Two hot hours later, Joel was thoroughly lost in the countryside. KT had only mentioned in passing that Garrett’s brother lived “out on 270 past the water towers,” and while Joel had had no issue finding the water towers west of town—they stood weeping rust onto a cow pasture long since abandoned—he soon discovered that County Road 270 in fact terminated a few miles past them. Road 270 split into two new roads, both of which unwound and eventually split again themselves. Joel passed small houses with black scabby windows, ancient trucks parked in their yards, and yet he hadn’t seen another soul for miles. Driving with the convertible’s ruined top folded down he soon felt the sun searing his hands to the wheel.
Google Maps was little help to him. Some of these roads didn’t even appear on the screen, and those that did refused all analysis. There was no Street View. The overlay of a satellite image simply revealed what he already knew: he was nowhere. He wandered a road until he reached a dead end, doubled back, tried again. No wonder people never went into the Flats east of Bentley. He could only imagine how maddening it would be to traverse this much emptiness without even a gravel road to make you feel tethered, however tenuously, to some more ordered world.
A text message arrived from Clark: Still driving.
He responded: Same.
Joel thought about Clark’s mom, about the time the woman had told him to kiss a piece of gold—“Real gold,” Margo had insisted. “Not that cheap shit your mother drags out on game nights”—to keep the devil away. What a strange world that lady must have lived in if the devil himself was only ever a few steps down the hall.
And what a world Joel lived in now. Her world. Because when he considered the eyes that had watched him at the park ten years ago, when he thought of whatever had stepped out of his car last night, when he took stock of all that he’d seen and heard this week, what answer was he left with?
That Margo might have been right all along.
Another message came from Kimbra Lott:
no word on that bright lands place—been keeping it low-key but so far nobody knows shit (which is maybe weird by itself??) will keep you posted.
When Joel had texted her late last night to ask Kimbra about the “White Lands boys” that she’d mentioned earlier in the evening, the girl had said yes, she’d probably misheard KT when he’d mentioned them over the summer. Last night, Kimbra had sounded eager to continue helping Joel, even though KT had already been found, safe and somewhat sound in Dallas, and for the life of him Joel still couldn’t guess why.
Not for the first time he felt apprehensive about asking Kimbra to play spy for him. If his suspicions were correct and this secret place—whatever it was—had something to do with Dylan’s death, then there was no reason someone might not kill again to keep it hidden.
Joel wrote:
Saw KT. He’s ok, not very talkative. I think you should stop asking around about this. Something bad is going on.
The unmarked road on which he’d been traveling petered out at a muddy pond. A thin band of gravel led to the southwest, off into more nowhere. To the north, however, far in the distance, Joel spotted something odd shimmering in the heat: a dense vivid block of red and green.
A few minutes later, he saw that it was a little shack tucked into a thicket of red, white and green signs. Even from yards away he knew what those signs would say. He’d seen them around town all week.
There were signs in the grass and signs in the windows, signs on the doors and pasted over the roof. MY HERD MY GLORY declared the green ones. The red ones were predictable, political, frightfully mundane. Who these signs were hoping to persuade Joel couldn’t imagine. The shack looked to be the only building for miles.
Joel parked well away, idled for a long time. Nothing moved. He dug a finger beneath the sheath of the knife on his ankle, scraping at a nasty itch that had spread since last night. Clark had offered him a gun earlier and he’d declined it, certain he would be more likely to shoot himself than someone else. Now that he’d arrived here he wished he’d taken his chances.
A breeze rustled the signs in the yard. He felt a faint, silent tremor rise from the dirt road and shake the wheel of the convertible.
Enough screen had fallen from the door’s outer frame Joel needed only to reach through and knock. A Bison sign was hung there, and in the Bison’s eye a small circle had been cut to keep the door’s peephole uncovered. Joel knocked again.
The Bison’s eye darkened to study him.
A moment later, Ranger Mason was standing a few inches and a lifetime away from Joel.
“You.”
“Me,” Joel agreed.
Ranger had withered. A stained green jersey hung from his bony frame. The snake tattoo on his neck now ended abruptly at his Adam’s apple. Nobody had told Joel that the bomb Ranger had fallen on in Iraq had peeled off most of his face in addition to taking off half his hand. A hollow socket stared back at Joel from deep inside the old scars.
“If I’d known you was coming I’d have put my eye in,” Ranger said.
“You’re a hard guy to find.”
“That’s intentional.” A pause. “Well, shit. We’re air-conditioning the outdoors.”
Joel followed him into the shack. Inside it reeked of chili and stale cigarettes and some sweet pallid primal stink. The shack was nothing but a single room: a grimy kitchenette to one end, a rumpled daybed on the other, a wide TV on the wall catching a choppy satellite signal. There was a door in the back that looked to lead outside and another to the side that Joel assumed concealed a bathroom. He thought of his own apartment with its marble counters, its Italian furniture. He’d never felt so cultivated, which was saying something.
Ranger muted the television as he walked by. On it, Joel spotted the Bison field, saw people already claiming seats five hours before the game. The man opened a rusted refrigerator and removed two beers.
“You can push that shit to the floor,” Ranger said, indicating a sunken easy chair, its seat covered in a heap of green jerseys identical to the one that dangled over his gaunt shoulders.
“Cheers.” Ranger passed Joel a tepid beer. “The hell happened to your face?”
“Wesley Mores.”
Ranger threw his head back and laughed. He reached out his gnarled half hand to pat Joel on the shoulder—Joel couldn’t help but flinch at the touch—and said, “Thank you, Whitley. I needed that.”
The man dragged over the solid oak daybed with his good arm and sat. He held his bottle between his legs and wrenched off the cap with the claw of his ruined hand. He drank most of the bottle in a single pull.
Joel sat. He sipped his beer and readied himself. He wondered how exactly you were supposed to ask a man what he had come here to ask.
Before Joel could say a word, Ranger burped and told him, “Jason Ovelle is dead. I’m sure he’s involved in this somehow.”
Joel blinked.
“They found him on Tuesday, in a motel up outside that town Mexia. You know the place?”
“A couple of hours north. What was he doing up there?”
“Precisely. His mother knew how to find me. She asked me to go identify him. As a friend of the family.”
“An overdose?”
“That’s what they told her. Oxy. Oxycodone. You know what it is?”
Oh, did Joel ever. A breeze stirred an army blanket that had been nailed over a busted window. Joel thought of the bottle of pills he’d discovered in his brother’s nightstand, wondered if he and Clark had been too hasty to assume Dylan hadn’t been involved in drugs after all. “It’s a painkiller.”
“Makes you loopier than morphine, yeah. But downers like Oxy was never Jason’s style,” Ranger said. “He might have got a little wired on ice every now and then but lately he hadn’t even been using that. He said he was clean the last time I saw him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t feel bad for the man, that game had already ruined him. The busted ankle he had? Nobody likes to remember he got that at the play-offs. If he’d been any use to the team the school wouldn’t have given two shits about his grades, but after that injury—” Ranger snickered his old snicker. “You want to know the sorry part? Jason been allergic all his life to that sticky shit on the back of tape. Glue. What’s the word?”
“Adhesive?”
“Bless you. Adhesive. That shit so much as grazed him, Jason got himself these awful red hives all on his skin. I’d seen it before.”
Ranger drank.
“The cops up in Mexia say it must have been suicide, all the pills he took. But I want to know why he would have taped over his own mouth once he’d swallowed the damn bottle. Because sure enough he had them hives all the way around his cheeks. They let me see his wrists. His ankles. Same thing. Somebody had trussed him up like a pig and tore all the tape off when they was done, Whitley. I’m sure it were an accident.”
Joel said, “There’s been a lot of those lately. Officer Grissom suddenly took up smoking last night and forgot to turn off his oxygen.”
“Hmph.”
“I know that Grissom arrested your brother in July for dealing drugs with KT Staler. The deputy had an accident on his horse a few weeks later. And then last night, after he started talking again, his house burns down. Am I crazy for wondering if these aren’t quite coincidences?”
“I’ll never understand that Grissom. He knew better.”
“Knew better than to arrest one of the golden boys?”
A grackle squawked outside. The drone of cicadas resonated in the small crevices of Joel’s ears. The only decoration Joel saw anywhere in the shack was a long shelf of football trophies that had gone dull with age. One had lost its arm.
“Wesley said you were one of them,” Joel said.
“Mores was fruitier than banana bread.” Ranger spat a glob of snot into a tissue and dropped it to his feet. He watched it fall. “There’s some boys in Pettis County you just don’t touch, Whitley. As you discovered.”
On the television, a reporter on assignment from the city, a woman with better skin than anyone in miles, was interviewing a little cluster of men standing around a portable grill near the football field’s end zone. Despite all the chaos of yesterday, despite the fact that the team’s quarterback had died on Monday and another had been arrested on felony murder charges, the headline at the bottom of the screen read 5 TIPS FOR PERFECT “BISON” BURGERS.
“Everything that happened to me in the park with Grissom—did you have some hand in that? Was that the price I paid for throwing a punch at you?”
“I hated you something awful.” Ranger looked exhausted, like he’d spent a decade kicking through sleepless nights. “I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Why? Why protect these people?” Joel made a show of appraising the filthy kitchen, the bed. “They’ve clearly taken such good care of you.”
A long silence. The TV flickering blue and white.
Ranger’s scarred face took on an eerie sheen when he smiled. He made a noise that could have been a chuckle. “Hell with it—what sort of fucks do I give now? Ten years ago, I had Jason take care of things for me while I was overseas. I knew that Troy was digging himself a hole of debt the size of Mexico with all the tweak he was using and he was eyeing an exit. Jason and me, we knew where to get some money to pay off Troy’s debt—somebody big owed us a fortune, you wouldn’t want to hear why. And to top it all off, I knew a deputy who would just love to hear a tip about a young boy waiting all alone in a shady park. It worked out well for all parties involved. Present company excluded of course.”
“And the pictures?”
“Whitley, it was all just meanness.” Ranger flipped his mangled hand. “We used to run this town, Jason and me. Not that it’s done me any good.”
Joel rested his beer on the ground. He couldn’t drink any more. “Then what happened to Troy?”
“He left town that Friday, the night you was arrested. That was our deal. God only knows why his girl didn’t report him missing for so long. He was out of work, they was separated, maybe she didn’t know he’d left. Tell me something, Joel. I’ve always wondered—did Troy come to the park that night after all?”
Joel remembered the sound of tires pulling away. “He did. He must have seen Grissom’s cruiser and known it was too late.”
“Troy cared for you, you know. He didn’t want to do any of it, he was crackling on a bad connection from the other side of the world saying, ‘Can’t we come to some other terms?’” Ranger rose, headed for the kitchen. “But I had him by the balls and he knew it. I wanted your head on a silver platter.”
Joel caught something in Ranger’s voice. A small piece clicked into place. “You were jealous of us. You knew we were happy.”
Ranger stopped, his arm inside the rusted fridge.
“He’s dead, irregardless,” Ranger said. “Jason and the others made to pay back the Mexicans but the money was way overdue. Benicio had done took care of your boy already.”
The smell of this cramped, sweaty shack was making Joel nauseous. He hadn’t come here to learn any of this. He would have been happier not knowing.
If you don’t go tonight there’s no stopping it.
Joel cleared his throat. “KT Staler said selling drugs around here was your idea.”
Ranger scoffed. “The drugs have been going on for ages. It’s simple—just use some of that golden boy immunity to sell product the cops won’t hassle you for. After Troy went away, Jason thought it was a brilliant idea and started selling with the Staler boy’s sister—that crazy bitch, Savannah—until the two of thems got busted on the other side of the county line, where they wasn’t safe. Fast forward nine years, Jason gets out of Huntsville, comes back to town, finds out pretty quick KT’s looking for money to move away and somehow KT roped Garrett into selling with him. Jason didn’t tell the boys how things had ended up with Troy, of course. I told all three of them it was about the dumbest idea a man could ask for, but the money was too damn good, I guess. Jason said they’d be cleverer than last time, they wouldn’t get their product from the Mexicans. He’d heard all about this new thing when he was locked up. You can buy drugs off the internet now—did you know that? They call it the dark web.
“Those little bag boys always work the same. KT would get the product delivered off the internet to somewhere here in town. He and Garrett picked it up. Garrett sold some to folks around the county and kept some for their little gang. KT would drive a chunk of it up to Dallas and hand it off to some hotshot he knew up there—KT must have a stack of money the size of a house. Jason skipped town after the three of them got busted by Grissom in July but the arrest didn’t stop the younger boys. Jason was turning over a new leaf in Austin. He was out a few grand worth of product before the arrest so I guess he finally got desperate enough. He must have thought he could sneak into town during Friday’s game and make off with some money while they was playing. Fucking idiot.” Ranger pointed a scarred finger at Joel as if this were his fault. “Jason knew the old boys had gotten tired of him. He’d outspent his loyalty, you know.”
Joel struggled to make sense of this. “And you think Jason was killed for that? Just for coming back to town?”
Ranger burped. “This place is old, Whitley. It has rules.”
Joel’s eyes drifted to the TV screen, where the reporter with the perfect skin was talking to a man in a cowboy hat that shaded his face. The man was stationed near the football stands, a meat smoker belching beside him. Standing behind the smoker, staring at the camera with its glassy black eyes, was the stuffed bison Joel had seen on the highway last Friday as he’d made his way into town.
imissedyou.
Joel went very still when he looked at Ranger again. He was smiling, but there was no joy in it. Something had come loose inside the man. No light from the TV could penetrate the hole where his eye should be.
“Ranger—” Joel heard anxiety thrumming in his voice: he needed to get out of this house. “How does Dylan fit into all of this?”
“You really ain’t asking the right questions here, Whitley. Why ain’t you asking what broke me? Who killed that friend of Parter’s? Who invited Troy—”
“Parter?” Joel leaned back. “Coach Parter? A friend of his died?”
Ranger laughed. He sounded incredulous. “You mean you never heard of Corwin Broadlock? I thought all that business with him is what started you down this road in the first place. The boy was just like your brother.”
At the sound of Broadlock’s name, static began to creep through the TV’s muted speakers in a long, mad whisper, the radio-whisper, the dream-whisper—imissedyou—and it set to work inside Joel’s skull.
On the television the stuffed bison seemed to cock its head at him like a bird.