Jamal wasn’t entirely certain what a generator was supposed to sound like, but he didn’t care one bit for the wet sputtery noises the Bright Lands’ generator was coughing up. The trailer park appeared to be run entirely off a single massive black box that stood taller than Jamal by a good six inches. The name on its face—MITSUBISHI—was dancing violently a few inches to his right. He wondered if the thing had been hit in all the gunfire. Frankly, he didn’t want to find out.
“I hope you understand the arrest weren’t nothing personal, Reynolds,” Coach Parter said, hands over his head. “When Boone told Mason to hold on to Whitley’s socks I never thought we’d find a use for them. But once Staler started setting you up with the cops, saying you was mad at Dylan for some reason, well...”
Jamal said nothing. The big man stood a few feet away, just past the front of the triple-wide, the shotgun somewhere in the dirt. Parter had dropped the .38 easy enough when Jamal had come around the back of the trailer a moment before. The warning shot Jamal had fired had certainly helped the coach over any hesitation.
Ahead and to the left of Parter, on the steps of the orange RV, Luke Evers lay in blood.
Parter glanced back at Jamal over his shoulder. “It was all just bad luck.”
Jamal cocked the hammer of the revolver and felt the gun tremble in his hand with a supple, satisfying clunk—why didn’t every black man in this state own a gun? Jamal wondered—and Parter froze at the sound.
“You ever notice the only brown kid here is light enough to be white?”
Parter swallowed.
Jamal shouted to the others. “We doing this or what?”