“…can expect more clouds, with temperatures much cooler than yesterday’s. Highs in the upper forties with late-afternoon thunderstorms likely to hang around through the evening. Gonna be a sloppy night for football folks, so remember to bring . . .”

Cole clicked off the radio, flung away the sheet, and came up off the mattress on the floor. His knees and ankles creaked as he rose onto his toes and stretched his arms toward the ceiling. He rotated his throwing arm until blood flowed into the gravelly joint.

Stepping over strewn gym clothes, he moved to the door and peered across the trailer’s narrow hallway. Two sets of feet poked out from beneath a twisted sheet on his mother’s bed. A tattoo wrapped around one of the man’s ankles. It looked like either a mermaid or a dragon. Something with scales. It might have been familiar, but he couldn’t be sure. They had all started to look alike lately.

Cole hadn’t bothered to check the time when his mother and the man had come stumbling in last night. He’d heard the front door swing open, some laughter, beers being cracked open. Then came two or three minutes of creaking springs before, finally, snoring.

He shut the door, slipped Guns N’ Roses into the CD player, and put on his headphones. He did fifty quick push-ups as “Paradise City” rang through his head, then he lit a Marlboro and smoked slowly as Axl Rose wailed through “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” When the song ended and the cigarette was finished, he stopped the CD and threw on the nearest T-shirt and Levi’s from the floor. At the dresser, he slipped a silver hoop into his earlobe, then ran gel through his matted black hair.

His little visitor came calling right on schedule, scratching at the window beside the dresser. Black Mona’s cats never slept in. The old woman in the next trailer over had to have three dozen of them now; they seemed to breed like a virus. There were times Cole wanted to shoot the damn things, especially when they appeared early on weekends. He’d have done it, too—shot them dead without remorse.

If the cats had belonged to anyone but Black Mona.

If even half the rumors he’d heard about the old woman were true, he wasn’t prepared to take any chances. In fact, to stay in her good graces, he had even made a habit of feeding her cats a little something when they came around.