I said, “Yeah, but…”

Devin leaned toward me. “The prick who did this is going down, Patrick. Believe it.”

I wanted to. I really did.

Just before we left, while Devin and Oscar were in the bathroom, I looked up from the blurred bar top and found both Gerry and Patton staring at me. In the four years Gerry’d had him, I’d never known Patton to so much as bark, but one look in the dog’s still, flat eyes and you’d never consider messing with it. That dog’s eyes had probably forty different casts for Gerry—ranging from love to sympathy—but it had only one for everyone else—bare warning.

Gerry scratched behind Patton’s ears. “Crucifixion.”

I nodded.

“How many times you think that’s happened in this city, Patrick?”

I shrugged, not trusting my tongue to enunciate properly anymore.

“Probably not many,” Gerry said, then looked down as Patton licked his hand and Devin came back into the room.

That night, I dreamed of Kara Rider.

I was walking through a cabbage field filled with Black Angus cows and human heads whose faces I didn’t recognize. In the distance, the city burned, and I could see my father’s silhouette standing atop an engine ladder, hosing the flames with gasoline.

The fire was rolling steadily out from the city, kissing the edges of the cabbage field. Around me, the human heads were beginning to speak, an incoherent babble at first, but soon I could distinguish a stray voice or two.

“Smells like smoke,” one said.

“You always say that,” one of the cows said and spit cud onto a cabbage leaf as a stillborn calf fell from between its legs and puddled by its hoofs.

I could hear Kara screaming from somewhere in the field as the air grew black and oily and the smoke bit my eyes, and Kara kept screaming my name, but I couldn’t tell the human heads from the cabbage heads and the cows were moaning and tipping in the breeze and the smoke was all around me, and pretty soon Kara’s screams stopped and I felt grateful as the flames began to lick at my legs. So I sat down in the middle of the field to get my wind back and watch the world burn around me as the cows chewed the grass and swayed back and forth and refused to run.

When I woke up in bed, I was gasping for air and the smell of burning flesh clung to my nostrils. I watched the sheet shake over my racing heart and swore I’d never go drinking with Oscar and Devin again.

10

I’d crawled into bed at four that morning, been awakened by my Salvador Dali dream sometime around seven, and didn’t fall back asleep until about eight.

Which meant nothing to Lyle Dimmick and his buddy, Waylon Jennings. At exactly nine, Waylon started screaming about the woman who’d done him wrong, and the harsh grate of a country fiddle climbed over my windowsills and rattled china in my brain.