“And ordering you to be a good girl and send me on my way.”

“He was reporting that he’d be tied up for a while.”

“So we’re on our own.”

“What?”

“Just you and me, kid.” Galimore winked. Ineffective, given the unnecessary lenses.

I dropped my phone into my purse and glanced up at him. As before, my stomach performed a wee flip.

I looked away. Quickly.

Two cats were tearing at something in a patch of grass by one corner of the restaurant. One was brown, the other white. Both had sinewy shadows overlying their ribs.

“I know you’re curious about Fries,” Galimore said.

I was.

“And Bogan.” Cale’s father.

“You’re heading to talk to them now?” I asked, still looking at the cats.

“I am.”

A zillion brain cells clamored that it was a bad idea. I waited for opposing views. Heard none.

“I drive,” I said.

North Carolina is loaded with little pockets that have managed to remain on the far side of rural. Fries had found one of them. Or someone had found it for him.

Following Galimore’s directions, I’d taken the outer beltway, then gone east on NC 24/27. Just before Locust, I’d cut north on 601, then made several turns, ending up on a stretch of gravel that hardly qualified as a road.

For several minutes we both assessed the scene.

If Galimore’s information was correct, Eugene Fries lived in the seediest trailer I’d ever seen. Its hitch rested on a boulder, keeping the thing more or less horizontal.

The trailer had no wheels, its flip-open windows were rusted shut, and a mound of debris rose halfway up the side facing us. BOLER was barely legible on its sun-fried aluminum.

A brand name? The owner’s name? A name given to the trailer itself? Whatever. I suspected Boler had been parked sometime this millennium and never again moved.

The trailer occupied most of a small clearing surrounded by hardwoods and pines. Along its perimeter I could see more trash heaps.

Behind and to the trailer’s right stood a shed constructed of haphazardly nailed two-by-fours. A dirt path circled from the trailer’s door around the hitch and boulder toward the shed. Straight shot to the can. Though gray and weathered, the outhouse seemed of more recent vintage than Boler.

To the trailer’s left loomed an ancient oak whose trunk had to be eight feet in diameter. Its gnarled limbs stretched over both trailer and shed. In its shadow, the earth was dark and bare.

Four feet up the oak’s trunk, I spotted two bolts. Clipped to each was a chain, now hanging slack. The stainless-steel links looked shiny and new.

My eyes traced the chains downward, then out across the bare ground. As I feared, each ended in a choke-collar clip.

“There might be dogs,” I said. “Big ones.”

“Yeah.” Galimore’s tone suggested he shared my apprehension.