“Then I’ll give you the worst haircut of your life.”

“You shoot, they’ll hear.”

“They’ll think I’m offing a dog.”

“I’m a cop.”

“You’re not a cop. You’re a killer in a cop suit. A monster in man-skin. Now throw that gun away or I swear—”

He gently pulls the gun out by the holster. Lets it dangle. She gestures to the forest with her head and he tosses it into the brush. She hears it crash and thump.

Atlanta stoops.

Grabs her phone off Skank’s belt loop.

“Come after me,” she says, “and I’ll kill both of you.”

She runs.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The first impulse is a fist reaching into her heart and pulling its strings—Go get Whitey, stop the fight, do whatever you have to do—and it takes everything she has to do differently. She tucks the gun in her waistband and skirts the woods with the burner phone in her hand—no bars, no signal, no bars, no signal, c’mon c’mon c’mon.

She’s ready to take the phone and pitch it into the woods, throw it to the ground, bite into it like a candy bar—but then she thinks, The barn, the barn, go back behind the barn. That’s where she had her limp-noodle signal, and that’s where she heads, tearing ass and watching over her shoulder to make sure nobody’s following her.

Atlanta holds the phone up. Her arm an antenna.

Still nothing.

She tries dialing Holger’s office.

NO SIGNAL.

“Shit!” she says, trying not to cry—keep it together, keep it together—and she starts waving the phone around like she’s trying to catch butterflies in a net.

She hears a twig snap—she spins, gun out and up, ready to shoot.

A chipmunk darts into the tree line.

She almost laughs.

When she next looks at the phone: one meager bar.

She has no interest in squandering whatever chipmunk magic that woodland varmint conjured up, and she quick fumbles with the phone, redialing Holger’s number.

Ring, ring, ring.

Ring, ring, ring.

Please answer please answer please—

“Holger here.”

Atlanta laughs. Weeps. Utters a vanquished, strangled cry.

And then she tells Holger all the details: dogfight, the Farm, Ellis Wayman, guns, Nazis, drugs, the whole nine yards, every bad thing under the sun.

Come, she tells her. Come now. Hurry up.

Bring everyone.

Her first urge is to crack up, to collapse and sob, or maybe to spin around like that girl in the meadow in The Sound of Music. But then comes a sound that cuts to the quick: a dog’s yelp, a cry of pain—a cry she knows.

Whitey.

She’s too late.

The fight’s on.

Oh, God.