“Before tonight, I . . . I . . . I didn’t even touch the dogs. It’s not my thing, I’m just there with . . .”

“With who?”

“Bodie and Bird.”

“Who the hell are they?”

“The Haycock boys. Know ’em? Brothers. Irish twins.”

“Like, from Ireland?”

Tressa shakes her head. She seems to be getting more nervous now. “No. Kids born so close together they might as well be twins. Born nine months apart. They call them Irish twins.”

“Whatever. They go to school with us?”

“No, they’re, uhh, they’re ‘homeschooled.’” When she says it she makes little air quotes, and in doing so, the Slim Jims drop from under her arm onto the asphalt.

“So they’re the ones who like to hurt the animals.”

“It’s not like that, I told you—”

Atlanta scowls. “You banging one of them?”

Tressa tightens, doesn’t say anything. Atlanta almost laughs.

The girl tries to change the subject. “So it’s true, right, you shot the junk off your—”

But Atlanta has little interest in letting the girl finish her statement. “You’re banging both of ’em?” Atlanta asks.

“I . . . I was with Bird, but then Bodie wanted to hook up and . . .” She suddenly looks confused, maybe even a little sad. “I still sometimes get time with Bird. But mostly it’s Bodie.”

Atlanta’s about to ask another question when Tressa’s gaze jumps like a leafhopper. Next comes the dingling bell tied to the top of the convenience-store door.

“Hey!” barks a man in a strong Indian accent. She turns, sees the little man brandishing a broom like a gladiator. “You stop messing around outside my store or I call the police! I call them!”

Atlanta scrunches her face, gives him an incredulous look. “You just sold this underage girl cigarettes. So go on, give ’em a ringy-dingy. I’ll wait.”

The man fake-laughs (“heh heh heh”), eases the broom by his side. “Oh! Oh, I think I, ah, hear a customer.”

Then he ducks his head back inside. Ding-a-ling.

“That was cool,” Tressa says while kneeling down and feeling for her lighter. Atlanta jabs her hard in the knee with the baton. Tressa bowls backward into a pothole. “Hey!”

“You don’t get to tell me what’s cool. I don’t care to be admired in the eyes of a dog killer.”

“I told you, we don’t kill the—”

“You stole a white dog recently. Couple weeks back. Little. A . . . a terrier.”

Tressa just sits in the pothole like someone who sat on the toilet while the seat was still up and ended up stuck. “Yeah. Well, I wasn’t there. But we stole a couple little white ones recently.”

“And where do they end up? Where do Bodie and Bird”—those scum-sucking sumbitches—“take the dogs?”

“The Farm.” Tressa clears her throat, says it again louder. “They take them to the Farm.”

“The heck happens at the Farm?”

“The fights.”

“What fights?”

“The dogfights.”