Willie Frank scratched the top of his head. “Well, I’ll bring my gun if you want me to. But I’d better bring a rope, too. We already talked about stringing him up, remember? A shotgun blast would be too noisy, not to mention messy. Besides, a hanging would look like typical Klan activity. They’ve been busy raising hell all over the South this year, including two lynchings in the same week. They’ll no doubt get blamed.”

“Hmmm. Yeah, bring a rope in case we decide to take him out that way.”

“All right then. One more thing, how do you know what time he’ll leave his daddy’s house?”

“Um . . . we’ll have to go out there at some point and hide somewhere until we see him leave.”

“All right, buddy. I can’t wait to see his face when we let him know we know he made that call to Sheriff Potts.”

“I can’t wait neither.”

I hated deceiving Willie Frank, but I didn’t have no choice. I still didn’t think it would be a good idea to let him know about our plan to tell Joyce about Betty Jean—or that Betty Jean even existed. For one thing, I didn’t want him to feel left out if he found out we’d known about Odell’s secret life all this time and didn’t share that information with him. But he was the one who told me it wasn’t a good idea to let the right hand know what the left hand was doing. Even when he was the right hand in question.

After I collected them five hundred dollars from Odell and took Joyce to Hartville next Friday, there was no telling what would happen next. Me and Willie Frank wouldn’t be hiding nowhere on that road that led to Odell’s daddy’s house so we could ambush him next Sunday like I’d told him. But this was the best way I could stall him for the time being by letting him think we would.

If Joyce forgave Odell and things went on as usual between them, I knew he would come after me and Yvonne. We wouldn’t give him a chance to do us in, though. As soon as we found out our plan to ruin his life with Joyce didn’t work, then me and Willie Frank would ambush him somewhere and take him out in the woods and put him down. There was no telling how many new lies I’d have to come up with to tell Willie Frank so he would never suspect we kept him in the dark about our involvement in this mess. One thing that gave me hope was the chance Joyce would kill him, or he would take hisself out. But for now, I wasn’t going to count on that happening.

* * *