Jon Golly shook his head and whispered. She bent over him.

“What? Say that louder.”

“Immunity from all prosecution.”

He winced and swallowed.

“Or not one more word from me.”

She stared at him, for a long moment sucked into a whirl of worry about her own twins keeping one another’s secrets. She lifted her phone from behind her badge.

I think I might need help because she

Deputy Luck’s text ended there. She was in trouble.

Refocused, the sheriff released her pinch on Jon Golly’s drip.

“Peace be with you, Mr. Golly. While it lasts. I’m coming back.”

She tore her Charger over twelve miles of melting asphalt to reach Liberty Hill Road. She nearly lost it on the first gravel corner, reined herself in over the next two miles until she cleared a rise and saw Deputy Luck’s Tahoe in the ditch beyond Goodgolly’s driveway. She skidded up beside. Her rookie deputy lay in the creek that ran beside the road, a brown mass amid the hard glints reflecting off the shallow current.

Her phone stirred again. The rest of Lyndsey Luck’s text had just arrived.

offered me a glass of buttermilk

CHAPTER 26

“Ambulance and backup, Denise. Liberty Hill Road, same damn place as yesterday.”

She jumped from the Charger before it stopped moving, reaching back for PARK.

“And get a deputy to the same farm as yesterday. It belongs to Jon Golly. Get me everything we have on him and his brother, Jim. Run both names through CrimeNet.”

She plunged down the bank and crashed into the creek. Ankle-deep was plenty deep to drown in, and Lyndsey Luck lay on her face. The sheriff hauled her rookie over and dragged her by her shoulders onto cobble. For a weird instant they stared into each other eyes, as if neither believed the other existed on the same life-death plane. Then Deputy Luck convulsed and spewed a multicolored geyser that hit the sheriff’s chest and face. The deputy took two retching gulps and tried to exhale. Then her eyes widened and she froze. Her heart had stopped.

The sheriff lunged, dragged her to higher ground, and fell upon her with chest compressions while her mind searched for what she knew about poisoning and came up with nothing. Between pumps she dug two fingers down Luck’s airway. Something was stuck down there, too deep to reach. The sheriff tore her deputy’s uniform shirt and vest off, pumped, rooted with her fingers and poked the obstruction deeper, pumped, gave up, and put her mouth over the deputy’s, pinched her nose and inhaled hard, then pumped, pumped, for so long that her body and Luck’s body seemed one. She had no idea how much time passed before she felt pressure, crowding, annoying interference.

An EMT shoved her aside.

“Sheriff, help is here.”

She collapsed into a reef of watercress. For a while her phone had been buzzing.