Sitting in the parking lot, Blake began adding and multiplying the best he could. If Nick ever reported him then Blake would have to explain, when all was said and done, about a quarter million dollars in income. Tax on that figure at thirty percent, would have been seventy-five grand. Add a seventy-five percent penalty to that and Blake figured that was well over a hundred thousand dollars due before the interest charges were added. But that’s if the IRS found out now. The penalties would become more severe with each passing day.

If Nick reported that, years from now I’d be screwed, Blake concluded. They’d take the house, everything. I might even get jail time! Shit! The thought of jail time reminded Blake of the visit from the sheriff. The sheriff’s vehicle trailing him out of Rabun County. Maybe that was just a coincidence, Blake thought. Maybe they weren’t trailing me.

He didn’t believe that. No, that would have been too much of a coincidence. A visit from the sheriff himself in the morning, and then less than a half hour later followed all the way out of the county by a separate patrol car? No, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. But what have I done?

Blake thought about it, momentarily relieved that, he believed, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Even if them boys are found and they’re dead, heads ripped clean off their bodies, what does that have to do with me? Even if the sheriff finds out they may have done some work for me, I didn’t kill ’em. I didn’t send them off.

Blake started making his argument to the judge, to the jury, the way he had seen so many times on television.

Your Honor, what happened to those boys was tragic. An awful tragedy for the community to have to cope with. But, Your Honor, it was an accident. Those boys got lost in the woods on their own and couldn’t find their way out because they was stupid. My client, Blake Savage, is as distraught about this as the rest of the community, your honor, but he is guilty of no crime. So just leave him the fuck alone! Case dismissed!

Blake exhaled after listening to his lawyer’s well-reasoned defense. He didn’t believe that he had done anything. So why was the sheriff after him? What had the sheriff said?

Do you know anything? Do you know them boys?

That’s what the sheriff had asked and Blake had lied. That realization is what made the hair on Blake’s arms stand up, the fact that, just that morning he had lied not once, but twice to the sheriff. If the sheriff found out he had lied about that then he would be under suspicion for...Blake didn’t know. But for something else.

What if the sheriff gets to Terry? What if Terry blabs his mouth at a pool hall or something and the sheriff’s men pick up on it, question him and come back to me?

Blake gripped the steering wheel with both hands, ringing the leather like he was ringing out a chamois cloth.

Crap! Blake tensed as he realized that he had forgotten what he had done with Jesse’s jacket that he had found over a month before. Holy crap! How could I not know where I put that? THINK! Where is it?

He couldn’t remember. If they find that, can they link me to Jesse somehow? Is there a way to know that’s Jesse’s jacket? And it had blood on it! Crap! They’ll think I killed him!

Every thought led to a more sinister thought, like a series of opening doors leading Blake deeper into a snake pit. Maybe I should go look for them? Maybe they’re still alive, Blake thought hopefully, but his optimism faded quickly. It’s been six weeks or so. Ain’t no way them boys are alive in those woods. Ain’t no way.

Blake tried to think. He lifted his hand and rubbed his right palm on the back of his neck, trying to relieve some tightness, some tension. His fingers found some small bumps, a rash or something on the back of his neck. Blake figured it was a reaction to the stress, so he continued to try and figure a way out of his mess. He cranked the truck and put it in gear, feeling that he was in enough control of his senses, his emotions, to drive home. But his mind kept racing with fears, with ideas...ways out that only led to dead ends.

I wish I had someone I could talk to, Blake thought. I’m sick and tired of being so alone, of having to figure out everything for myself. But he knew full well he had created this mess. He had made these choices for himself. He would have to figure a way out. How did I even get to this point? Blake shook his head furiously.

He drove northwest on 441 and tried to find a radio station to free his mind from thoughts that haunted him. A salesman on the classic rock station shouted that he should “come on down!” and buy a Toyota from him. Blake switched instead to the NPR station in Athens at 91.7 and caught the announcer finishing the news at the top of the hour. “Widespread flooding can be expected throughout Puerto Rico as Hurricane Isabel, now at Category 1 strength, races toward the gulf. Forecasters say there’s a slight chance the storm could turn in a more northerly direction and impact the Bahamas. This is NPR news.”

Classical baroque music blasted through the speakers. Blake reached his arm to turn off the radio as he drove from Athens toward Commerce, the only sounds coming from his inner voice asking him questions, admonishing him and replaying his life for him, as if he were watching a game film on the Monday after a game.

The reel turned and played his life film on the windshield as he drove. There he was in high school, setting records in his red jersey and leading the Wildcats to their first and only state championship. Then he was in yet another red jersey, but with the same number seven as he led the Georgia Bulldogs toward a BCS bowl bid. And then...the hit. The safety, out of nowhere. He remembered watching it on ESPN while lying in the hospital, the blindside shot that his running back, his friend, his bodyguard, didn’t even attempt to block. Blake collapsed with the hit, twisted like an empty tin can crushed underfoot, face first into the turf. His brightly lit flame snuffed out in that moment. Blake told doctors, fans, and friends that he’d be back, but he knew he wouldn’t. He just tried to hang on to the fame, to the hope for as long as he could. With bad grades and an alcoholic father that had taught him nothing but hate and anger, he knew he was lost without football.

The reel fast-forwarded and stopped at the car accident, as a driver who had just left a bar crashed into the driver’s side of Blake’s car at an Athens intersection. When the accident was picked up in the Athens Banner Herald, Blake promptly received a call from a lawyer at Peacock and Associates who sympathized and suggested that Blake should be compensated for what had happened to him. “You’re entitled,” the man had claimed. Blake was furious at the world for the turn of bad luck that had come his way. He agreed even though he knew that, maybe...the accident wasn’t the other driver’s fault.

Blake knew that he had run that red light at night. That’s why the car hit him. But he was furious with anything and everything then, and told the driver it was his fault. By the time the police arrived the two men were in a heated argument, but only one of them had been drinking, and it wasn’t Blake. Police charged the other driver for causing an accident while drinking even though he had only registered a .06 on the Breathalyzer, paving the way for Blake to receive almost a one hundred twenty thousand dollar settlement after the lawyer took his share. It was easy money, something Blake did feel he was entitled to given his misfortune on the gridiron. He liked the taste of making so much money, so quickly. He returned to Clayton on crutches, with a load of money in his pocket, but not with what he really wanted and needed. Fame. Fans. The feeling that he had made it, that he was somebody. That he was important and that he was nothing like his old man.