Marshall had more cash. Quite a bit more. He’d pulled it out of his safe when he got the guns. But this guy was ready to sell Lexie out at the first offer. He was excited to do it, and why not? He had in the past sold Lexie herself. He’d turned her body over to multiple men, strangers, to feed his own hungers. Marshall had to work to keep his upper lip from curling in answer.

He told Marshall his story, darting little glances at the money.

They’d been living here since he got out, the two of them, renting the third bedroom as a crash pad when they could. That room had been empty the night Lexie’s mother showed up. Very late. He and Lexie were dead asleep on the living-room floor in front of the TV.

“The front door banged open, I mean, BAM, like a thumper,” Toby told him, his pink-rimmed eyes wide. “We’d forgot to lock it, I guess, but anyway, we hadn’t heard no knocking. So I sit bolt upright, and there’s this figure in the doorway. At first I didn’t realize it was a person. I thought it was some kind of mummy or a witch, ropy silver hair lit up from that streetlight, and I couldn’t hardly make out her face much except to tell she looked a thousand years old. I let out a holler, and I reached for—” Toby stopped, licked his lips. Gun, Marshall thought. Toby didn’t want to say that part to a guy he assumed was a cop. “Anyway, Lex sat up yelling stuff, like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ The woman ran right at her and grabbed her by one elbow and hauled her up onto her feet. By then I’d realized it was some little old frail lady, and I was like, ‘Bitch, you better step out.’

“But Lexie said, ‘It’s my mother, asshole,’ and at the same time that old woman fixed me with the meanest eye I ever saw. She said, ‘Look to your business, young man.’ I’d been woke from a dead sleep, and I was jacked up mad as hell, but when she said it that way, it kinda stopped me. Dead in my tracks. Like, I don’t want to say I was scared of some old granny, but Jesus.