“I know.”
“So you know I meant it.”
“Not just Devil's Needle but all the other things too?”
Dustin looked at him. His eyes were still red and his jaw was still tight, but something underneath the anger had gone quiet. “My shoulder's dislocated, I'm sitting in a cemetery parking lot, I just watched a demon in a nice suit tell me my soul tastes like gas station sushi, and you—” His voice caught. He didn't finish.
Greg waited.
“Yeah,” Dustin said. “I mean it.”
Greg chose to accept that. His chest felt lighter somehow, not as if he were dissolving but as if a weight had been lifted off it. Something he'd said had gotten through to Dustin, he knew it.
After another moment, Dustin started the car. He pulled out of the cemetery lot and onto the road. The headstones shrank in the rearview mirror until the cemetery was just a dark shape behind them, and then it was gone.
They drove in silence.
Greg looked down at his clipboard.
He hadn't checked Dustin's file since before the cemetery. Would it say something different now? Something other thanPending?
Greg wasn't sure what he should hope for as he flipped to Dustin's page, but what he found…
Well, he certainly hadn't expectedthat.
Thepage was blank.
Every field aside from Dustin's name, his description, status, death date, collection window—all of it was gone.
Greg stared.
What did itmean?
Greg didn't know, but he had a feeling it wouldn't be good.
CHAPTER 36
Greg kept his silence while Dustin drove them back to Cathy's house. When they reached their destination, Dustin turned off the engine and didn't move for a moment. Then he looked at Greg.
“Let me do the talking,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I mean it. If she asks you something, don't answer. Look at the floor. Count something.”
Greg understood why. If Cathy asked him a direct question about how the deal was broken, he would tell her. Not because he wanted to, but because he'd never really figured out how to lie convincingly. “Okay,” he said again.
They got out of the truck.
Dustin knocked.
Nothing happened for long enough that Greg wondered if Cathy was asleep.
Finally, the door opened.
Cathy wore a bathrobe over a faded t-shirt. Her eyes went to Dustin, then Greg, then Dustin.
“How did it go?” she asked.
