“Atlanta!” he calls over to her, waving and smiling like they’re fucking yachting buddies.

She wants to run screaming, wants to dart around the corner or dive in a passing car or climb up into the food-counter window like a cat fleeing a house fire. But her boots stay rooted to the sidewalk.

“Been a while,” she manages to say as he suddenly stands before her, smelling like soap and smugness.

“It has,” he says, tongue probing the inside of his cheek. “Sorry to hear about your friend.”

“I’m sure you sent flowers to the funeral and I just missed them.”

“Totally.”

“What do you want, Erickson?”

He leans in close, lowers his voice. The smile falls away like an ill-hung painting tumbling off a wall. “Just wanted to say, sorry to hear about your house.”

“My house?” Her chest tightens. “What about my house?”

“Little mouse squeaked in my ear, told me that your mother’s having a hard time paying the mortgage. Foreclosure, huh? Man. Symptom of the down economy, I guess.” Sympathy so fake a breeze could knock the cardboard cutout down and blow it across the street, where it’d get hit by a bus.

She says through clamped teeth, “How do you know that?”

“Oh! Didn’t I mention that my dad’s got friends at First National? Golfing buddies. He keeps all his investments there, too—a sizable package.”

“I’ll rip off his sizable package and cram it down his throat.” She feels dizzy. Like the world in front of her sits in supersharp focus but has gone blurry and greasy at the edges. Consequences again come crashing down upon her, the chain of action and reaction laid bare.

This tree she planted has twisted roots. Roots that want to choke her dead.

“Good luck with everything,” Mitchell says. He reaches up and musses her hair; she swats his hand away.

“Wait,” she says. He stops and smirks. “Let me tell you something, Mitchell Erickson. If I find out you had anything to do with Chris’s death, anything at all, then you better run and you better hide, because your daddy or his banking buddies or his gun-club fascist freak-show friends won’t be able to stop me from hurting you. I’ll crash your car. I’ll break your pitching arm. I’ll find whatever it is you love—because even for a monster like you there’s gotta be something—and I will tear it into screaming pieces.”

Again his face falls. The smirk drops. “Coyne killed himself. It was suicide.” But he says it as if he’s not sure.

“That your story? That what helps you sleep at night?”

Mitchell grabs her, both hands around her shoulders, his face a sudden rictus of rage. “You listen to me, I didn’t have a fucking thing to do with—”