“Jesus, girl. What have you done?” Gabriela moans.
I strap on my seat belt. “The rock is there for painting!” I shout. “People do it every day!”
“ ‘Class of 2016’ is not the same as ‘Valor Sucks,’ ” Chance says. “I mean, full points for brass balls, but let’s keep the antigovernment graffiti a little more quiet next time.” If I didn’t know him as well as I do now, I would think he was totally blasé, but he’s scared to death.
The SUV is so close now that I can’t even see its lights in the rearview mirror. Wyatt floors it, and the SUV speeds up and swerves to pace us in the other lane of the four-lane highway.
I pull my gun and aim as the SUV’s passenger-side window rolls down to reveal . . .
The big Crane goon points at the window with one hand while shoving his AR-15 out his window to suggest that if we don’t roll our window down, he’ll shoot it out.
“Goddammit.” Wyatt rolls down the window and leans his head back against the driver’s headrest as if he’s ready to avoid a gunfight. Or maybe he just doesn’t trust me not to start one.
“Slow down, dumbass!” Tuck yells.
“You’re the ones chasing us!” I shout back, waving my Glock.
Wyatt slows down to almost the speed limit, and the SUV keeps pace. I don’t put down my gun, and Tuck’s rifle barrel is staring at me like the little black hole to hell. My heart’s hammering, and Gabriela is on the floorboards, and the scent of grease and chicken and pickles in the air is making me want to barf.
“Y’all head over to Crane Hollow right now and nobody gets hurt,” Tuck hollers in his mean-guy voice. Then, in his regular jolly-guy voice, he adds, “Matty misses you.”
“We’re not going back,” I shout. “Leon’ll kill us.”
Tuck shakes his bald head. “Not true. You took out a lot of good folks. We need more bodies. You come back now, and you can have your trailer back. I promise.”
The cars race, neck and neck, toward a red light, and I look back at Gabriela and Chance. “Raise your hand if you’re pretty sure Leon’s going to execute us if he ever sees us again,” I whisper.
“Raise your hand if you think we need to get the hell away from that gun,” Wyatt says. Again, everyone’s hand goes up. “Okay. Here we go. Check your seat belts and hold on.”
“Let’s talk at the light?” Wyatt hollers, and Tuck smiles and waves like we’re all friends.
Both Wyatt and the SUV slow as we reach the stoplight. It’s a decently busy time of night, and even with the sweeping sense of caution Valor has inspired, cars are just doing their thing. I look ahead and do the math. And I realize what Wyatt’s going to do. I lean back against my seat, test my seat belt, and turn my face sideways. Like that would help.
“Patsy, I need you to . . .” Wyatt starts, but he can’t finish it. “I need you to do it. On three.”
“I’ll do it,” Chance says.
“It has to be her.” Wyatt pushes his seat back, just a little, as we coast to a stop. “If you roll down your window, they’ll know.”
“It’s okay. I got it,” I say.
And my hands are shaking and my stomach drops out and everything is cold and bloodless. Before the car comes to a complete stop, I bite my lip, sit forward, take a good look at the Crane goon in the driver’s seat, and wait for Wyatt’s word.
“One . . . two . . .”
Before he can say three, Chance knocks my gun down, half dives between the front seats, and pulls the trigger three times. I can’t see what’s happened, and Wyatt floors it, and the car squeals through the red light, fishtailing around a sedan. A spray of bullets pings off the car, and everyone but Wyatt ducks. Chance falls into the back, breathing hard. There’s a huge crunch and a ton of honking right where we were. We’re already through the light and doing ninety up the highway. I look in my side mirror and see the messy aftermath, the Crane-driven Valor SUV T-boned by a white van. I’m pretty sure Wyatt was just planning on taking out the driver, but a complete crash is even better. Tuck is standing in the street, shaking his gun at us.
“That was really effing close,” Gabriela says, breathless. “Jesus, bro.”
“I think that was the SUV we stole,” Wyatt adds.
“Lesson to self: Do not give Leon Crane new playthings.” I pick up my milk shake and suck in enough to give me a brain freeze.
“Did you get him?” Wyatt asks.
“I got the driver,” Chance says quietly. “Right in the temple.”
“I didn’t need to know that,” Gabriela mutters.
I look in the mirror and see him put a hand on her shoulder. “You always need to know that. Otherwise, it stops mattering. We can’t let it stop mattering. Then we become like them.”
I turn to look Chance in the eyes. “Thank you,” I whisper. “It still matters.”
Wyatt exhales, long and slow, and turns down a side street. The air in the car relaxes once we’re off the highway and away from the SUV. I don’t want Chance to be right, but I think he might be. It’s so much easier to forget. But the more I let myself forget, the easier it becomes to kill people. I don’t know why he knocked down my gun and did it himself. I don’t know how to pay him back. “Thanks” does not feel like enough.
“You want a milk shake?” I ask. “It helps.”
He chooses strawberry.
We’re silent for the rest of the drive home.
Back in the house, we drop all the food bags like we’re returning from an expedition with unexpected and welcome treasure. The general mood is jovial and light, but I can’t get there. I didn’t see the driver’s head, didn’t see the bullet, didn’t see its aftermath. I didn’t even recognize him. But he’s dead because I just had to stop and play rebel. And what about the people in the van that T-boned them? For all I know, it was an innocent family on their way to church to adopt a puppy. It looked like a work van, though, but why should a bunch of painters be worth any more or less than a busload of children?
No matter what I do, people die. Whether I see it happen or not, they die.
“Honey, are you okay?” my dad asks.
It throws me, at first, because how should he know I’m upset? My mom’s the one who lives with me, who understands my moods, but she’s just laughing with Heather and eating a sandwich. She knew the old Patsy, but my dad’s the one who recognizes the new one.
“We, um . . .” Suddenly, the fries are stuck in my throat, and I have to find a soda to wash them back down. “We ran into some Crane goons. Tuck and some other guy. In the SUV we stole from Valor. They wanted to take us back to Leon. So we ran.”
My dad puts down his sandwich and leans forward. “Did they follow you here?”
Wyatt shakes his head. “We shot the driver. They crashed about two miles away. Tuck lived, but he couldn’t follow us on foot.”
I smile at him. He always knows when to use “we” to make me feel more human.
“So they’re looking for us,” my dad says, and his fingers twitch like he wants nothing more than to start typing on his dumbass laptop.
“Or they were driving around and recognized a familiar car full of familiar kids,” I counter.
“Were you guys doing anything suspicious?”
A blush creeps up, and I dig through the bags for napkins. I say nothing.
“You were, weren’t you?”
That accusing tone—like he’s going to slap my wrist.
“I was spray-painting the Haven High School boulder, and they just drove around the corner and saw us,” I say into the bag.
“Patsy, come on. That’s incredibly risky and stupid. You can’t do things like that.”
My head snaps up, and I’m surprised that he’s not shaking a finger at me. “If you’d like to talk about doing things that are incredibly risky and stupid, what about having a daughter you can’t take care of with a woman you can’t marry? What about leaving me? And my mom? What about giving bombs to a psychopath like Leon Crane? What about playing around with your bullshit anarchy on the Internet? Oh, excuse me, the ‘darknet.’ You don’t get to show up after thirteen years and start telling me what to do. You’re just a suburban hacker trying to get back at his daddy.”
I stand up and rub the fry salt off my hands.
“Patsy, stop. The most important thing right now is keeping you safe.”
“All I ever wanted was to find you. And I was so worried you’d be disappointed in me. But you know what, Dad? I’m disappointed in you. And I’ll spray-paint whatever the hell I want.”
I stand, grab a lantern, a random food bag, and the drugstore bag. “Gabriela?”
She stands, too, following me to the grand, echoing marble stairs. My dad watches us, and I would say he lets us go, but nobody “lets” me do anything anymore.
My mom just calls out, “Honey?”
“I’ll be fine, Mom.”
The last thing I hear from them when we’re upstairs is my dad muttering, “I just don’t get her at all.”
And Wyatt, a little louder, a little angrier, saying, “Yeah, and how could you?”
I find the master bedroom and close the door behind us. It doesn’t have a doorknob—none of the doors do. Gabriela turns on the lantern in the corner so that we’re each carrying one, both our faces eerily lit from below. It’s so weird to be this far from light, from streetlights or fluorescents, surrounded by a dark forest and endless nothing. I feel so far from home, from humanity. I want to be the child of one of those happy idiots sitting in the restaurant drive-through tonight, oblivious to anything but a loving daddy who brings treats.
“Will you wash my hair?” I say. “I don’t know if it’s dirt or blood in there.” Realizing what I’ve just said, I add, “Or I can wash it and you can just help pour the water, because that sounds gross.”
She smiles, a gruesome monster face, distorted by the lantern. “No, it’s fine. I used to work for a vet’s groomer and had to wash the nastiest, angriest dogs. Not to say that you’re a dog—just that I don’t mind.”
We set out the supplies in the bathroom, and there’s a painter’s bucket of cistern water and a rough towel by the sink. My dad says that the polite thing to do in a safe house is to leave it like you found it while adding value somehow. I guess whoever was here before us thought towels would help us feel like humans again, and I wonder what we’ll leave behind. I don’t have anything extra, anything that would bring comfort to anyone else. Maybe we’ll leave this shampoo and conditioner so someone else can enjoy the fleeting feeling of cleanliness to go with their rainwater.
I hop on the long granite counter and lie back with my hair in the sink, and Gabriela opens the gallon of water from the drugstore.
“You ready?” she asks. I nod.
The water is colder than I expected, possibly because we’re in an unheated house in November. I hiss and try to turn my head to help the water soak in. I guess I never thought about how much water it takes for a simple task like washing blood out of your hair. At this point, I can’t even remember how it got there. From rifling Hartness, maybe? I don’t think there’s enough water in the world to make me feel clean again, even if I just walked into the ocean and lived there. Soon Gabriela is massaging shampoo into my scalp and scrubbing me clean.
“You have nicer hair than most of the dogs I bathe, if that makes you feel any better,” she says.
“Can I ask you a question?” She nods. “Are you glad you went with Chance?”
She snorts. “I wasn’t, at first. It was horrible. I felt like some superhero’s sidekick, but my superhero turned out to be a villain. And then we went back home, when he was all done, and our house was gone. Just . . . a black crust. And then I was real glad. I can only pray that our parents and the other kids weren’t there when it happened.”
“Your . . . ?”
“Yeah, I guess we never explained that. Our parents were this older couple who took in troubled teens who were getting hassled in the foster care system. Good people, not like the ones you hear about on the news. Chance and I, we got there about the same time, when we were both thirteen, and made a good team. Some kid at school made fun of my hair, and he just about ruined that kid’s life.”
“So he didn’t ask you to help him?”
A laugh. “Oh, hell no. He begged me not to. But our parents would never have forgiven either of us if he hadn’t come home. They turned him from a junkie into a good kid. Really cared about him. About us both.”
“What about that bag of drugs?”
“It’s not what it looks like. He was a dealer, a few years ago. But he wasn’t lying about what he does now. Medical marijuana, pain meds, prescriptions. These days most of his customers are old folks with no insurance.” She pours water over my hair and says, “You asking all this because you’re curious, or because you’re worried about Wyatt?”
“Both,” I admit. “I’m just trying to . . .” I choke down a sob. “Does Chance have a hard time living with himself?”
“Talking about feelings is not his jam. But it bothers him more than he shows.”
I sit up to towel off my hair. “Has it changed him, what he had to do?”
She turns away, looking out the picture window into what can only be more darkness.
“Of course it did. It changed us all.”
“You think we’ll ever be okay?”
She takes the towel from me and starts rubbing my head roughly but efficiently, like I’m a rogue poodle. “I’ve lived with seven different families and never met my folks. Been on the street, in the system. I’ve never been okay. But at least this way, anybody who tries to hurt me gets killed. That’s more than America ever gave me.”
“You next?” I ask, pointing at the sink.
But steps are echoing up the hallway, and we both stop and wait.
“Patsy?” my dad calls.
I roll my eyes, even if no one can see it.
“What?” I yell back.
“We need to go back to the bunker. We need the guns we took off Hartness.”
He pushes the door open, and the lantern makes him look like an angry ghoul.
“So we can get your dog back on Red Thursday.”
Finally he has my attention.
“I thought you said Leon was just playing me. That it was a trick.”
“I still think that. But I also know that he wouldn’t miss out on an explosion that big, which means he’ll be there personally. And I’m more interested in putting down the rabid dog than in saving the good one. So I’ll leave that part up to you.”
“Fine. Let’s go,” I say.
Not because I want to. Not because I want to have the conversations that I’m sure he wants to have when we’re alone and away from my mom. I agree because I owe it to Matty. And because I don’t want to be a coward.
My dad is quiet while he drives, like he’s still trying to figure out exactly what he needs to say. He takes back roads, diving down narrow dirt lanes and cutting through sleepy subdivisions. I lean against the window, my eyes heavy. I’m about to fall asleep when he pulls down a dirt road and stops the car.
“Where are we?”
“Nowhere important. We need to talk.”
I yawn, my jaw cracking. “So talk.”
In the darkness under the trees, he’s just a disembodied voice, and I wonder what he sounded like when I was tiny and called out for him in the night. “We’re going into that mall, but we’re walking into a trap. I know Leon Crane, and there’s no way that this trip is going to be simple or easy. He may talk like a preacher, but underneath that is a hardened criminal who was murdering people before murder was legal.”
I shrug. This is not news.
“I don’t know how to make you understand. Look, when we were kids, Leon came up with this plan to steal booze from my dad’s liquor cabinet. He wanted to replace the clear ones with water and the brown ones with tea, then sell sippy cups of booze to the other kids. My dad caught us doing it, sent Leon home, and beat the shit out of me. Broke my arm and gave me a black eye. I told him it was Leon’s idea, that it wasn’t my fault, and he said, “That’s why I’m punishing you. You should know better than to do anything Leon says. I don’t trust that sticky son of a bitch. And now you’ll never forget it.”
“Okay.”
“Just okay? That’s all you have to say?”
I shrug. “A broken arm can’t really compare to everything that’s happened this week.”
“When we were older, Devil Johnny found out that Leon was breaking into his dad’s own businesses to get back at his brother, Larry, trying to make Larry look incompetent so he could weasel his way in as Crane consigliere. Instead of telling Lawrence Crane or calling the police or even confronting Leon, my dad had him enrolled in the army and shipped out. We still don’t know how Devil Johnny pulled that one off, but Leon got pulled as AWOL and ended up doing two tours overseas.”
“If you don’t know how he pulled it off, how do you know your dad did it?”
“Because the day Leon got back, he shot Devil Johnny. Right in the kitchen of Cannon House while I was eating my cereal. Shouted, ‘That’s for sending me to Iraq, you bastard’ and everything. My dad was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time, always wore one, and he had Leon arrested and put away. As the witness, I had no choice but to take the stand. So, technically, I was the one who sent Leon back to jail. And even though he was glad to use me for the CFF, happy to welcome me home and forgive me and hug me like a brother, it’s been an uneasy truce. So you can maybe understand why Leon would just love to have me back under his thumb and you in his service. Or either of us dead.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point, honey, is that Devil Johnny and Leon Crane are the two craftiest, meanest bastards I ever met. And all this happened before Dad was on the Valor board and Leon was in charge of an antigovernment anarchy cell. After all the heartache and trouble I’ve known keeping you away from my father, I’d hate to lose you to Leon, especially when I know that this is another one of his bait-and-switch games.”
“So we’re not sneaking into the mall?”
He sighs. “No, we’re going in. But we’re going in knowing it’s a trap. We’re not going in to save some dog that probably won’t even be there. We’re going in to kill Leon. Are you with me?”
I swallow and tamp down my rage at the thought that he would just let Matty die. “Sure. Whatever. Let’s just get the guns and go home so I can sleep.”
“Patsy.”
I exhale slowly through my nose. “What, Dad?”
“Just promise me you won’t fall for Leon’s bullshit again.”
Even though he can’t see it, I smile sweetly. “I try to avoid as much bullshit as possible these days.”
He turns the car on and backs up into the road. I let my head fall against the door, and my eyes close, heavy as lead. When I open them again, the headlights flash down the long lane to Cannon house we walked up together just . . . Was it yesterday? It’s so hard to keep track of time. I’ve slept for only five minutes, but it feels like hours. My entire body aches, and I’ve drooled on the arm of my hoodie.
We slow down as we start up the last hill, and my dad turns the car around laboriously on the narrow drive, almost hitting a tree.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Someone’s in the carriage house,” my dad whispers, as if they could hear us from this far away. “There’s a light on. And two cars by the porch. I’m going to go up there on foot. You stay here.”
I shake my head and stretch. “No way. I’m not sitting in this creepy car alone. They could be Cranes.”
“That’s exactly why you need to stay here. Get in the driver’s seat. If you hear gunshots, drive away, fast.”
I stare at him, then up at the house. It looks sinister, lit by the moon. Hard to believe that I was saying a rosary to that same moon a short while ago, the last time I heard Matty.
“Okay,” I say with a smile.
My dad smiles. “Thanks, honey. I’ll be back soon.”
He gets out and shuts his door softly. As he stalks up the dirt road, he pulls a Glock from his waistband, from the same place where I carry mine, flat against my spine. He holds it like someone in an FBI movie, cupping the bottom and pointing it ahead with both hands. It’s actually kind of funny. When he’s halfway up the drive, I pocket the car keys, get out, and follow him.
It’s so crisp and cold and dark that it feels like swimming at night, and my lungs burn as I take the hill. My dad spins around, gun pointed right at me, and shakes a fist at me. He’s too smart and scared to say anything. I just smile and nod at the house, and he mouths something that I can’t read that probably describes how much trouble I’m in now for disobeying him.
What are you going to do—break my arm?
Side by side, we creep up the driveway, making as little noise as possible. The lights move in the carriage house—lanterns or maybe candles. There are two cars parked just outside it, and they appear to be empty. One is a big ol’ country-boy truck, tricked out and sky-high with truck nuts, and the other is a sleek sedan, like the kind rich guys use as limos. A Valor car. I don’t get what my dad thinks we’re doing—are we going to kill these guys, or hold them hostage? Is he just doing that country-style “trespassers will be shot” thing because they’re on his dad’s land?
A lantern bobs out of the carriage house and moves toward the big truck. The truck door opens, the dome light clicks on, and the breath catches in my throat when I see the bearded figure standing there.
It’s the guy from the photo in Uncle Ash’s house.
It’s my dead grandfather. Devil Johnny.