“I’m just messin’ with you. So whassup? Been a while, girly. Heard you got into some shit.”

“Who’d you hear that from?”

“Word gets around when you tangle with the town Nazis.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Guy’s face suddenly falls. “Oh, shit, you know, I didn’t say to you—I didn’t say sorry. And, uhh, what’s the word? Condolences. For your friend. The gay kid.”

“Chris.”

“Yeah. Him. That sucks.”

“It’s pretty much the definition of suck.”

“He killed himself?”

“Yes.” She pauses. “No. I don’t know.”

“So, ahh, what you need? You need pills, I don’t have anything right now that’s up your alley. I got a little weed if you want it, and between you and me I got some sugar cubes if you like acid—did you know that the penalty for selling LSD is, like, ten times worse than if you were selling heroin and shit? That’s fucked up. Anyway, you don’t seem like the trip-out kinda girl.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to feel my brain melt, no. I was hoping you had some Adderall.”

“My hookup at Geisinger’s gotten all paranoid. I think he’s using what he takes, and it’s making him a little loco, you know? I need to find a better connect there. Sorry, Burns.”

“There’s something else.”

“’Sup.”

“I need to know about dogfighting.”

Guy leans back. Opens his mouth, waggles his tongue back and forth over his teeth. “Who told you that?”

“Who told me what?”

“That I could help you with that.”

“Nobody. Well—you once mentioned dogfighting, and Shane had an idea—”

“Who’s Shane?”

“What? He’s my—you know, what the hell just happened here? One second we were talking, and now you’ve gone all squirrelly on me. I just asked—”

Guy stands. Puffs out his chest and tucks the gun under his armpit. “Who the fuck is Shane?”

She stands up to meet him chin to chin. “He’s a friend who thought you might know people who know people.”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“Do what?”

“The fights.”

“The dogfights?”

“Yeah. I don’t do that anymore.”

“You used to be involved in that shit?”

“Isn’t that why you’re asking?”

She gives him a hard shove. He staggers backward. Guy’s ankle clips an exposed duct and suddenly his arms spin like a pinwheel in a hard wind, and next thing Atlanta knows he’s tumbling over the edge of the trailer, yelling as he falls.

Then: thump. He cries out in pain.

Oh, shit.

She stands over him but doesn’t help him up. Atlanta can see that his limbs aren’t twisted or anything and that his biggest problem is trying to get air back into his flattened lungs. When he fell, he narrowly missed hitting a small, rusted picnic grill. Good for him.