Dustin recognized her right away—recognized her from one of the photos that Mr. John had shown him. Except now she was wearing a nightgown, slippers, and a bathrobe. Nancy looked lost in thought, walking a recycling bin down to the end of her driveway.
Dustin could not believe his luck. Quickly, he turned off his headlights, ducked down in the driver’s seat, counted to twenty. When he came back up in his seat, Nancy Howard was gone. But he knew which house was hers now, and he was ready.
Quietly, he gathered the bullets off his lap and the seat and the floor. He made sure his gun was loaded. He closed his eyes yet again. It had been a few hours now since his last hit, and though his head was still cloudy he was grateful for it—the drug would help him do what he couldn’t do sober.
“I’ll count to two hundred,” he told himself. “Give her a few minutes to get in bed.”
He’d counted to sixty when the police siren sounded behind him.
* * *
Officer Bethany Wright had had her eye on Dustin for some time, seen him circling the neighborhoods, pulling over at random, then starting again. He’d been driving so slowly, the cop hadn’t had much of a reason to stop him. But now that Dustin was just sitting there, in his car, with the headlights off and his engine still on, Wright felt that she had sufficient reason to question him.
“Sir,” she said as walked up to the driver’s side door and looked at the kid inside, pale and jittery in his threadbare Batman T-shirt. “How long have you been in Carrollton tonight?”
Dustin was breathing heavily. He’d had just enough time to hide the gun under the passenger seat.
“Been trying to find my uncle’s house now for two, three, four hours,” he said with a long, heavy sigh.
“The reason I ask is, I saw you earlier. And now I see you again…”
“Yeah. I was going in circles. Circles and circles. Circles and circles and circles and circles…”
Officer Wright fingered the strap on her holster. What the computer in her squad car had told her was that the Honda was a hundred miles away from its point of origin. And, even if the car was in the right place, the man sitting behind the wheel belonged elsewhere. Carrollton was an upscale town, easy and quiet. Sometimes the local kids would smoke grass or get drunk and dumb out in their pickups. But this kid, who could not have been older than twenty, was strung out on meth. That much was clear: He had that moldy shower-curtain smell that truly committed meth heads would get on their binges. And when the officer asked for his license—the kid was nineteen, it turned out—she saw that he was from a methed-out town in East Texas and didn’t belong in Carrollton at all.
“Will you please step out of the car?” she asked.