I dropped the smile like I’d gotten hogtied and force-fed a gravy spoon full of mud butt. “Hey, Andy, we were just fixing to leave.”

Andy looked at me with one eye over the shotgun’s sight. “That ain’t what I asked you. What’re y’all doing down here?”

There wasn’t no good way for me to answer her, and Marshall wasn’t helping none poking me with a stiff finger between my shoulder blades. I knew he wanted to answer her, but I didn’t trust him to be as coy as he liked thinking he was. Since my smile didn’t do enough to disarm Andy, I tried humor instead. I spoke like I didn’t have a care in the world. “We thought we’d just come down here for a loan.”

Andy’s mouth set a hard line across her face, and her features went as smooth as the porcelain dolls Mama kept locked in her curio cabinet. Marshall saw the look she gave me and spoke just loud enough for me to hear. “Goddamn, Coy, you’re fixing to get us both shot.”

Andy slid her feet to the left to get a better angle and aimed at Marshall over my shoulder. “What’d you say?”

Marshall answered, “I said I hope your aim ain’t as good as your figure. We’re both dead if it is.”

She thought that was about as funny as scraping a splinter from under the skin with the dull blade of a pocketknife and let us both know it. “If y’all wanna keep standing there being funny, then I’ll just go ahead and shoot you. Done got enough reason to with y’all trespassing the way y’all are.”

I couldn’t remember Andy ever being so thorny and thought it wiser to tread lighter. “Hey, Andy, we’re just nervous with that gun being aimed at us like that. We don’t mean no harm here. Ain’t even got no guns on us.”

I hesitated before coming clean, but she probably already knew we were unarmed, and it didn’t make a difference to her anyway. She said, “Y’all oughta be nervous cause I’m this close to putting a bullet hole clear through the both of you.”

Marshall stepped up. “That wouldn’t be no good idea, Andy.”

“And why not?”

“‘Cause if you kill us, then our buddies will know we’re dead, and they’ll let everybody in Tugalo County know y’all got this money.”

By the time Marshall finished telling his story, I’d muttered my last words and was ready to die. But when Andrea didn’t pull the trigger, I started thinking I’d said them too soon.

When Marshall kept talking, it made me start doubting myself. He said, “And, Andy, we know where y’all got this money.”

Hearing those words made Andy drop her aim a frog’s hair and glance over her shoulder for a creep sneaking out of the dark to snatch her up. She snapped back when it didn’t happen and corrected herself before we could act on it. Andy didn’t stand around and try finding out how we knew where the money came from. She walked around the side of the hole and said, “I better go get Deddy.”