Before Petry can say anything, Atlanta blurts: “I can get a ride.” They both look at her. “I’ll call somebody. They’ll come. They can drive me.” Her words are short, clipped, a little breathless. All doing a poor job of masking just how her skin crawls, how her heart feels like a moth trapped under glass.

Holger shakes her head. “Nah, this is fastest. Safest, too.”

“How about the dog?” Petry asks.

You leave my dog alone.

“Take the dog, too,” Holger says. “You can put Atlanta in my office and the dog . . .” She seems to think on it. “Break room downstairs, maybe. Give him a cookie or something.”

Petry waves her on like he didn’t just have a showdown with her behind the Morton building. “Miss Burns, follow me, please.” So polite for a sociopath.

Atlanta looks to Detective Holger. Thinks to say something. Anything. Maybe just run. What if she tells them Petry was here? That he was a willing participant in all of this? That he threatened her? That she stole his gun and tossed it into the woods?

Would they believe her?

They’d take his word over hers.

And saying any of that right now opens up a real bag of snakes. More snakes than she can kill.

A thought strikes her: He can’t do anything to you. Not now. Not like this. Everybody will see him put you in that car. This is on the record. On the books. Holger knows.

Holger looks at Atlanta expectantly. “You can go, Miss Burns. Unless there’s something else?”

Atlanta wants to tell her everything else. All of it. But she doesn’t. Instead she pats her thigh to get Whitey’s attention and follows ten feet behind Officer Petry.

The killer in a cop suit, the monster in man-skin.

He opens the door to a cruiser—his cruiser—and says nothing as he points toward it.

It’s a little miniprison, she knows. She’s seen movies and TV. Those doors close, they only open for him. It’s a portable cage, a jail on wheels.

Whitey hops in the back.

Atlanta holds her breath—not by choice but because she can’t seem to let it out—and gets in, too.

For a while the car just drives, humming along the back roads, occasionally rocking as one or two tires hop in and out of a bad pothole. Like before, it’s all trees and barns and horses behind fences. The trees seem to sag and wilt. The paint on barns peels in long leprosy strips. All the horses look like the animals at the zoo on a hot day—tired, wasted, like they just want to lie down, roll over, and die. Sunlight comes through the trees, a bleach-white light—not warm and comforting but empty and hot. The eye of hell watching.

Petry doesn’t say a word.

Neither does she.