Pain. The blaring horns awoke him to a pain in the back of his head so terrible he wondered if his brain was trying to wrench itself out through his skull. Joel strained to touch the wound, certain he would feel the soft gray matter exposed, but he couldn’t move his hands. His arms were spread wide, shackled to some sort of bar suspended from the ceiling above him that rattled when he moved. His feet had been secured to the floor. He heard a rustling noise somewhere ahead of him. Through the darkness he could just discern a shape on the floor maybe ten feet away.
“My Herd, My Glory.” That’s what those fucking horns were playing. Somewhere outside—outside meaning he was inside, his battered mind told him, okay, he was getting somewhere—there was the chatter of a small crowd of people. Joel tried to scream for help but found that his lips were sealed together. He tasted adhesive. Oh boy.
God, the pain. It brought back a jumble of memories: Deputy Browder shouting that Kimbra had been hurt. Seeing thousands of dollars spread around the floor as he ran inside the hardware store. The young cop going very quiet behind him. A blinding rush of—
Joel’s eyes burned as a door opened and light spilled in from outside. The shapes of two men appeared, one tall and heavy, the other shorter, more tightly packed. The two were followed, a moment later, by a lithe, muscled form that could only be Browder.
“Don’t let that door bolt,” said Mr. Boone, the county attorney. “My key—fuck, what did you do?”
Deputy Browder closed the door softly. There was a click and a bare red light came on overhead, illuminating what looked like the inside of a small camper trailer. Joel was standing, he saw, in what had once been a living room but had long ago been emptied of all furniture but a black leather sofa. Hanging from nails across black walls were a range of instruments that Joel recognized from sex shops and some of the stranger corners his nocturnal adventures in Manhattan had taken him: riding crops, paddles, ball gags, chains.
The three men paid him no attention. They were standing in the camper’s bare kitchen, staring at the shape Joel had earlier seen on the floor. It was Kimbra Lott, he realized: her feet bound with black tape, her hands cuffed to something on the wall.
“Christ Jesus,” said Coach Parter.
“Why the hell did you bring her here?” Boone said.
“She’d been asking questions around the school,” Deputy Browder said. “I was watching the bank while Jones was on his break—I saw her go into the store. I just wanted to talk to her, figure out what she’d heard. I didn’t know she was going to scream.”
“Christ Jesus,” Parter said again.
“Has her father heard yet? That she’s here?” said Boone.
“Are you smoking that ice now too?” said Parter. “Can you imagine what the little blossom would do if he knew about this?”
A long moment of deliberation. Boone played his nails along a black metal refrigerator that rested near the kitchen’s doorway. “There might be some leverage in it.”
Parter pulled a face. Joel caught, in the coach’s scowl, decades’ worth of dissatisfaction with the county attorney. A fraying patience.
Boone rounded on Joel. “Mr. Whitley, how are you?”
Joel stared at him.
The man motioned to Browder. The tattooed young deputy slid a long knife from a sheath at his waist—“The wound to the neck was caused by a serrated blade about six inches long,” Clark had told him Wednesday night (really, you don’t say?)—and tossed it casually in the air. Caught it. Tossed it. Caught it. Browder wore only a pair of baggy jeans and a leather jacket over his bare chest.
A jacket, but no shirt. A costume like the ones these men were wearing. Like Dylan had been wearing.
“You ain’t gonna holler on us, are you?” said the deputy, drawing close, holding the point of the knife a few inches from Joel’s eye.
Joel pulled back, shook his head no.
Browder ripped the tape from Joel’s mouth. Joel didn’t make a sound.
Boone gave Browder a dismissive little flick of his hand.
“Mr. Whitley, it’s good to finally meet you. I apologize for the circumstances.”
Joel said nothing.
“You must be awful curious about all this.” Boone gave the implements along the wall the broad gesture of a TV hostess revealing a prize. He said with more than a touch of pride, “It’s like the sort of thing you might find in the city, no? Look, here, this way.”
Boone stepped to the wall to swing open a black shutter and reveal a barred window. Joel saw other trailers outside, strings of lights, young men. Naked young men.
Joel caught one of those young men—was that Luke Evers?—glance at him, an eyebrow raised, a moment before Boone pushed the shutter closed.
“I want you to imagine something, Mr. Whitley,” Boone said, and immediately Joel realized why Clark had spoken of this man so dismissively: he was a born jackass. “I want you to imagine three young men in Nowhere, Texas, who were given the chance to carve out a little piece of country where they could be themselves. Maybe invite a few folks they knew was like them, some other boys who was just a little bit peculiar. Different. Harmless.”
Browder and Parter grimaced, shifted on their feet in the kitchen and looked impatient. Kimbra lay motionless between them. Mr. Boone adjusted the leather harness strapped over his chest and gave Joel a politician’s nod, all gravitas.
“Things ain’t changed much around here since Korea, Mr. Whitley. The crazy seventies, that was all going on someplace else. We was still living in a town where the old ways was the best ways. And we didn’t feel no need to change that. We valued it. Everyone knows your name in Bentley, holds the door at the grocery, brings over food in the hard times. It was our home.” Boone wiped his eyes. The man, to Joel’s astonishment, was suddenly buckling under real emotion.
“Bentley was beautiful. There just wasn’t room there in it for all of us.”
Joel’s eye fell on a row of wooden instruments on the wall.
“Mr. Whitley, when that opportunity to make something beautiful fell into our laps, you can bet we took it, yes, sir. The chance to make a place where we could go release a few urges and then head back to our brothers on the team, head back to our girls, our wives and children. Could go back to the right sort of life. We made a safe space for us and the boys who came after. Can you imagine the pain we’ve relieved here over the years? Can you imagine the good we’ve done?”
Joel was too injured to be clever. He said only, “If it’s so safe then why is my brother dead?”
The three men all looked away. A faint tremor in the earth set a pair of long metal rods—God, not even Joel could imagine what those were used for—clacking together on the wall.
“Dylan’s death was unfortunate,” Boone said, acting as if he hadn’t noticed the trailer shake. The man nodded to Parter. “By the time us Old Boys heard what the young ones had done to your brother—well—things was too far along to smooth over. We would have saved you a lot of heartbreak if we could have, Mr. Whitley. We’re truly sorry.”
Joel’s arms were starting to burn. He’d gotten sick of this man. Hoping to jostle him, perhaps play on some of the frustration he had caught earlier between Boone and the coach, Joel said, “Is that the same comfort you offered Clark’s family?”
“Troy was—”
“What about Corwin Broadlock’s parents?”
The name had a much stronger effect than Joel had intended. Coach Parter seemed to fly across the trailer—for such a big man he could certainly move—one thick arm pulled back to throw a punch. Joel felt a distant pain in his temple as his mind went dark again.