The highway to Dallas was nearly empty. Night had fallen. Irons had flipped on his headlights and told Jamal that he could call his mother. Half this plan had been her idea in the first place.
“Won’t it look bad that I’ve run?” Jamal had asked his lawyer, and Irons had insisted that whatever they did would look bad. Hopefully, Irons had said, once Jamal’s cousin in Dallas had gotten him to Atlanta, the lawyer could subpoena footage from the security company that monitored the Tanner ranch and prove Jamal’s alibi.
Jamal hadn’t known what to say to that. However prudent or miraculous this escape may be, the fact remained that he was running away from a crisis he knew he had helped to create in the first place.
All this past summer, Dylan’s mood had pitched wildly at any moment from giddy to morose, from generous to petty to irritable to enraged. As his friends’ trips to the coast became more frequent, Jamal had never found the sack to say a word about what was clearly a dire (and worsening) secret.
With a queasy flood of shame, Jamal remembered the lazy afternoon three weeks ago when—a few minutes after he’d sent those fateful text messages to Bethany: Let’s do it—Dylan had sighed through a cloud of weed smoke in his stuffy attic and said, with a faint trace of something Jamal recognized now, too late, as fear, “It’s like a fever. It makes you crazy.”
“The weed?”
“Like, love.” Dylan laughed. He always laughed when he talked about his own feelings, as if it were some embarrassing insult of nature that he had any at all. But then he said it again, a tremor in his hands. “Love.”
Jamal suspected that Dylan wasn’t talking about Bethany. He should have pressed his friend, should have asked why he was seeing somebody if it made him so miserable, and yet all Jamal had done was mind his own business, take a drag on their blunt, say, “It’ll chill eventually, right? You have to do what makes you happy.”
That was Jamal, ever the backbencher. Cheerleading in the places the girls couldn’t reach.
Just what, he wondered, had he cheered Dylan into doing?
Jamal hadn’t called his mother yet. As he and Irons crossed the line into Burleson County, Jamal saw that Kimbra Lott hadn’t answered the messages he’d sent her since his escape. The face that the girl had worn when she’d left the interview room this morning—stubborn, brash, curious—had haunted him all day.
“Don’t let those guys fuck you up,” he’d told her, because when Kimbra asked him about the Bright Lands, Jamal had remembered plenty of rumors about that place: weird gossip the backbenchers were smart enough to only whisper about when certain players came close. Stories about a party in the Flats where boys swore a blood oath of secrecy, made pacts that followed them all their lives. It had always sounded so ridiculous, like the cheap seriousness of a fraternity in a movie. But now he wondered.
Kimbra’s silence over the last hour had spooked him. She was never away from her phone.
Jamal called her. It went to voice mail.
KT sounded stoned when he picked up Jamal’s call a minute later.
“Yo,” Jamal said, dialing down the end of the game on the car radio. “Where’s Kimbra?”
A long pause. “She’s supposed to be meeting me here.”
“After the game?”
“This afternoon.”
“Then where is she?” Jamal stared at the empty road. Mr. Irons gave him a curious look. “Bro, she was asking questions today about that place you and Dylan used to go.” Jamal paused. Why did the words frighten him so badly when they were poised on his lips? “The Bright Lands.”
After a long silence, KT said, “That was dumb of her.”
“She’s in trouble, ain’t she?” Jamal said.
Silence.
“Where are you now?”
“At home.”
“Stay there.”
Jamal lowered the phone. He choked on the smell of cinnamon cologne. Irons’s knuckles were almost white on the wheel. “Change of plans.”
“No,” the lawyer said.
“Please. My friend’s in trouble.”
“And you’re not?”
“Nobody will even know I’m in town. With the game—”
“You’re not that stupid, son. Don’t play me like I am, either.”
“Turn around.” Jamal swallowed, almost couldn’t believe what he was about to say. He felt, suddenly, that he had no choice. “Turn around or I’ll confess.”
“It wouldn’t stand up after we get the security footage.”
“You’re right, I’m not dumb. But if you think Mr. Tanner hasn’t found a way to get that footage deleted—”
Irons spun the wheel of the car. The Mercedes fishtailed as it turned its way back to Bentley.
A silent hour later, Irons slid to a halt outside the dark Staler house, idled with one foot on the brake and said, “Don’t do this, Reynolds. Please. If you get out of this car you’re on your own.”
Jamal tried to smile. “Thank you for the ride.”
Irons said nothing. The moment Jamal stepped out onto the cracked sidewalk, Mr. Irons’s Benz pulled away with a roar.
Jamal Reynolds, he thought to himself. You are a fucking idiot.
He started up the overgrown lawn toward the dark house, shivering in his leather jacket despite the warmth of the night. Before Jamal could make it to the front door, KT called from the backyard. “Around here.”
There was something broken in his voice.
Jamal found him seated alone in a lawn chair in the middle of the yard, staring at the eerie hook of moon that hung above them. It illuminated the awful bruise on KT’s cheek, the backpack at his feet, the phone in his lap.
“They let you out,” KT said.
“I’m on the run.”
“You ran the wrong way.”
Jamal couldn’t remember the last time they’d talked like this, just the two of them, Dylan nowhere to be seen. It might have been never.
“Kimbra’s in trouble, man.”
“We’re all in trouble.”
“I know you two didn’t just go to the coast on those weekends you wasn’t here. I know you went to that party first. You tried to act like it wasn’t real that one time you saw me listening to you and D but you can’t fool me.”
KT snorted. “Oh no, sir, nobody could ever fool you.”
Jamal refused to be distracted. “I know that’s where y’all was going the night Dylan died, after the game. And I think Kimbra knows that too. I tried to stop her asking questions but—”
“It’s not my fault it’s awake now.”
Jamal blinked. “Awake? What’s awake?”
“I know what you want me to do.” KT’s eyes grew wide, the bruise bulging as a nerve worked in his jaw. “They’d kill me if I went out there again. They’d kill all of us.”
“I think Kimbra might have learned something about that party. I think somebody’s going to hurt her to keep her quiet.”
“And you think you can stop it?” KT said. He started to laugh.
Jamal struck him, hard, on his bruised cheek. He grabbed the legs of KT’s chair and wrenched it out from under him, spilling him into the grass. He kicked KT in the ass.
“All that time I knew you were getting yourself in trouble with those other guys and I didn’t say shit!” Jamal shouted. “I didn’t want to get in your business. But now my best friend is dead, your girlfriend’s in trouble and someone in this fucking town is trying to put me on death row. So you and me are going to fix this. Now.”
KT lay curled in the grass, a hand over his face. He didn’t move.
“Was it your idea to frame me?” Jamal said.
KT trembled, bracing for another blow, but Jamal only adjusted his jacket. What did it matter?
“Get up.”
After a long pause, KT dragged himself to his feet.
Jamal said, “They took her out there, didn’t they? It’s the best place to hurt someone if you want to hide it. I bet it was dumb luck Dylan’s body was ever found. What do you want to bet they’d get luckier next time?”
KT scowled at him, rubbed his cheek. If he was going to tell Jamal anything else, he wasn’t going to do it now. All he said was, “Where’s your car?”
Jamal stopped. “What happened to yours?”
“It’s impounded. Up in Dallas.”
“What about your sister’s?”
“Mom totaled it.”
“You’re telling me you ain’t got a car here?”
KT picked up his chair. He shrugged. “Life’s a bitch. You wanna sleep here tonight?”
Jamal couldn’t think of anything to say. He watched KT lower himself into the chair, felt his heart slowing. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real.
And then a brilliant pair of headlights washed over the street out front. A truck rumbled to a stop at the curb. Jamal jogged around the side of the house to see Whiskey Brazos and T-Bay Baskin starting up the walk to the house. They gawped at him.
“You’re out,” T-Bay said.
“It’s a long story.”
Whiskey cleared his throat. “Are you here about Joel Whitley?”
“Joel?” Jamal looked between the two of them. “We’re looking for Kimbra.”
A second truck pulled to a stop behind the first and Jamal fought a violent urge to flee at the sight of the woman behind the wheel. It passed when he saw the way Officer Clark regarded him with nothing more than a cool interest.
“She’s with us,” T-Bay said. “We’re going to that place.”
Officer Clark rolled down her window and said, “Where’s KT?”
Jamal heard something. He slipped back into the yard just in time to pull KT down from atop the fence over which he was trying to escape. Jamal marched the shaking boy to the front of the house, a hand clamped over the back of KT’s neck.
“Right here. And he’s going to take us.”