Even Whitey doesn’t pant. He just stares forward, his eyes like lasers burning holes in the back of Petry’s seat.

The dog knows. Has a sense of the man’s malevolence.

Atlanta feels trapped. Like she’s one of the dogs before the fight. Locked away in her crate until it’s time for the scuffle. Until it’s time to die.

Comes a point when to head back to town, toward the station, Petry should stay straight on this road—Boxelder Road—but turns off instead onto Old Orchard Road. Not toward the town of Maker’s Bell in the valley, but rather onto a road that loops back up toward Grainger Hill. Toward the trailer parks and dead barns and shitty little ranch houses where grungy motorheads sell bad weed or crystal meth.

That’s not good.

She pulls out her phone. No bars.

Whitey growls, real low.

Finally, she says in a croaking voice: “Where are we going?”

But Petry, he doesn’t answer. He just drives forward, eyes front.

Ahead, a dirt lot. He pulls into it, the tires conjuring up a plume of dust. Doesn’t turn the car off, but leaves it running instead. Through the windshield Atlanta can see a burned-out house—a charred briquette that was once someone’s home and is now just a skeleton of black bones.

Petry turns around. Faces her through the wire.

“If you touch me,” she seethes with false bravado. But she can’t finish the words. She’s too scared.

He says nothing in response. Instead he pulls out a phone—no, not a phone, but some kind of MP3 player. He’s already got it cued up to play what he needs. He thumbs a button.

Sound fills the car. A conversation.

First voice: “Something’s wrong with my son.”

Second: “We’ve noticed that. Wondered if you’d come to us.”

Two men. Atlanta recognizes both of them.

“I worry that who he is . . . is who he is,” says the first man. Bill Coyne. Chris’s father. “That it’s something he can’t change, you know?”

“He can change.” This one, Orly Erickson. “It’s a choice he’s made. Whether out of teenage rebellion or something else, I don’t know. I’m no psychologist. But I know that God did not make us this way. And I know that the devil gives us choices and tempts us so that we choose poorly.”

Bill: “I want something done.”

Orly: “Are you asking me to do something about this?”

Bill: “I . . . I don’t know.”

Orly: “You are. Aren’t you.” A statement, not a question.

Bill: “Yeah. Yeah. I guess I am.”