Kimbra turned away from Browder’s corpse and followed Joel’s eyes up the kitchen’s wall. Her hands had been cuffed—so tightly her fingers were numb—around a rusted pipe that ran between two exposed joists. Kimbra lifted her arms to situate herself well back on her ass. She pulled her legs up, easing them past Browder’s slack body, and braced a foot against the wall’s joists.
She jerked the chain of her cuffs against the pipe and felt it shift, loose in its casing.Dry rot, she thought. Her father would have just the fix.
“Try it again,” Joel said in a low voice. “I think you can pull that pipe loose.”
She pulled again. The pipe did, indeed, move a little.
From behind the trailer’s back wall she heard a man’s voice.
Hurry.
Joel was right: with enough leverage, she might just be able to wrench the pipe from the wall and free herself, though her numb fingers refused to help her. She listened to the way the chain of the cuffs click-clacked against the rusty metal and grimaced. This wasn’t going to be pleasant.
She braced her other foot against a joist, took a long breath, bit her lip. She pushed with her legs and pulled against the pipe with the cuffs’ chain and choked on a squeal. A sharp bite of metal on her wrist, a sudden cold ache in the bone.This, she thought,must be what it’s like to use a rowing machine in hell.
When she stopped to catch her breath, Joel said behind her, “You’ve got this. Please.”
“Easy for you to say,” she said through a gasp. Kimbra saw blood beading around the tight cuffs. She braced her legs again. Pulled.
She’d never felt pain like this before. She pulled until she thought her arms would tear free of her shoulders, pulled until she thought every bone in her wrists had been ground to powder. She bit the top hem of her Bisonette’s singlet and screamed into her teeth.
The pipe shifted an inch. Another. She heard a crack, a low moan of old wood and then, in a shower of splinters and dust, the pipe snapped free of its casing and came plummeting toward her face.
She fell back, hit the kitchen’s linoleum, twisted her head away. The pipe landed an inch from her ear with a dull thud.
Kimbra rose, panting, to one elbow. Browder still lay motionless. Joel, in the living room, gave her an exhausted thumbs-up. Even in the red light Kimbra could see that his face had gone very white. You didn’t have to be a doctor: the guy had lost an enormous amount of blood.
Kimbra stumbled along the length of the pipe, pulled her wrists free over its little cap of splintered wood and fumbled off the loop of tape that clung to her ankle. She checked Browder’s pockets—empty—and grabbed the long hunting knife from where it rested a few inches from his fingers. She carried it with her into the living room.
Someone rapped on the trailer’s shuttered back window. No sooner had she heard the sound than the trailer’s lights dimmed, died and shook back to life again.
“Joel?” said a muffled voice.
“Clark.” With his good hand, Joel tugged at the cuffs around his ankles that bound him to the floor.
Kimbra fumbled with the latch of the window shutter.
Officer Clark was outside, looking up at her through the bars over the window—becauseof coursethere would be bars over the window—while Jamal Reynolds and Whiskey Brazos—of all fucking people—stood trembling behind her. Kimbra raised her bleeding, cuffed wrists and said, “Joel’s hurt bad. We need keys.”
Clark fumbled at her belt, said, “Can you raise that window?”
It didn’t budge. Kimbra returned a moment later with a metal paddle the size of a fly swatter. She shattered the window with the butt of the paddle, swept the glass away with its business end. Clark raised an eyebrow, passed Kimbra a small ring of keys. “Hopefully those cuffs came from the department,” Clark said.
“Is KT with you?” Kimbra asked.
The stillness that settled over the three of them told her everything she needed to know.
Oh.
“Here.” Joel held out his hands. Kimbra uncuffed him first, let him take the keys and free her a moment later. Her wrists burned. KT was dead. “Are you alright?” Joel asked her, and she tried to smile. She honestly didn’t know the answer to that question.
“Dadders would say I’m better off,” she finally said, and touched her dry face as if she expected to find a tear there.
“What’s going on out front?” Clark asked, and as Joel worked at the cuffs on his ankles Kimbra crept to the trailer’s other window. She swung it open and took a quick breath. She was here, in dreamland.
Two guys she didn’t recognize stared at her—their mouths agape, their faces jaundiced with fear—from the windows of a red trailer on the other side of the circle. Directly across from her, past the tall triple-wide that had lorded over her all week in her sleep, Kimbra saw a boy slumped on a concrete porch outside an orange RV. The boy rose from a puddle of blood, reaching for the RV’s doorknob, and fell back down. It was Luke Evers, she realized, struggling but alive.
Kimbra saw a tall man step from the far side of the triple-wide, a shotgun in his hands, and Luke’s survival suddenly became much more tenuous. Kimbra had given up being surprised tonight. The fact that Coach Parter would be here, shotgun in hand, slipping a shell of buckshot from the pocket of his Bison jacket, seemed just as logical as all the other nightmares she’d experienced since Dylan Whitley had gotten himself murdered.
