5

Ever since the night in the woods, Blue had known someone would come.

The reality was even worse than she had imagined. The gangbanger going door to door in the trailer park was a certified killer, a twentysomething Latino who everyone called Cobra. His quick knife strikes had earned him the nickname, along with the hooded black jacket he favored. Blue had never crossed paths with him, but she knew him on sight. His gang, Los Viburos, controlled the drugs that ran like diarrhea through the trailer park, and Cobra was their top enforcer. Whenever he rumbled in on his Honda CBR Interceptor, kicking up clouds of dust, the busy trailer park suddenly resembled a desert in the heat of the afternoon.

She peered through the plastic blinds in her bedroom. Sunlight glinted off the discarded toys and bicycles in the weed-filled yard of the trailer across the gravel drive. To her left, three doors down, Cobra was holding something in his open palm and asking questions about it. No doubt about it: the murderer who had chased her through the woods had found the items from the bag she had dropped. Maybe Cobra himself had been in the woods, maybe not. Didn’t matter. He was here now, and he was looking for the owner.

Looking for her.

When she had watched the film footage she had shot a few nights ago, all she had seen was the flash of a gunshot and then a swish of brown, which she assumed was a burlap sack used to drag the body away. She hadn’t seen the murderer or the victim, though whoever had committed the crime didn’t know that and would never believe her.

Over the last few days, she had run through the missing contents of her bag a million times in her head. Food stamps. Lipstick she never used. A stolen cigarette lighter. Her father’s Ghostbusters keychain. A flyer for the end-of-semester variety show at the high school.

No doubt the food stamps, recovered so close to the trailer park, had led Cobra here. The fancy silver cigarette lighter might have thrown him off for a day or two, or maybe he had assumed it was stolen. She didn’t know why he had waited so long to come.

The crazy part was the victim.

David Stratton, the Morning Star, shot dead in the swamp behind Barker’s Mill.

No way there were two murders in Creekville that close in time. David was the victim, and someone had dumped his body in the swamp.

And she had heard the whole thing.

It didn’t seem real. Popular kids didn’t get killed in the woods, and contract killers didn’t hunt down witnesses in Creekville. Had David been mixed up in the drug scene ? It seemed to be the only explanation. She had heard nothing like that at school, though she was hardly part of his circle. Still, gossip from the popular kids usually trickled down. She knew Elliot Jacobson and Fisher Star, two of his closest friends, used pot and coke and pharmies.

Or maybe David was a dealer. Maybe that was how his mom afforded that house between boyfriends. Maybe the Morning Star had slung some rock on the side and skimmed off the top, and Javier Ramirez, the head of Los Viburos, had signed his death warrant.

She watched Cobra finish another home visit and walk through the yard to the house next door to Blue’s, his boots squashing the tiny pyramids the fire ants made in the dirt.

As she let the shutters close, her hands trembled like an alcoholic’s. If she didn’t calm down, Cobra would know she was hiding something. For once, she wished her mother was at home and didn’t work two jobs and sleep at her boyfriend’s house most nights.

Whenever she needed to leave without leaving, whether to flee the soul-numbing reality of the trailer park or a humiliating situation at school or to escape an abusive stepfather, all three of which had come and gone like bad weekends, Blue went to the safe space in her head.

She went to the movies.

Was this an Indiana Jones problem? Crocodile Dundee, Lethal

Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop ? Just thinking about those films brought a smile to her lips, calmed her down a fraction.

But no. This was not a time for larger-than-life, sugar-coated eighties films. The danger outside was all too real. She had to channel true emotion. RagingBull territory. The Color Purple. The Killing Fields.

Grit, realism, survival.

Blood and fury.

With a deep breath and a snarl, Blue strode to the cabinet above the sink and grabbed the bottle of Southern Comfort. The whiskey burned as it went down, so bad it made her choke. But she kept it down and felt better. Calmer, more in control.

Okay, Blue. Think.

Cobra didn’t know who had been in the woods that night, or he wouldn’t be going door to door. Should she hide ? Run away? Give him the camera and come clean?

All of those options were risky. Hide, and she looked guilty. Give him the camera, and he would probably decide to tie up loose ends. She could run if she had to, but she didn’t have the money to get very far, and she feared he would find her. Contrary to what regular people thought, people on the street all knew each other. Unless she took to the woods—and she didn’t have the skills to survive long term—Cobra would catch wind of her before long. Someone would narc.

She couldn’t go to the police, either. Cops didn’t protect people like her.

Pushing out a breath, she decided she had to face him and throw him offthe scent. The variety show flyer suggested a high school student, or maybe the parent of one. But there were a dozen teens living in the trailer park. Blue kept her dark hair short, as short as a boy’s. She had worn a denim jacket the night of the murder. With any luck, whoever had glimpsed her in the woods would assume he had seen a young man.

The only other identifying object was the Ghostbusters key ring. No one had seen her with it, she was sure of that. She never took it out. It was one of the few things she owned that belonged to her father, a private thing she kept from the world.

A knock at the door. Soft but insistent.

This was it, then. More deep breaths. She bit down hard on her lip to calm her nerves. Right before she opened the door, Blue took another swig and let the whiskey fire spread through her belly. She channeled the working class sneer of DeNiro, the helpless rage of a young black woman in rural Georgia in the 1930s.

In the open doorway, so close she could smell the musk of his cologne, a clean-shaven face peered at her from deep inside the hood. His stare was like an ice pick, cold and bladed, unfeeling.

“Yeah?” she said, somehow managing not to croak the word.

He thrust his hand forward, causing her to flinch, but instead of striking her, Cobra opened his palm to reveal the food stamps, key ring, and flyer she had dropped. “These belong to you? I found them in the woods.”

It was the first time she had ever heard him speak. His voice was soft and calm, with the faintest trace of an accent. Though she yearned to grab her father’s key ring and slam the door in his face, she flicked her eyes down at his palm, noticing the underside of a black ring, then gave a nonchalant shrug. “Nope.”

His stare lingered so long she felt tendrils of fear creeping up her legs and down her arms, slow and malevolent. “What about a friend?”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“That’s too bad.”

Blue put a hand on the door frame. “That’s life.”

His eyes roamed past her, studying the interior. The intelligence in his eyes unnerved her. She had imagined him as an empty vessel, a dumb thug with a gun.

Then again, that was probably the assumption people made about her. Ignorant white trash from the trailer park.

“You smoke ?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

He was still holding his left palm out. With his other hand, he reached into a coat pocket, withdrew a packet of Marlboro Lights, and offered her one. She accepted. With a deft series of movements, he shook the cigarettes out, returned the pack to his coat, then took a lighter out of his back pocket. At first, she thought it was the silver lighter she had lost, and her knees felt watery. Watching her the entire time, Cobra lit her cigarette, and then his own.

It was a stainless steel lighter, but not the silver one. He closed his palm over the lost items. “Ask around for me. Find out who these belong to.”

Was he toying with her, she wondered? Did he know?

“Okay,” she said, forcing indifference into her voice.

“There’s something in it for you if you do.”

“How do I find you?”

“I’ll be back. Soon.” He blew smoke, backed away slowly, then turned and started walking down the gravel drive pockmarked with potholes that snaked around the trailer park.

“Hey,” she called out.

Cobra stopped, did a half-turn.

“Thanks for the smoke.”

He took another drag, raised the cigarette in acknowledgment, then continued on to the next trailer.

With a shudder, Blue shut the door and sank to the floor, shivering as if she had the flu.