The lights died, and the explosion knocked the triple-wide into the black camper. Like a capsizing ship, the camper tipped into the dirt, the shutters swinging closed and sending Clark—who had just lodged an arm over the Browder thing’s windpipe—rolling off of him and tumbling into the sudden inky dark.
Joel heard Clark strike something hard in the kitchen. She righted herself as Browder ran toward her. Joel grabbed for the deputy but caught nothing but air.
Between the damage to his skull, the blood lost from his ruined shoulder and now this canted floor, Joel felt hopelessly disorientated, jet-lagged, as if his mind had left his body in a safer, colder time zone. He wasn’t sure how he was still conscious. When Browder and Clark collided with the far wall, some cracked piece of Joel’s brain wondered what the queens with whom he’d gone to Tulum would say when they heard that Joel Whitley—the brooding boy with the chest and the black card and a drug dealer in every city—had run out his brief clock in a mildewed mobile home in the middle of nowhere.
“I’d say you deserve better.”
A sudden warm draft lifted the hairs on the back of Joel’s neck.
“I’d say you deserve more of that fifty-k.”
A dull amber light came from somewhere just over his shoulder. Years later, Joel would imagine a thousand explanations for the voice he heard in his head at that moment.
But Joel knew something he would never tell a soul: his brother’s voice came not from inside his head but from behind him. He heard it a few inches from his ear. And his brother’s hand had pivoted his head, ever so slightly, to show him exactly what he needed to see.
Browder was pinned between Clark and the kitchen wall, his hands around her throat, hoisting her into the air. She grabbed for his black eyes—her feet convulsing, her strength failing.
But what was that on her ankle?
“He needs vessels,” said Dylan’s small voice. “But you can break them.”
Joel felt the little key in his hand turn smoothly and the cuff around his ankle pop free.
“Go.”
He stumbled down the canted trailer floor in a crouch—careful to avoid the pipe Kimbra had pulled loose earlier—and when he reached Clark, he somehow moved his bad arm enough to touch her leg. To still her.
With his good hand he slipped his brother’s hunting knife free from the sheath on her ankle. He stood up straight. He met Browder’s black, empty eyes over her shoulder.
The knife was so sharp it slid into Browder’s side as easy as sex after a long night. When the hilt of the blade reached the skin Joel turned it once, turned it farther, then turned it back around, just as he had seen Browder spinning his own knife earlier. Joel studied the pain in the deputy’s blackened face and wondered when he would find the exact combination of turns to take the life from his twisted body.
Browder shuddered. His mouth opened wider and wider, the jawbones cracking free of their sockets, and a horrible smell of blood and clay and rot seeped out.
A blink, and Browder’s eyes were his own again. The young deputy focused on Joel with an expression of absolute, desperate tenderness.
From his ruined mouth, Browder said, “You look just like him in this light.”
Joel pulled the knife free. Blood splashed onto the old linoleum. Browder’s fingers fell from Clark’s neck. His eyes died.
Clark was saying something that Joel couldn’t hear. She was pulling him away from the wall. He stumbled back up the canted floor and felt the bloody knife fall from his fingers.
Joel raised his head to see the place where his brother’s voice had spoken to him. He saw nothing there. No shadows, no light, no bends in the air. No ghostly presence to give him one final nod of encouragement.
Instead he could just make out the trailer door rattling. “Fire!” screamed a voice outside. “You’re on fire!”