“Don’t have time,” she says, gnawing a fingernail to the quick. She gets it to a hangnail and uses her teeth to wrench it free from its mooring. Blood wells and the wound stings. “This has to happen fast. He can’t know it’s coming.”

“Yeah, but are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Chew, chew. The taste of licking an iron skillet.

“Is your nose broken?”

She touches it. She’d forgotten about it, actually—the pain receding like low tide, but now that she’s thinking about it again her nose feels like a radio powered on, full volume, dialing up a loud frequency of pain. “No. Don’t think so.”

“You can’t go like this forever. At some point you gotta be a normal girl.”

“If you say so.”

Guy looks over at her, obviously worried. “I’m serious.”

“This part has to happen first. This man shot my dog and killed my friend—and I don’t buy that line of bull that Chris killed himself—that’s not what this was, not for one dang second. I let that slide, and soon he’ll come for you. Or Shane. Or my mother. I’m tired of people taking power that’s not theirs to take. Evil keeps on keepin’ on. At some point you gotta stand in the headlights and take your shot.”

And that’s the end of that conversation. Guy nods. Says nothing else. Just drives.

She eventually points ahead: “Turn here.”

The night sky is a kind of green-dark, like the algae waters of the pond that is now the murky, mud-bogged home to Orly Erickson’s heirloom ring. A pond they just passed.

As they get close, Atlanta tells him to cut the lights. He does, and he slows the Scion so it’s quiet. And so they don’t go driving into a tree.

Up ahead—moonlight on windows, like ribbons of light caught in pools of oil.

The gun club. Where Orly Erickson and his cronies meet and talk about powder loads and the NRA and, oh, right, white power heil Hitler let’s hurt anybody who doesn’t look or act like we do.

From behind Atlanta, a blue glow rises, fills the car. She looks back, sees Shane sitting there, nose practically pressed against the screen of a very small laptop—what he calls a Chromebook.

“You can do this?” she asks.

“I dunno. It depends.”

“Depends are what old people wear to hold in their pee,” she says. “I thought you said you could do this.”

“I can. If there’s even anything here.”

Way Shane put it was this: Petry played her a recording, but it wasn’t played on a handheld digital recorder. It was an MP3 player. Which means that conversation between Orly and Bill Coyne was contained within a digital file—like, duh, an MP3.