“Penn, if anything were to happen to you or Annie, Caitlin would never forgive me. I accept that my daughter is dead, but I don’t accept that my obligations to her will ever end. So you hire the best and send me the bills. I don’t give one goddamn how high it goes. You killed Snake Knox’s nephew. Until that son of a bitch is pumped full of embalming fluid, I want you living like the president of the United States. I failed to protect my daughter, and I can barely stand to look in the mirror. Don’t make the same mistake with yours.”

I don’t intend to.

Thus we have lived with at least one bodyguard—and sometimes three—within yards of us twenty-four hours a day. Today, during our weekly drive to and from the Pollock prison, we’ve had only Tim, an ex-SEAL from Tennessee. Tim has become like a favorite uncle to Annie, and a brother to Mia and to me. As usual, Annie saw her grandmother first today, and then her grandfather while Mia walked down the road and shared a cheeseburger with me at Wendy’s.

Juvenile, maybe, but that’s the way it is.

More eyeshine flashes out of the empty fields beyond the shoulders of the highway. This drive is like a night tour of some vast wildlife refuge, a southern safari inundated by the sulfurous, miles-long reek of a skunk’s defensive spray. The bright orbs flashing in the darkness run the color spectrum: yellow for raccoons, green for deer, red for foxes and possums, blue for the occasional coyote. The land seems peopled by luminous ghosts, yet the explanation is simple enough. The tapetum lucidum layer of crystals behind all those retinas evolved to enhance night vision by reflecting light back through the eye, so that it can be used twice, not once. But like the TV lights that always blinded me when I arrived at the Walls Unit at Huntsville to witness executions, the blaze of my Audi’s xenon headlamps renders that adaptation useless, blasting all those sensitive eyes sightless—

“Daddy?” Annie’s hand lightly squeezes my right arm. “I need to pee.”

My daughter is eleven years old, but when she speaks from half sleep, her voice sounds exactly as it did when she was three or four.

There are no lights ahead, only blackness. But my brain quickly riffles through its file of stopping points in this near desolate landscape. “I think there’s a gas station about eight minutes ahead, Boo. Can you wait?”

“Uh-huh. Don’t forget and pass it, though. I gotta go bad.”

A voice from behind me says, “I second that sentiment.”

Glancing up at the rearview mirror, I see Mia watching me, a wry smile on her face.

“I’m hungry, too,” she adds. “I’m going to be huge by the time I go back to school.”