The dream shifted. I was back in Carson City, a shitty motel off the highway, gun in my hand, my mother’s voice on the phone. She was already dying, but she sounded alive. “Come home,” she said. “Please. Just come home.”
But I couldn’t, not with what I’d done. The dead man on the carpet, his blood pooling under my boots. The sound of sirens, so close I could taste the fear.
The next dream was the Reverend, wearing his Sunday suit and my old CO’s face, dragging me out of bed and pinning me to the wall. He called me by my real name, and it stung worse than any fist. “You’re just like your father,” he said, and that was the kill shot.
I woke before dawn, sweat soaking the sheets, my mouth full of smoke and the taste of copper. My heart pounded so hard I thought it might burst. I sat up, breathing ragged, and stared at the wall until the world came back into focus.
Red knocked, once, then let herself in. She carried a cup of coffee and a cigarette, both for me.
“Vin wants you downstairs,” she said, setting them on the nightstand. “Says it’s important.”
I nodded, wiped my face, and lit the cigarette with shaky hands.
She lingered at the door. “You sure you’re okay?”
“No,” I said, and it was the truth.
She gave a ghost of a smile. “Me neither.”
When she left, the room felt smaller, like the walls were closing in. I dressed slow, every movement a reminder of how close I’d come to getting put in the ground. I thought about Darla—her hands, her eyes, the way she’d looked at me when she left the hospital. The promise in it, and the warning.
I walked downstairs, each step a rehearsal for whatever hell was waiting.
Vin was at the head of the bar, alone, reading a sheet of paper with a frown deep enough to dig trenches. He looked up when I came in, nodded to the stool across from him.
“Sit.”
I did.
He slid the paper over. “That’s from our man inside LPD,” he said. “Your name’s on the watch list. So is the Reverend’s.”
I scanned the list, didn’t bother pretending I understood the details.
“They’re prepping for war,” Vin said. “You ready?”
I looked him in the eye. “No.”
He liked that. “Me neither.”
He poured two shots. “To the ones who don’t get to run.”
We drank, no words left.
It was time to dig in and fight.
10
Darla
If there was a better way to die than in a shit bar with sticky floors and a laminated menu older than my mother, I hadn’t found it. The Pink Beaver was the only place on the east side where you could order a double whiskey at four p.m. and not get carded, or shanked, depending on who you sat next to. I liked it here. The air was fifty percent smoke, the music was so loud you could bleed out under the table, and nobody would notice, and the regulars were too tired or too tragic to give a damn about what you were running from.
Today I was running from myself, again, and maybe from the memory of Axel Martin’s face, swollen and purple and stitched up like a child’s failed art project, staring at me with all the judgment of a dying animal and none of the fear. It’d been two weeks since I saw him at the hospital, two weeks that were pure hell.
I wore jeans tight enough to stop a clock and a black camisole that did less to hide my tits than to advertise them. Dad would’ve had a stroke if he saw me walk out the door in this, but he was busy sermonizing to a room full of polyester souls while I nursed my third vodka cranberry and wished the earth would swallow me whole. Heather, my favorite bartender, gave me the “steady now, sugar” look every time she passed, but she knew better than to play den mother. You didn’t last behind this bar without learning when to mind your own business.
The college boys showed up around five. I clocked them before they even made it to the bar—blue-and-gold Greek letters, jawlines like breadboards, the smell of money and deodorant. Three of them, loud, already drunk, and eyeing everything female with the intensity of a searchlight. They squeezed onto the stools two down from me and started the time-honored tradition of pretending not to look.
The blond one made the first move. “You come here a lot?” Like I was the punchline in a joke he’d already told.
