They were halfway between Charleys Creek and Booker Branch when Thad finally said, “I want you to look at this,” but Aiden did not turn to face him. He kept his eyes on the road ahead and tried to block out the fact that Thad was in the car at all. “You need to look at this, goddamn it,” Thad said. And it wasn’t so much the sternness of Thad’s voice as the clack of metal that grabbed Aiden’s attention.
He turned and looked to where Thad had the revolver pointed dead between his eyes, the cylinder opened to the side. Thad spun the wheel and Aiden could see gaps of light flicking by like an old film through the empty chambers.
“There wasn’t a thing in it,” Thad said. He dug around in the side pocket of his jeans and came out with five cartridges cupped in his palm, those .500s looking as long and fat as Swisher cigars.
“I don’t give a fuck!” Aiden yelled. Until then he’d been chewing at the inside of his cheek, nervously trying to figure out what had gotten into April. The dope always made him grind his teeth, that chewing seeming to be some physical thing that tried to keep up with how fast his mind raced. “I don’t care if it wasn’t loaded, Thad. That’s twice today. Two fucking times that somebody has pointed a gun at me. And both of those times the one pointing said, ‘Aww, it ain’t loaded.’”
“I had the shells in my pocket—”
“I don’t care, Thad. Wayne Bryson said the same goddamned thing, and you saw what happened. He blew his brains out.”
“Wayne Bryson was an idiot, Aiden. Always has been. You know that,” Thad said. “He shot himself in his own leg with a twenty-two when we were in high school. I ain’t Wayne Bryson. I know my way around guns and you know it. You know I wouldn’t have pointed it at you if it was loaded.”
The truth was, Aiden wasn’t quite sure whether he knew that or not. He knew Thad was as close a thing to family as he’d ever had and he knew Thad would’ve regretted anything he’d done just as soon as it happened, but he also knew Thad Broom was just like him, so short-fused that nothing was ever out of the question. There’d never been anything between thought and action with either of them, and that’s what Aiden had worked so hard to change. All their lives, they snapped time and time again. A thought would come and they would act. Nothing in between. Not a moment. Not a second thought. Nothing. So Aiden wasn’t sure Thad wouldn’t stick a loaded gun into his forehead. All Aiden knew was that he’d felt the blood run up into his face and his palms go sweaty. All Aiden knew for sure was that his mind was whirling out of control.
“I shouldn’t have pointed that gun at you, and I’m sorry, I really am, but you don’t know what it’s like, Aiden. You can’t know what it’s like. You might like getting fucked up, but mine ain’t a want, mine’s a need, and that’s a big damn difference.”
“I’m going to go ahead and tell you right now, Thad, you ever stick a gun in my face again and one of us is going to be burying the other.”
“I said I’m—”
“I heard you the first time,” Aiden said.
Thad sat rattling the pistol cartridges in his hand like he was about to throw dice, and neither spoke for a good while. They rode along steep highway cut into the side of the mountain, rock face and trees towering to one side, a steep descent into the gorge below. And when the tension finally seemed to have eased just a hair, Thad broke the silence.
“Who you think’s got enough money to buy an ounce of dope?”
Aiden glanced over and didn’t say anything at first. He knew his answer was one that wouldn’t sit well. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it? You tell me you’ve got somebody that’ll buy a whole ounce of dope, damn near twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of crystal, and then say don’t worry about it? Who the fuck’s going to buy this shit, Aiden?”
“Leland,” Aiden said.
“Bumgarner?” Thad squawked.
“Yeah.”
“Goddamn, Aiden, are you kidding me?”
“If there’s anybody on this mountain that knows where to unload an ounce of crystal, it’d be Leland.”
“And if there’s anybody on this mountain that’d fuck his own family over for a dime, it’d be Leland too. That rotten son of a bitch tried to dicker the doctor down when his wife was in the middle of popping out that kid of theirs. I’m telling you we might as well just flush it down the toilet.”
“You know anybody else?” Aiden asked. He stared at Thad for a short moment, and when it was obvious there would be no reply, added, “Then Leland’s the only shot we’ve got.”
“Just don’t say a word when he winds up dicking us over.”
“He ain’t going to dick us over.”
Aiden and Thad knew just how snaky Leland Bumgarner could be because they’d always been friends with him. They’d sat back and laughed as he fucked over everyone from kids at school to his own lazy-eyed mother. Every man has something that makes him tick, and ever since Leland was old enough to pickpocket kids on the bus for nickels, it had been anything that would spend. He and Thad had a mixed history of horse trading and fistfights, and the conclusion Thad drew was that Leland couldn’t be trusted. There was no arguing there. Aiden agreed wholeheartedly. But Aiden also understood that Leland was the only chance they had at making money off that bag, let alone money off whatever else they might find lying around Wayne Bryson’s house. They were only a mile or so away now and Thad was still shaking those cartridges around in his hand nervously.
“Now, when we get back over there, I want you to stay in the car till I make sure that house is empty,” Thad said. “You just stay out in the car and keep an eye out in case somebody comes riding in on us.” Thad dropped one of the shells into the floorboard and he hunched over, rummaged through the trash between his feet, and came up with the cartridge pinched between his index finger and thumb, the other four shells still clamped in his hand. “You just wait out in the car and I’ll clear the house,” he said, half talking to himself as he slid each shell back into its chamber and slapped the cylinder closed with a flick of his wrist. “You understand?”
Aiden just nodded and stared up the road.
In the headlights, two orange eyes glowed in all that darkness like the lit ends of cigarettes, and Aiden couldn’t make out if it was a possum or coon dragging a mangled hide of flesh and fur from the roadway. Whatever kind of animal it was slunk into the ditch, nothing more than a high-shouldered shadow, before Aiden could make it out. A thought struck him as he veered to straddle what the animal had dragged between the Ranchero’s tires, and he steered on around the next curve. It wasn’t just possums and coons that learned to eat what’s left behind, that learned to make meals off scraps picked from bone. A man who spends enough time at the bottom learns to do the same. They were all alike in that way. Everything was feeding off another. It’s the scavengers that turn predators to prey, he thought, and if a person can’t see that, he’s probably the one being taken.
• • •
WAYNE BRYSON COULDN’T SEE anything anymore. He just lay there by the coffee table on his stomach, his head cocked to the side, exit wound up. Where the bullet had twisted out of him, the flesh was gnarled, skin lapped, folded, and curled around a dark hole, but most of the blood seemed to have dumped from the other side of his head because of how he fell. The blood hadn’t so much pooled as thrown a sticky mess across the carpet around him. What poured from the exit wound had washed Wayne’s face red, like it might’ve been painted. His mouth hung open, dumbstruck. His eyes were closed. Aiden was thankful his eyes were closed.
The stereo had been on repeat since they left, the same Drive-By Truckers album still playing. There was no telling how many times it had played through in the hours since, but it was almost finished again. Patterson Hood was singing “Lookout Mountain,” and there wasn’t but one song after that. Aiden knew this because the last cut on the record had always been his favorite.
When they arrived at Wayne Bryson’s, the front door was open, and neither Aiden nor Thad could remember if they’d left it that way. Thad told Aiden, again, just to stay in the car until he’d cleared the house, and Aiden watched Thad go inside. He didn’t lower the revolver from the time he was out of the car until he’d checked every room. But only Wayne was there and he was no different from how they’d left him. Aiden and Thad just stood over his body for a second before Thad seemed to remember why they’d come.
“You just going to stand there staring at that son of a bitch or you going to help me?” Thad sidled past and grabbed the tactical rifle Wayne had folded in two from the table, slid that carbine and the digital scales into a black book bag. He and Aiden both brought bags to loot Wayne’s house. Aiden’s was still empty. Thad knelt between the couch and coffee table, snatched the pump shotgun from the carpet where he’d set it, and held it toward Aiden, pistol grip first, the barrel pointed back toward his own stomach. “Snap out of it and carry something.”
Aiden took the shotgun from Thad, let it hang by his side, and Thad scuttled along the floor, running his hand beneath the couch to search for anything hidden. He came up empty-handed and pushed back to his feet. When Thad rounded the table and stood sandwiched between the body and Aiden, he unsheathed an old oak-handled knife that always hung fastened to his belt. That drop-point, Queen fixed-blade was what Aiden had given Thad when he headed off to Fort Bragg. The edge could carve calluses as thin as deli meat. Thad kept the knife that way. Almost every night he swiped the blade against whetstone, never even gave it a chance to lose its edge. He crouched beside the body and ran the blade under the nylon strap lashed over Wayne’s shoulder and across his back to just under his opposite arm. Thad pulled the sling tight against the blade, swiped the knife back toward himself, severing the nylon clean in two. Only the buttstock of the assault rifle showed from underneath the body, and that’s what Thad grabbed.
“What are you doing?” Aiden hollered. “Don’t move him.”
“He don’t care, Aiden. He’s dead.” Thad yanked on the rifle and it nudged a little farther from beneath Wayne’s body. “Take that pistol out of his hand.”
“There ain’t no way.”
“Get the pistol, for fuck’s sake.” Thad sat on the carpet, braced the soles of his boots against Wayne’s shoulder and ribs, and jerked as hard as he could, as if he were trying to pull a post from the ground. The rifle slid out from underneath Wayne’s body, the upper and lower receivers and the hand guard greasy with blood that hadn’t had the time or air to dry. Wayne’s face skated across the carpet till his neck was cocked at a horrible angle, his whole torso contorting. When the rifle came free it dragged across Thad’s pants and shirt, the severed sling painting him with bloodstains.
“You’ve got blood all over you.”
Thad glanced down at himself, then settled his eyes on the pistol in Wayne’s hand. “You going to grab that gun or not?”
“No. For God’s sake, no!”
“And why the hell not?”
“It’s a suicide, Thad, and that don’t leave questions, but the minute you take that gun out of his hand, you’ve got a man with his brains blown out and no reason for it. Now, get up.”
Thad stood, walked past Aiden, and turned into the bedroom just ahead of where a bar separated the living room from the kitchen. It wasn’t so much a bar as a large opening cut into the wall. From the couch, where Aiden had sat earlier, he’d watched Wayne go through the kitchen to get the drugs. Wayne had moved through quickly and cut into a room that Aiden couldn’t make out from that angle, but that’s where Wayne got the dope from. That’s where the stash would be if he had any more.
Aiden could hear Thad rummaging through Wayne’s room, kicking at things on the floor, shuffling papers, and yanking drawers out of the dresser. Aiden only glanced in as he passed. Thad was turning Wayne’s room inside out.
The kitchen was floored with yellowed linoleum, indented square tiles framed in green with a picture of arranged fruit centered on each. The linoleum curled against blackened baseboards beneath cabinets washed with a mossy green stain. Wayne’s whole kitchen seemed eaten with green: the cabinets wrapping the room, the outlines on tile, even some ivy border running the tops of the walls against the ceiling.
On the stove top next to dirtied cast-iron skillets stacked three high stood the bottle Wayne had used to shake and bake crystal. A two-liter bottle that had the top cut off and turned upside down like a funnel was on the counter beside the stove. Coffee filters had been fitted into the funnel, and Wayne had spooned what he’d cooked into the filters to separate the dope and let it drip-dry. The filters slumped into the bottleneck, all of the liquid having seeped through since they left. The smell that filled his house was concentrated in the kitchen, all of it hovering around that stove top and those bottles. When Aiden breathed through his mouth he could taste it like floor cleaner. He stood there with his eyes watering for a second before he remembered the room behind.
There wasn’t a door into the washroom, just a doorway. The small square floor was slopped shin-high with unwashed laundry. Both the washing machine and dryer had lids opened, but nothing inside. A narrow shelf ran above the appliances at eye level on the back wall with an opened box of powdered detergent and a stack of dryer sheets at one end of the shelf. On the other end, two tall olive-drab ammunition cans stood side by side. Aiden closed the dryer lid and set the pump shotgun there, slid the cans down from the shelf. Both were latched shut. Both had the same yellow letters stenciled on the sides:
100 CRTG .50 CAL
LINK M9
BALL M33
He unlatched the first can and opened the lid against a stiff hinge. The inside smelled of dirt and rust the way clumps of bolts and screws come to smell inside coffee cans once time has welded metal together. The can was filled nearly to the brim with blister packs of Sudafed. Aiden had no clue what the medicine would fetch, only that it’d be easy to sell. He latched the can shut and opened the second.
From the looks of it, Wayne Bryson had kept his entire business inside those two cans. Aiden’s first thought was how stupid Wayne had been to leave it all out in the open, but then again, he never left his house. His business came to him and his business never left the front room, so anyone who made it to the back of the house would’ve had to go through him. At that point, it wouldn’t much matter what he was hiding.
There were two ziplock bags filled just as heavy with crystal as the one Aiden and Thad had taken. Three rolls of money, bills coiled and banded as wide as beer cans, separated the two bags from a handful of small, square packs already weighed and measured for sale. There were fourteen or fifteen grams ready to serve to any tweaker who had a buck fifty to blow. Aiden was no good at math, but if every one of those packs was a gram, and if both those bags plus the one they already stole each held an ounce, then Wayne Bryson was sitting on nearly a quarter pound of methamphetamine when he put that pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. They’d never get top dollar, but with that cash and that dope, there was more than ten thousand dollars in drugs and money.
As fast as Aiden’s mind was already running, the thought of that much money sent him into a panic. He reopened the first canister, dumped the dope and cash on top of the medicine, snapped the can shut, swung it by his side like a briefcase, and headed out the way he’d come. Thad stood over Wayne Bryson’s body when Aiden came into the room.
When Thad saw Aiden there, he focused on what Aiden held. Standing at the threshold into the kitchen, Aiden had the shotgun in one hand and the can in the other. “What the hell is that?” Thad asked.
“Everything,” Aiden said.
“What do you mean everything?”
“The dope, the money, every-fucking-thing.”
Thad stood confused for a moment or two before he recognized the look in Aiden’s eyes and knew he meant it, an excitement coming over him then. Aiden was grinding his teeth and could hardly keep still. “Goddamn Lonely Love” was midway through on the Truckers album. It was the last song to play. It was Aiden’s favorite song. Thad tore out of the house and the screen door slapped closed behind him. Aiden stepped over Wayne Bryson’s body and took one more look at his face, one more look at where his brains had blown out of him.