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Back Atlanta Burns Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication Page
  4. CONTENTS
  5. PART ONE: SHOTGUN GRAVY
  6. Sometimes she wakes…
  7. CHAPTER ONE
  8. CHAPTER TWO
  9. CHAPTER THREE
  10. CHAPTER FOUR
  11. CHAPTER FIVE
  12. CHAPTER SIX
  13. CHAPTER SEVEN
  14. CHAPTER EIGHT
  15. CHAPTER NINE
  16. CHAPTER TEN
  17. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  18. PART TWO: BAIT DOG
  19. CHAPTER TWELVE
  20. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  21. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  22. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  23. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  24. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  25. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  26. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY
  28. PART THREE: THE FARM
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  37. PART FOUR: KISSING FIRE
  38. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  43. PART FIVE: BAIT GIRL
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  46. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  47. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
  48. EPILOGUE: THE MESSAGE
  49. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  50. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

She doesn’t say. She just winks and leaves.

Atlanta has a free period in the afternoon. She sneaks outside to the parking lot. Goes row by row until she finds that green Mustang. A restored classic muscle car.

She takes a piece of limestone gravel off the lot and keys a message into the driver’s-side door:

BEAR MACE

She heads back inside.

She has a whole plan concocted. She’s going to sneak into the administration office, and Shane’s going to run interference because everybody there knows him and loves him, and then she’s going to use someone’s computer or get into a file cabinet and find home addresses for both John Elvis and Mitchell—but Shane tells her that plan is dumb.

“Haven’t you ever used the Internet?” he asks.

“Sure,” she tells him. “Cat videos and weather reports in case they’re gonna cancel school for a day. But not Facebook. I stay the hell off that thing.”

“No, I mean, have you ever used it to learn something?”

She shrugs.

He shows her that, if you know what digital door to knock on, you can find out pretty much anything. Finding out addresses is, according to him, “Easy like Sunday morning,” which she’s pretty sure is a Lionel Richie reference and strange coming out of Shane’s big round head. She tells him so. But then he reminds her that she knew the reference, which makes her strange, too.

“My daddy used to like him,” she says.

Regardless, they get the addresses. John Elvis lives in Grainger Hill. Mitchell’s way on the other side. Up in the circle of minimansions on Gallows Hill. The Internet doesn’t have any more information on John Elvis, but it has some more of the 4-1-1 on Mitchell: his father’s Orly Erickson, and he, along with many of the other minimansion inhabitants, is a transplant. Erickson in particular is from Dayton, Ohio. Heads up some new “biologics plant” north of here, in Springtown. Some fifty-thousand-foot facility. TNC Biologics. She’s not sure what biologics is, so Shane works more Google-fu.

“Looks like TNC does all kinds of stuff,” he says. “Recombinant DNA. Stem cells. Vaccines.”

She shrugs. Fine. The elder Erickson is a productive member of the business community. His son’s still a gay-bashing bully piece of shit, and he has to be taught a lesson.

Still, though: she’s a little nervous when it comes to creeping around the richie-rich types of Gallows Hill. Some of those are gated communities.

That means the first order of business is paying a visit to John Elvis Baumgartner.

To Grainger Hill. Trailersburg. Meth Town. The deep dark acre.

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

They head over on Saturday. Chris drives: he’s got his mother’s minivan, a 2004 Ford Freestar whose front end is mashed up like a boot-crushed Coke can.