“We don’t want any part of you, you skanky ho,” Scotty said, trying to sound scornful, to square his lack of rape aspiration with his need to assert his manhood. Of course, real men should be ready to have any sort of sex, any time. So if they didn’t want to rape me, I must not be desirable.

“That’s good,” I said, and then I saw that the black-haired boy on my right had gotten too tense to hold back any longer. His arm had gone back to hit me. Stupid to telegraph like that. I sprayed him right in the face, and he turned red and began clawing at his eyes and shrieking.

“It’s burning! I can’t see!” he screamed. While his two buddies were staring at him with their mouths open, I sprayed them, too, though Scotty tried to dodge at the last minute, and I didn’t get his eyes.

The blip of a police siren scared me out of what wits I had left. When I’d recovered from the shock, I was delighted to see the police car, and even more delighted to see that the driver was Sheriff Harvey Branscom.

He was not as glad to see me as I was to see him.

“What happened here?” he asked, surveying the young men with disgust. They were crying and moaning, and the black-haired boy was actually on the ground.

“They swerved in front of me and got out of the truck to threaten me,” I said.

“No, Sheriff,” wailed the black-haired boy who’d swung his fist first. “It was her! She—”

“She pulled your truck over to the sidewalk, dragged you out, and made you stand in a row in front of her so she could squirt you with pepper spray?” Harvey Branscom would have loved a credible reason to blame me, but he was honest enough not to manufacture one. “You three make me sick. Scot, if I see you even cast a glance at my niece after this little incident, I’ll find a way to stick you in jail, and you won’t like it one little bit.”

I wasn’t sure if Scot was absorbing any of Sheriff Branscom’s threats, since he was doubled over rubbing at his burning face. That was exactly the wrong thing to do, according to the booklet that came with the pepper spray. Sheriff Branscom sighed heavily and pulled a six-pack of Ozark Mountain bottled water out of the police car. “Lucky I ride around with this,” he muttered. He opened a bottle and made the boys stand still while he poured it over their faces.