I had a long list in my head of things I wanted to look up. Some day. Not like I owned any encyclopedias. Maybe in the library.

I finished the cigarette, flicked away the butt and looked at my watch. I’d killed exactly ninety-seven seconds.

Hell.

Screw this.

I hiked the three blocks to Molly’s house. Molly was about the only good thing in this town when I came back. I’d left with a guitar and six hundred bucks I’d saved up mowing lawns and pitching sod. Came back to bury my mother and got stuck. The town hadn’t grown one inch since I’d been away. Hell, we were so far out you couldn’t use cell phones. Satellites didn’t fly over. We might as well have been in another fucking dimension. I’m surprised they bothered putting us on the road maps.

I thought about getting a band together, but there were only high school punks who kept tripping over their own peckers or old men with banjos. And where would we play anyway? There wasn’t enough room in Skeeter’s for a drum set. Screw it. Anyway, I was going to be a law man. Some plan.

I slowed up at the edge of Molly’s yard, made sure the coast was clear. It wasn’t a bad little house, three bedrooms, big front porch with a swing. About fifty years old but in good shape. Molly’s room was on the side. I knocked on her window. Her step-dad drove a big rig and was out of town, but I didn’t want to chance he’d come home early, so I always went to the window. Molly was two months shy of eighteen. Molly’s mom had run off a year ago.

She came to the window, and I saw she hadn’t been asleep. Sometimes she stayed up all night smoking cloves and reading books. She had a paperback of Ayn Rand in her hand. Big book. I generally didn’t read anything thicker than Road & Track.

Molly looked good and weird which is what had attracted me to her in the first place. Dyed black hair like wet silk and black lipstick and a ring in her nose and white, white skin. She said when she turned eighteen she was out of this shit town and never looking back. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but it was two months away. Sometimes two months is a long time. A lot can happen. Other times it’s the blink of an eye.

“Come on,” she whispered and opened the window all the way.

I scrambled through, and she shut the window again.

She started peeling off her clothes, but I stopped her. “No time. I just wanted to say hi. You want to go to the lake tomorrow?”

“What about Doris?”

“I’ll tell her I pulled an extra shift or something. We can swim then lie out on the rocks.”

“Too hot. I’ll sunburn.” And she kept taking off her clothes anyway. She had a silver ring through one raspberry nipple.

“Somebody killed Luke Jordan.”

She was naked now, but the news stopped her from coming at me. “How?”

I shrugged, looked at her bright white skin and thought I could maybe do her quick and get back to the body before anyone missed me. “I think he came on to the wrong Mexican lady and somebody shot him.” I sat on her bed, tugged down my sweatpants, erection springing into view. “They shot the shit out of him.”

I tried to pull her on top of me, but she shrugged my arms away, knelt in front of me. I felt her hot breath down there. She stroked my sack, and then I felt wet, warm lips wrap around me. Her head started to bob, but slowly. My mouth fell open, a groan slipping out like a hiss. I felt it all up and down my body, like every nerve had been switched on.

Then she did climb on top, grunted as I entered her. “I applied to an art school in New York?”

“Oh yeah?” I thrust upward, finding a slow rhythm.

“I think I can get a scholarship. I have to, like, get all my stuff together into a portfolio and everything.” She started to grind little circles, bit her lower lip. “You could come with me.”

I couldn’t do that, not with Doris and the boy. She knew that. Probably why she asked, so she could get credit for asking but with no danger I’d take her up on it. But it would be pretty cool to go to New York. I could probably get in with some band. I liked picturing myself there, but I hated thinking about a life I couldn’t have.

She asked, “What’s going to happen with Luke Jordan?”

“Don’t know.”

But I didn’t want to talk anymore, and I thrust sort of desperate and quick, picking up speed, filling my hands with her ass, pulling her into me as I arched upward. I jerked and twitched, and we collapsed, pressed together in the heat and the sweat and the dark, dead night.

I lay there for a little while, time not seeming to mean much, but it was probably only like ten minutes. I got out of bed and pulled my sweatpants up. Molly turned over and pulled the sheet up to her chest. I waved bye and climbed out the window.

On the way back to Luke Jordan’s truck, I tried to think if I felt bad about Molly or not. I told myself Doris would never know, so it wouldn’t hurt her. And Molly would be gone in a couple months. Fuck, what did I know? Maybe I should just break it off now, but I probably couldn’t do that any more than a junkie could give up the stuff. It’s hard to do the right thing.

I made it back to the truck, stopped, blinked, circled the truck three times, a jittery sense of panic fluttering in my gut.

Luke Jordan wasn’t there.

CHAPTER TWO

Iran around the truck looking for the body, looking up and down the street, my head spinning, trying to see everyplace at once. The world seemed to tilt a little and go wobbly.

Luke was gone.

“Oh … fuck.”

There was this one time, a couple years ago, I was in Austin trying to catch a flight to Tulsa so I could come back for Mom’s funeral. I was at the airport, and I felt for my wallet and it wasn’t there. You know that feeling in your gut when something bad has happened and you know you can’t fix it in time? Just like I knew I couldn’t get home and back to the airport in time to make my flight. Take that bad gut feeling and multiply it by about two million and that’s how I felt, on my hands and knees looking for Luke’s corpse under his truck.

The difference is that the wallet turned up in another pocket. Luke Jordan didn’t turn up.

I jogged up and down the streets, looking in every shadow. Maybe he hadn’t been all the way dead, crawled off some place. A person thinks of shit like that, impossible miracle scenarios to somehow undo the calamity. I ended up back at the pickup truck, staring stupidly at the patch of road where his body should have been.

I was totally fucked.

Skeeter’s was dark, but I went to the front window anyway, cupped my hands against the glass and looked inside. Maybe Wayne was still in there cleaning up. Maybe he’d seen something. Another miracle scenario, inventing it as I went along. Maybe Wayne came out and took the body inside. I knocked on the glass. No luck.

I lit a cigarette, tried to think what to do. I had completely and totally fucked this shit up. They don’t put you on full time if you lose a body. More like I’d be fired, and then what? The boy went through a hundred diapers a day. There was no way we could make it on Doris’s paycheck and tips. I’d have to get some shit road crew job or something. Hell. Doris was going to be pissed.

The three minute walk to the police station turned into ten as I meandered along waiting for an idea to fall out of the sky. I smoked a cigarette in front of the stationhouse door. Last one in the pack. I crumpled the pack, made like I was going to toss it into the street then remembered I was supposed to be the law. I held onto it. Not that I’d write myself a ticket for littering. But still.

It occurred to me maybe Billy was pulling some kind of prank on me, or maybe him and Karl together. Karl was one of the other deputies along with Amanda, but Amanda wouldn’t fuck with me like that. Mom always said girls matured faster than boys, and some boys never got around to maturing at all. My first week on duty, Billy and Karl had radioed me all kinds of crazy shit, wild goose chasing me all over the county.