to burn the place down, to smash up all the furniture, to go back to the bar attached to the office and pick a fight with any six or seven randos who happened to be sitting around.

I heard my knuckles pop. A second later, the door opened and Pills breezed back in, leaving the door open behind her.

“Hey, yeah, you remember our good friend Terry from town who stood by and watched us get our asses kicked?” she said, dropping heavily into the chair by the desk. “He’s here.”

####

In the yellow light of the motel room, Terry was somehow thinner and more leathery than he’d appeared at the bar. I found himself mesmerized by the way his long, yellowed beard bobbed up and down as he talked.

“I didn’t like the way y’all were treated back there,” he said slowly, swirling whiskey in the spare plastic cup. “Not so much Billy—you look like you can handle yourselves well enough in a fair fight. But Batten makin’ it a not fair fight. That was fuckin’ bullshit, and I’m sorry for it.”

I looked at Jill. She pushed her lower lip out, her cheeks red and her eyes shining. “Ah, shit,” she said. “That’s okay. Wasn’t your fault, right? What were you gonna do?”

Terry nodded. “That bitch. You know, I known her all my life. But if I dare call her Evelyn, she bites my head off. Always Sheriff, she insists. Always with the chip on her shoulder. Everything’s racist for her. I slip up and call her Evvie, like in high school? I’m in the god-damn KKK.”

I didn’t say anything. I had a sense that Terry had come to talk. When the Terries of the world came to talk, it was usually profitable to let them.

“Fuck her,” Pills slurred, getting into character, stretching out her. “That cunt.”

Terry nodded and gulped down his drink. “But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how she’s tied up with those fucking gangsters out on 40. That Outfit has fucked this town three ways from Sunday and Evvie just don’t see it. Because it makes her a big swinging dick around here.”

“Fuck them, too.” Pills said.

Terry glanced up at her. “Y’all came here for them. That’s what’s got Evvie in such a state—you’re here to go after those fuckers in Paradise, and she’s charged to stop you.” He held out his cup for Jill to refill. “We’re not even supposed to say the word, Paradise. You let it slip and people give you a look, like some fucking mafia asshole is going to lean in from behind you and slit your fucking throat.” He watched her pour the whiskey. Then he stared down at his cup, jaw muscles bunching. “This place changed when they figured Paradise out. That old gated community got built forty years ago when there was a housing boom, everyone was going to be a yuppie. Place never sold all the units, and five years later it was empty. Then this investment group comes along and buys the whole place. We all figured, a mall, maybe, or a driving range. But they start renovating. Repairing. They make the wall higher. We never see anyone move in, suddenly there’s a couple dozen people living there. Armed guards at the gates. They never come into town, they send the guards. They’re assholes. Arrogant, never want to pay for anything, rough with everyone. They have everything delivered. Food, clothes—everything. No one ever leaves. The only people you actually see are the security guards.”

“How many of those do you see?”

He glanced at me and thought for a moment. “If I had to guess? Maybe two dozen. You see different ones in town. They don’t wear a uniform or nothin’, but you can smell ?em. Plus they’re always carrying. Long guns, handguns. They’re like a fucking militia.”

Long guns. “Rifles? Semi-autos?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Guns ain’t my bag, man. But, fuck them. You came here to hurt those bastards, and I came here to help you do it. This town was never anything great, but it used to be decent.”

Jill was leaning forward and grinning up at Terry. “Fuck yeah.” Jill was good at this, at the revival-tent hype hallelujah! bullshit. I half expected her to leap up and start running around the room, hands in the air as she shouted praise be!

“They order stuff from you?” I said suddenly, a memory clicking. “You said the guards come into town—they coming to pick up orders? They come to your place for liquor? Packaged goods?”

Terry nodded. “Yeah. They call in, then the muscle shows up. Everything’s marked by house number. I’ll get this order for number 70, this order for 72, like that.”

I licked my lips. He hesitated for a few seconds, rubbing his hands. “You get orders for cream sherry?”

Terry smiled. “What? Jesus … yeah, like fucking clockwork. I have to special order a case. Number 83 drinks that rotgut like water.” He shook his head. “Fuckin’ cream sherry. It’s like goddamn cough medicine.”

I looked at Jill. She was grinning. “Number 83,” I said.

“I told you about the old Mine Road,” Terry said. “I can guide you to it.”

I sat forward. “They don’t know about it?”

Terry shook his head. “Naw. This goes back, way back, deep magic kind of stuff. Can’t see it from the main roads; the kids keep a bunch of old branches and shit over the entry.” He sipped from his cup. “Sure, I’d bet Batten knows about it. But she knows the kids party out there, so she don’t pay much attention to it.”

“You’ll show us?” I asked.

Terry nodded. “Hell, yeah. You got a map?”

Jill shot her whiskey and stood up. “Do I have a map!” she said enthusiastically. Then she paused, looking around the room. She poked feebly around her possessions for a moment. “Well, fuck, no I don’t have a map. Who has a map? I got a phone.”

Terry held out his hand. “Good enough.”

####

“You believe him?” I asked, studiously ignoring the smell of whiskey. We were seated on the uncomfortable plastic chairs on the cracked concrete patio outside their room, shivering in the cooling air.

“You don’t?”

I shrugged. “It’s awfully convenient of him to come find us and offer that bit of information.”

She nodded. “It’s convenient when you don’t die in your sleep, too. If Batten or whoever wanted us dead or in prison, coulda been done already, pretty easy. I read him as a resentful cracker who wants to spit in the Sheriff’s eggs but doesn’t want to be in the room when she takes a bite. I think it’s a lot of trouble to go through just to lure us to some remote area and fuck our shit up.”

I chuckled. The smell of whiskey was killing me. The easy, relaxed way Pills was sitting was killing me. I knew the feeling, the dopey, warm feeling of a little too much booze, just sitting there sinking down into yourself. I missed it. I missed it so badly my hands kept twitching, like a dog having a dream while it napped on the couch.

Like every other addict in the universe, starting was the easiest thing in the world. The problem was stopping. That’s why I’d backed away from Jill. She might think it was because Carrie hated her—which was true—or because I didn’t want her near Ellie, which wasn’t. It was because all I heard from Jill was do it, Maddie. Do it, Maddie.

The rooftop flashed through my mind. The smell of tar and Lectric Shave. Do it, Maddie!

I looked at Jill. “Why are you here?” I asked quietly. “Why are you helping me like this?”

She looked down as if I was too bright to look at directly. “You always save everyone. You always saved me. So it’s my turn to save you.” She looked around and took a deep breath, pushing him aside. “Couple hours, it gets dark, we’ll head out there,” she said. “See what can be seen.”

She went back into the room. I sat there with the lingering smell of whiskey. I thought me and Pills had hit rock bottom together all those years ago. And then I’d left her behind there.

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

9.

I watched Billy stalk towards me and thought of Louie Something.

For a long time I didn’t understand myself. Before my parents didn’t died and left me not an orphan, I’d always been terrified of disruption, of unpredictable events. My father was always in motion, always grasping and fidgeting, scheming. He was chaos in human form, as likely to be laughing and joking as screaming and pounding his fist on the table. We got rich one day, we were dead broke the next. I was his baby boy one day, I was a fucking leech the next.

Liùsaidh was worse. My mother never showed much emotion, it was always impossible to guess what mood she was in. But I worked hard to anticipate them anyway, to get in front of problems and make sure I was far away when all the signs of a dust up were there. There were rules, I was certain. They were changeable and invisible and written in obscure courtly languages, but there were rules, I was certain. If you learned those rules, you could make your life orderly. The crazier things got, the harder I worked to make everything calm and boring.

This is shit I figured out years later, sober and clawing my way back to that zero.

I also worked hard to keep calm myself. Calm was my spirit animal. In grammar school my friends joked that I was the Iceman, because I never showed much emotion. I had this sense that I was a counterbalance to my parents, that the crazier they were, the louder and more terrifying, the steadier I had to be. I learned to always clench down on myself, to hold myself still, to never react. I curated a poker face and worked hard not to let my temper take hold, ever. I refused to be Mats, who was driven by nothing but anger, a free-form rage at everything and everyone.

And then, they’d gone, and in the ensuing silence I could no longer hold it together.

There are fish I read about once that live at the bottom of the ocean, under tremendous pressure, but they’ve evolved to survive. To move around under a dense weight of water pushing at them from every direction. They push back hard enough to survive. But if you take one and bring it up to the shalows, it explodes, because it’s pushing back against a pressure that’s no longer there.

Little things set me off unexpectedly. At Uncle Pal’s house, I smashed the bathroom mirror when Aunt Mary informed me of the dire cereal situation in the pantry. On the bus one afternoon coming home from my new, horrifying school, a baby wouldn’t stop crying, so I’d screamed at the kid’s mother, calling her every name I’d ever overheard.

These moments came without warning, and they disturbed me, but I couldn’t seem to control them. One moment I would feel like himself, calm and in control. The next it would be like waking up, slowly coming back to myself only to realize I was punching a wall or screaming at someone.

I took to hanging out with Pills in the parking lot behind school, at the bike racks. We smoked and talked, complained and made fun of everyone, everything. I’d never had a close girl friend before, so it was a novelty. Pills was profane, with a mean streak a mile wide, just as angry as I was. There was a weird, inexplicable safety with her. Nothing offended her. It felt like nothing could make her think any less of me, and I loved that.

Everyone called the bike racks The Pit. I always assumed every school, everywhere, had a Pit where the delinquents hung out, smoking cigarettes.

There was this kid, a year older, a Junior, who hung out in The Pit. Louie Something, long curly hair, a nose of truly heroic proportions, always a ratty old army surplus coat. Something wrong with Louie, though no one could quite put their finger on it. He was genial, and usually cheerful, but always seemed to float just beyond normal, always a little off.

Louie cackled. Man, I can still remember always being a little irritated by that cackle, the way Louie would start off laughing like a hyena and then choke his own laugh off into a coughing, wet-sounding croak. This one day, in The Pit, Louie kept laughing, Over and over again, that wet, croaking cackle, like it was on a tape loop.

“Hey, yo, shut the fuck up.”

When Carlos Piata told someone to shut the fuck up, they generally shut the fuck up. He was a big guy, and loud, and pushy in a way I already found provoking, but I was just starting to do the math on people who used bulk and volume and aggressive assertions of both to steamroll other people. Carlos mainly used his bulk and volume to tell people to shut the fuck up, a campaign for silence that older, wiser Mads Renik could appreciate. Looking back, I washed I had a Carlos with me at movie theaters, or standing over me while I slept, making sure none of the cackling assholes around me sounded off.

That day, Louie didn’t shut the fuck up. He cackled. And Carlos, sensing a challenge, surged up from his seat on one of the steps.

“Yo, I said shut the fuck up.”

Louie cackled, nervously, like it was the only sound he was capable of making under the circumstances.

I don’t remember getting on my feet. I remembered moving in sudden jumps, like I was having a series of small strokes that stole seconds from me. When Carlos reached out to smack Louie—a smack, a soft, insulting attack—I grabbed his arm, spun him around, and punched him in the face as hard as I could.

And when Carlos went down, making a soft, wheezing noise like a balloon suddenly losing air, I followed him, dropping to my knees and hitting him again. Or so I’m told.

I’m also told that when Carlos’ buddies sprang into action, pulling me away and kicking and punching me, I kicked and punched back. I remembered a weird euphoria. It hurt, it was violent, but it was freedom, too. Pure, ecstatic freedom. When that fuzzy moment of pure violent joy passed, I was overwhelmed, three against one as Carlos rose from the dead and joined in. I curled up and put my arms over my head to protect myself.

And then realized I didn’t have to, because Jill Pilowsky had joined the game.

She leaped onto Carlos’ back and yanked on his ears so hard he screamed, spinning around, trying to dislodge her. His buddies left me and grabbed onto her, and the last thing I remembered before being in the principal’s office was surging up and crashing into them all.

####

I settled myself. You always let them come to you. Let them make mistakes. Let them be too eager. In my experience, defense always won when you were dealing with drunk, overconfident assholes, because they never planned ahead and had an inflated sense of their own power and competence. And any man who was still awake at sunrise after an evening spent in a place like Mikey’s was definitely working with exaggerated power and competence.

Billy came first, of course. He danced up with his fists raised, which I assumed was something he’d seen in a movie, once. He telegraphed all his moves with the shifting of his weight, so when he feinted low and then tried to nail me with a haymaker, I had already leaned back, letting the fist sail past my chin. Billy, overbalanced, stumbled into the bar while I spun away, slipped and landed on his face.

Sometimes, you could get assholes to beat the shit out of themselves.

I had an idea that Sheriff Batten might be happy to charge me with aggravated assault, and since she hadn’t just invented the charge I had to assume she was that special snowflake that drew some imaginary line between entrapment and simple deceit. So I wouldn’t be the aggressor. At Queenies, I’d had to follow the same rules. Even if I knew someone was a complete asshole, I couldn’t initiate. I couldn’t be the aggressor. I had to watch and wait for the other person to come at me. Bouncing was 99 percent letting assholes beat themselves.

Billy’s two friends came at me together, one from each side. I spun away and they stumbled into each other, pushing each other away and lunging after me, off balance. I kept dancing backwards, letting them chase after me, then I suddenly stopped. They both windmilled their arms and I reached forward and popped Beta in the nose—a tap with a little weight behind it. He went backwards, hands flying to his face, and for a moment I had some space around myself.

Billy tagged in, pushing through his two useless friends with a mask of blood on his face. I planted my feet and got steady. Billy had learned his lesson and came slow, watching me, careful. I knew that if I didn’t take the initiative I would lose. I was already tired, breathing hard. In another minute or so my arms would start to feel like lead weights. But I figured that was the idea. I either lost and wound up in the hospital, or I won and wound up in the county jail.

Billy’s friends skirted the periphery, plucking up pool cues as they went, careful to stay outside my reach. I kept track of them out of the corner of my eye, but concentrated on Billy. Billy was the only one of them that had any guts, that was clear. He was stupid, but he wasn’t afraid to come back in after getting his nose busted.

Billy danced around, playing for time until his buddies could assemble on either side of him; I saw my opening, the moment when I could have stepped forward and clocked Billy pretty solidly, laid him out. I let the opening slide past me. Batten wanted me to take some lumps, she obviously wanted to impress upon me that our safety and security relied on her good opinion of my decision making process. Putting the three shitkickers to bed might feel good, but would probably cost me on the back end when it came to the sheriff.

So I wasted some time and let them come at me from three sides, Billy faking it, dancing in but not getting close enough, his two buddies coming forward with the pool cues, swinging wild.

I went down, wrapping my head in my arms. They began raining down blows, hitting my back, my arms, my sides. I tried to make myself as small as possible, tried to absorb the blows with my shoulders.

“Come into my town,” Billy snarled, stepping forward to kick at me, “and talk shit to me, bro?”

Everything went black.

####

When I came to, everything was different.

I was staring up at a cracked cement ceiling, a skein of lines that widened out into larger fissures then narrowed down to spidery again. My head pounded with each heartbeat, and my back and legs ached with a steady, burning pain. The smell in the air was awful, like a full dishwasher that hadn’t been run in weeks.

“Looks like your buddy is wakin’ up, finally.”

I sat up and winced, the pounding in my head surging and filling it until I thought it might burst. Something caught in my back and stung me.

I took a deep breath, wincing again as something inside me stabbed me in the chest. I was in a jail cell. I thought the same contractors must build every local county jail; they all looked exactly the same. This one smelled a lot worse than usual, though, I had to admit.

Batten was sitting on a metal chair in the corridor outside the cell. The chair was tipped back against the wall as she stretched her legs out in front of her, feet propped up on the bars. She had a bottle of beer in one hand, her hat tipped back. Jill sat on the floor next to her, handcuffed to the cell bars.

“You regretting any recent decisions, my friend?” Batten asked.

“Maybe,” I said. I probed a loose molar with my tongue thoughtfully.

“Sorry things took a turn. I came into town and saw your fucking van, I kinda got sore about being ignored.” She shrugged, taking a sip of beer. “I might maybe have handled that better.”

I waved it away. “Bygones,” I said.

She laughed. “You’re a corker. I bet you think I’m six kinds of asshole.”

I waved again. I felt like one big bruise.

Batten studied me for a moment. “My daddy,” she said, taking a deep breath and leaning forward, the chair tipping back onto all four legs. “He moved here fifty-seven years ago. Came up from Georgia, had a job offer, working in the old bottling plant.” She shrugged. “We did okay. He rented a little house a few miles outside town, because no one would sell him anything. Every day, we woke up and there was a noose in the mailbox. Every damn day.” She shook her head. “The energy required. The disciplined hatred. Every damn day for fifteen years.” She looked at me. “We got called names a lot. On Mischief Night, teenagers would drive out to our house and throw eggs.” She sighed. “I enlisted and turned out an MP, and found I loved it. Police work. Isn’t so different in the army, really, and when I came home I thought I might make it a career. But I was informed that there were no positions available, and then they hired two new deputies.” She killed off the bottle in one fast gulp. “An offer came my way. The sheriff didn’t want to hire me? Fuck ?im. I could be sheriff. All I had to do was tow the company line.”

“You sold out,” Jill said.

Batten shrugged. “Maybe. All I know is, life’s better with some muscle behind you. Not too long ago if I went into Busby’s and ordered lunch, Terry would have spit in it. And maybe he still does, but they don’t fucking dare do it out in the open any more. And I enjoy the bowing and scraping.”

“You know who that muscle is, right?” I said, my voice a croak. My headache had settled into a deep, predictable groove in time with my heartbeat. “The Outfit is the worst fucks in the country. Killers, drug dealers, traffickers.”

Batten nodded, standing up. “Ayup, so I understand. And I figure, they were here before me, and they’ll be here after I’m gone. In the mean time, they don’t fuck around in the town, and that’s the oath I took.” She walked over to the desk a few feet away. “Now, I’m gonna take you to your vehicle. I’m gonna watch you get in, and then I’m gonna escort you to 41, where you can go north or south, as long as you go.” She turned back, a set of keys in her hand. “That sound good?”

I studied his hands. There was a big, black scab on one knuckle. As I looked at it, my hand began to throb in time with my headache. “Sure.”

“I’m gonna put the word out with the deputies and some of the local sheriffs,” Batten added, unlocking Jill. “If you or that vehicle turns up in town again, something unfortunate has to happen. Okay?”

I nodded again. “Got it.” I looked up from under my eyebrows at Jill, and our eyes met. I knew she was thinking about taking some crazy chance—jumping Batten, probably. But putting aside the fact that Batten looked like she might be a tougher fighter than her short, not particularly toned body indicated, it was the wrong move. Stealth was blown. Our presence had been noted, and anything we did would be immediately noticed. The smart play was to leave town, looking sheepish, and come up with a fresh approach, because we’d screwed this one up.

I shook my head, a small, microscopic movement. Her jaw tightened, and then she nodded.

“All right then, children,” Batten said, unlocking the cell. “I hope you have enjoyed your stay. Please don’t forget to answer the brief survey about your customer service experience when asked.” She stepped aside to let me squeeze past her, her hand on the butt of her weapon but evincing exactly zero fear. “And when you speak of me, remember that time I saved your lives.”

I stood for a moment blinking in the afternoon sun. Shielding my eyes, I scanned the street as Pills pulled her jacket on angrily. The town looked dead. Not a single other soul on the street. Batten stood in the doorway until we limped over to the van and climbed in side. Then she walked over to her SUV and got in, popping on the flashers just to be an asshole about it.

I put the van in gear. “Let’s find someplace to crash,” I said, head ringing. “Figure out what we do next.”

“Next?” Jill said, pulling her vape from her pocket and inhaling with what could be described as violence. “Shit, Maddie—you forget who I am. What I do. I steal shit for a living.” She started walking. “Next, we break in.”

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8.

We found a town about twenty minutes south on Highway 41. As the sun was creeping up over the horizon, we cruised down the wide, empty Main Street. Tidy-looking businesses lined each side of the road, their signage cheerful, the sidewalks swept, the potted plants watered and green-looking.

The only place open was a tavern called Mikey’s that had a small menu taped to the window next to the Budweiser neon sign. I recognized the distinct smell and sealed feeling of a bar that locked the doors at 2AM but let patrons stay, then ceremoniously unlocked the doors at 6AM when they fired up the grill. There was no music in the air and there was sawdust on the floor, a few old-timers barely conscious at the bar and a trio of shitkickers making noise by the pool table, a collection of empty bottles lined up on a shelf under the ancient cathode-ray television.

We took seats at the bar. The bartender was a skinny, leathery old guy with snow-white hair and a long, yellowed beard he’d tied off with rubber bands. He glanced at us with an expression of immense apathy for a long time, then slowly ambled over.

“Yeah?”

“Old Granddad, neat, beer back, whatever you have,” Jill said, taking off her jacket. Her T-shirt read We The Heathens with a list of tour dates.

The old man nodded and turned to me.

“Menu,” I said.

The bartender squinted as if this was an unexpected and unsatisfactory request, then bent down and retrieved a laminated sheet of paper from under the bar. He slid it in front of me and nodded.

“Ain’t no fries,” he said, his accent flat and broad. “Fryer’s down.”

I nodded and glanced down, absorbing the limited choices in approximately three seconds. “Coffee, eggs over easy, white bread toast,” I said.

The bartender seemed pleased by the speed of the order, plucking the menu back up with a nod of his head. “Comin’ up.”

I looked sideways at Jill. “You’re not gonna eat something?”

“You know how many calories in booze?” she said, stretching. “I gotta watch my girlish figure.”

I nodded vaguely, my attention drifting to the three shitkickers in the back. They’d taken notice of us. I knew body language and the invisible ether of bars and clubs, the taste of metal in the air when things were drifting towards ugly, the shifts in the air currents when shitheels suddenly noticed you and got that that mulish look that told you they thought you were looking down on them, and resented it, a resentment they generated all on their own, like a brain chemical. I could feel that resentment, that stupid, boozy anger, like microwaves against my skin.

The bartender brought over two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. “I’ll have one wit’ ya,” he said, showing us a set of green and yellow teeth. “Like folks who can take a drink in the morning and not faint.” He sloshed whiskey into each glass, picked up one, and clinked it against Jill’s.

“May we never get to hell but always be on the way there,” she said, draining the glass and slamming it onto the bar.

The bartender cackled. “Love it,” he said, shaking his head and pouring her another. “One beer comin’ up.”

Jill picked up the glass. “You want that breakfast, Maddie, better start flirtin’.”

When the bartender returned with a pint, I forced my hands to relax, forced my face into Cheerful Neutral. Drunk assholes who thought they were somehow owed entry were easy to trigger, so I’d learned to be bland, to appear polite even when I was shoving them out the door.

I decided to see if I could trade a little on Jill’s charm. “We got lost,” I said with a little laugh. “How we ended up here. Got roused by the sheriff up by some weird gated community.”

“Oh, ayuh, Paradise,” the old man said with a nod, laying set of plastic silverware on the bar, wrapped in a paper napkin. “I wouldn’t head back up there, I was you.”

“Why not?”

“They ain’t friendly,” he said, leaning in close. “And they got protection. You wouldn’t be the first to come back from there all banged up and afraid to say a thing about it. Or not come back at all.” He straightened up, smiling. “’Course, that never stops kids from takin’ dares about being up there, heading up the old Mine Road.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, and waited. When people wanted to talk, it was best to let them.

“Sure, sure,” he said, leaning against the bar and rubbing his nose. He had that leather-skinned roadie look to him, a guy who’d lived hard in a very narrow lane. “Paradise used to be a mining town, yanno. Fifty years ago. The old mine road leads from its ass end to the old Phillips Mine. Most folks don’t even know the road’s there. But fucking teenagers who want a place to get drunk and fuck? They’re fucking brilliant in their own way, huh?”

I nodded. Behind the bartender, the three shitkickers were approaching us, and I had a sudden intuition that I was never going to actually eat that breakfast.

They were in classic flying-V shitkicker formation, the lead shitkicker—Shitkicker Alpha—leading the other two. Alpha was tall and skinny, unwashed-looking in a way that probably worked for him—long greasy hair and a white t-shirt that had seen better days and rode up, exposing his abs. He was like a wasted 60s rock star before all the bloating. He flashed an easy smile when he noticed me watching his approach, a casual monster used to being in charge.

Beta and Gamma, on the other hand, were fatter and dumber, that was obvious from the fact that they were following Alpha around. But stupid could kick you in the balls when you were down, as I’d found out the hard way, so you had to factor them in. Beta had red hair and a lingering rash of acne, a reminder of his almost-certainly awkward high school years. Gamma was a damp sort, sweaty, open-mouthed, wet-eyed.

“Well, sweetheart, you sure are a sight for sore eyes,” Alpha said, smiling at Pills and acting like I didn’t exist. “If you’re lookin’ for a party, you found it. This bar never closes.”

“And I bet you never leave,” Jill said, leaning back. Alpha’s eyes went straight to her chest. “Based on the smell.”

He smiled, cocking his head a little as if uncertain what he’d just heard. “How’s that?”

“C’mon, Billy,” the bartender rumbled. “Leave ?em alone.”

Billy held up a hand in the bartender’s general direction, but didn’t turn his head. He kept his dancing eyes on Jill. “I’m being perfectly nice, Terry,” he said. “She’s the one being rude.”

I kept all three in my field of vision, turning around. I knew better than to show any sort of agitation. Every confrontation I’d ever been, every bounce I’d had to make, had been this endless dance of fake smiles and affected relaxation, right up until you were ready to throw down. “That isn’t exactly true,” I said. “She was just minding her business, and you interrupted her.”

Billy waited a beat, then turned and smiled at me, holding up a hand like he had with the bartender. “Bro, I’ll get to you.”

Bro. Why every asshole in the world called me bro was a mystery for the fucking ages. I didn’t react. I was studying the guy’s body language; in my experience there are Tells for every level of a confrontation. It starts off nonverbal—posture and stare. Then it gets verbal, vulgar and insulting, trying to provoke, because people didn’t think straight when they were provoked. Then came an invasion of personal space, an attempt to dominate without crossing the physical barrier. And then would come the Touch, usually gentle, mocking. And all of these escalations were preceded by tiny movements, shifts in weight.

I’d seen a thousand guys like Alpha Billy try to provoke me at Queenies. They all thought that a lifetime of easy bullying made them tough, made them smart.

When Billy reached for Jill, I lunged forward, the stool clattering away as I intercepted his arm and jerked it towards me, slamming my forehead into his nose.

I staggered back, vision flashing purple, and then had the satisfaction of seeing the Alpha stumble backwards, blood gushing from his face, and fall, hard, on his ass.

Jill danced back, clapping her hands and erupting into a peal of unsteady laughter. In my head, I heard her say do it, Maddie! and I shivered. Zero kept drifting.

The other two helped Billy up. He wiped blood from his mouth and shoved them aside, surging towards me. I braced himself, bringing my hands up.

“Hey!”

The voice cut through the air with authority, the sort of voice that was used to being obeyed. Everyone froze in place.

“Ah, shit, Sheriff,” Billy said, licking blood. “This asshole deserves it.”

“Shut the fuck up, Hopkins.”

Sheriff Batten stood just inside the door, her beat-up old hat still on her head, her hand still on her sidearm grip. I wondered if she walked around like that, ready to draw down at a moment’s notice. So far hers was the only dark-skinned face I’d seen in this little shitburg, so that would actually fall under the category of prudence.

The old guys, who’d been watching the altercation with increasing enthusiasm, all stood up and moved towards the back of the bar as if a meeting of the Right Honorable Old Bastards, Lodge 49, had been called. I looked back at the Sheriff.

She sighed. “I told y’all to step the fuck out of town, didn’t I?”

I nodded. “We stopped for breakfast.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t believe I said ?get the fuck out of town, but first grab some breakfast, see the sights, scrape a knuckle on some local idiots.’” She pulled the cuffs from her belt and gestured at Jill. “C’mere, missy.”

Jill affected shock. “What?” She pointed at Billy. “These assholes were harassing me, sheriff.”

Batten nodded. “Billy Hopkins was born to harass. It’s all he fucking does. I said come here.”

Jill looked at me. I did some quick calculus. We had no friends in town, and Batten was the law in the room. I nodded, then added a shrug.

With a sigh, she walked over to Batten. “I’d like to know what I’m being arrested for?”

Batten grunted, taking Jill by one shoulder and spinning her around. She bent an arm back with professional skill and slapped one cuff on her wrist. Jill swung her other arm behind her, but Batten ignored it, instead turning and tugging Jill back to the wall, where she threaded the other cuff through the metal arm of a wall sconce.

“No one’s arresting anyone, honey,” Batten said. As Jill spluttered, tugging at the sconce, Batten walked to the front door and slid the deadbolt in place. The dry click of it was suddenly very loud.

She turned and pushed her hands into her pockets. “The official report will state I arrived with the altercation in progress,” she said. “So, Mr. Hopkins, if you don’t mind—let’s get it in progress and show this man the fucking sights.”

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

7.

I took over the driving for my own health and safety. Back on the road, Pills drove with bags of chips and jelly beans in her lap, popping one or the other into her mouth with robotic regularity, washing them down with sips from a large metal water bottle that I suspected had something other than water in it. I felt caged. I wanted to be moving, to be doing things. Trapped in the passenger seat, I studied Pills just to have something to do and to stop myself from smashing everything in sight. Driving was better. At least I could imagine some of my energy was being pushed into the van, urging it on.

She didn’t look good. Her hair was unwashed, and formed a greasy black cloud around her face. Her skin looked yellow, her eyes red. One leg jerked up and down nervously as we drove, one hand constantly drumming on the armrest. Her clothes looked like they would stand up on their own. When had I last paid attention—real attention—to Jill Pilowsky? Now that I was paying attention, I thought she looked unbelievably tired, as if she hadn’t slept in weeks.

It reminded me of The Summer of Frank.

Frank had come into the Pilowsky home mysteriously. The way Jill told it, he was, initially, a smell—Lectric Shave, literally the poor man’s aftershave. Suddenly it was everywhere. Jill wasn’t a stranger to new and vaguely distasteful men suddenly appearing at breakfast; she’d learned that monosyllables and vague gestures at lady problems and vaginal discharge worked well enough to shut them up while she stared at her phone pretending to text with the many interesting and delightful friends she didn’t have. But she wasn’t sure how to handle a ghost. It was weeks before Frank appeared in the flesh.

Frank didn’t walk with the pinched, hungover shame of the other guys. He swaggered into the kitchen and talked. And talked. He called her Legs and Cutie and asked her questions without seeming interested in her answers, made jokes without seeming to care if she laughed, and stared at her in a direct, assessing way without seeming to care if Loretta Pilowsky noticed.

For the record, Loretta did not notice. Or if she did, she considered it one more asset in her campaign to keep Frank around.

Frank thought he was hilarious. Everywhere she went, Frank was there. She realized that even when he wasn’t physically there, she could smell him. Lectric Shave. It got into everything. Her clothes, the furniture, her hair. No matter how much time she spent out of the house, with me, getting lit in the park or crashing on the floor of my room, Uncle Pal and Aunt Mary scowling, whispering, she could still smell Frank. No matter how many showers she took. Or didn’t take, letting her hair get greasy, working up a serious funk, a grit on her neck.

It didn’t matter to Frank. He loved an audience.

She shrank. She dried up. She had deep hollows under her eyes. She slouched and stared and ate junk food like they were power ups in a video game. And I had to just sit and watch it.

“You’ll just make it worse,” she said, when I suggested I try to make Frank go away. A week later, we both tried to make Frank go away.

Do it, Maddie.

I thought of all the times Pills had called or texted me and I’d ignored her. Carrie hated her, so it was best not to bring Jill up at home. Best to let things go to voicemail. Had she stopped leaving messages? I thought so. You stop returning calls, people stop bothering. Eventually your gravity spins you off into a whole other galaxy, and then the number stops showing up in your recents, and then you find yourself thinking of the person a decade later, wondering where they are.

But every time I called her to play backup for me, she answered. Every time.

####

The highway stretched out and grew sparse. 78 turned into 24 turned into 202 turned into 80, a wide swath of blacktop pushing us west, the seams in the road hitting the wheels in a steady, hypnotic rhythm.

In Iowa we took Route 35 north until we hit 90, then turned west again. Just over the border from Minnesota, dark, blank fields on either side, Pills turned on the dome light and consulted her phone and a wrinkled paper map covered in her shaky notes, side by side.

“We’re gonna be on some pretty sketchy roads,” she said. “Take 229 to 29. About an hour.”

I nodded, putting the van in the left lane. It handled like a brick with three wheels, but we’d had about an hour to scrounge up a ride since Trim had refused to loan out the Blue Ruin for such a long time, visibly shocked that we’d even ask. The more time you spent with Damien the more you realized he was a man who lived in a pretty elaborate internal simulation of real life, complete with its own physics and rules of polite behavior. He was middle-aged and despite talking endlessly about his old friends, two guys he’d planned a robbery with, he didn’t seem to have any contact with them any more—or any other friends aside from Jill, if she counted. But it didn’t seem to bother him.

It was three o’clock in the morning, which suited me fine. I wanted to get a look at the town when everyone was asleep.

The emptiness freaked me out. I’d spent my whole life in a dense, crowded city, sweating bullets in the summer and freezing in the winter, the walls so thin every noise made it through. The darkness all around us made it feel like the world was being rendered in real time by our headlights, everything else a void. There had been nights during high school and immediately after, before the fall, before Carolina and Elspeth and the grind of being a person, when Pills and me had spent our evenings driving around in her old beater Taurus, nick-named The Boat, just trying to beat lights and buying beer wherever we could. But the city had been filled with light and sounds and other people, no matter how late it got. Driving through South Dakota was like driving off the edge of the world into darkness.

Half an hour in, Pills roused herself and began blurrily giving directions, sending us through a maze of roads that got narrower and less universally paved as they went. I wondered what she’d been taking and how much, how fucked up she was, if she could even read the scrawl on the map.

“Left,” she slurred.

I let the van cruise to a stop at the crossroads. There was nothing. A pair of stop signs, some power and telephone lines. To the left was a dirt road stretching off into gloom. It was so quiet the click of the turn signal was like a clap in my ear.

I hit the gas and turned the wheel, and then we were bumping down the road at a good clip. It started to grade upward, the darkness pulling at us as we climbed, the van’s engine grumbling about the elevation as we headed into some low hills. After a few minutes, I saw lights drawing closer. We turned up a long driveway marked by a relatively new PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. Thirty seconds later we pulled up outside what looked like a standard-issue gated community with haphazard landscaping—a few shrubs, a few bare trees, a lot of bare, brown dirt. The stucco wall stretched off into the darkness. A new-looking chain-link rolling gate blocked the entrance. I idled the Van and leaned forward to peer through the windshield. I could see a small, brightly-lit guard booth just past the gate, and the road continuing up into a neat row of trees. I couldn’t see anything else.

“Looks like the most boringest place on earth,” Pills yawned. “Except for the barbed wire.”

I angled my head. A curl of barbed wire snaked along the top edge of the wall. There was no sign, no identifying feature at all. A few scattered lights beyond the tiny guard house inside the gate was the only indication that this was a real place where people lived.

“Not exactly standard issue—”

Headlights bloomed to my left, and then the familiar red and blue flashers of law enforcement. I squinted into the glare, hands tightening on the steering wheel. A moment later, a car door opened, and then someone was walking towards us.

The figure resolved into a tall, dark-skinned woman in a tan and brown uniform, wearing a banged-up trucker-style hat with a gold star on it. She smiled, one hand on her sidearm as she gestured to me to roll down the window.

I did, noting the SHERIFF HARLEE COUNTY on her badge. The name plate pinned neatly above it read BATTEN.

“Evenin’ folks,” Sheriff Batten said. She had a cheerful twang to her voice, and a triangular face framed by deep smile lines. She was compact and held herself well, someone used to being physically in charge of most situations. “You might not be aware, but this is private property.”

I forced himself to smile. Rule numero uno with police was, if they were willing to play it polite, let them. “We’re a little lost, Sheriff.”

I watched as she did the traditional neck-crane. Her eyes roamed the interior of the van, lingered on Pills for a moment, then returned to me. “Where you folks from?”

“Jersey.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh.” Her hand was still on her sidearm. I didn’t let himself look, but I was willing to bet money that the strap was off. The safety, too.

Eye contact, I thought. The secret to every confrontation was eye contact. You had to control the space, the speed, and the shape of the interaction. I kept my smile in place and heard my knuckles pop as my hands tightened on the wheel.

“If I ran these plates,” the Sheriff said, looking down at the front fender, then sliding her eyes back to me with a playful little smile, “would they come back stolen?”

“I sure hope not,” Pills said. I didn’t react. I hoped fervently Jill was joking.

The Sheriff turned and leaned forward slightly, eyes roaming the interior of the van again. Then she made a tsking noice with her mouth. “All right, folks, free advice time. Turn the fuck around. Get the fuck unlost, and don’t let me see y’all up here again, you hear?”

That smile again. It was wide and friendly, a real shiteater of a grin. I had a momentary, insane urge to lift one hand off the wheel and pop her in the nose. Even seated, without leverage, I was certain I could put her on her ass and bust her nose wide open. For her part, Batten’s eyes told me she knew what I was thinking, like I had a thought bubble over my head. It was a truth universally acknowledged that being a dirty cop didn’t necessarily mean you were an incompetent cop. Experience told me that the reverse was true—the sharp ones got tired of risking their lives for peanuts.

Instead, I nodded. “You got it, Sheriff.”

She nodded and stepped back from the van, but didn’t return to her vehicle. I put the van into reverse, still smiling, and spun us around. I watched Sheriff Batten fade back behind us, framed by light. She’d just been sitting there in the dark, the fucking sheriff. I wondered whether she’d been elected first and then bought by the Outfit, or if it was the other way around.

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