“He’s been hitting on me, following me to the parking lot. At first it was just, you know, annoying?” She raised her head, searched my eyes for understanding. “Then it got uglier. He began calling me at home. I went out of my way to avoid him at the gym, but a couple of times I saw him parked out in front of the house. David finally got fed up and went to talk to him. He denied it all and then he threatened David.” She blinked, twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fist she’d made of her right. “David’s not physically…formidable? Is that the right word?”

I nodded.

“So, Cody—that’s his name, Cody Falk—he laughed at David and called me the same night.”

Cody. I hated him already on general principle.

“He called and told me how much he knew I wanted it, how I’d probably never had a good, a good—”

“Fuck,” Bubba said.

She jerked a little, glanced at him, and then quickly back to me. “Yeah. A good, well…in my life. And he knew I secretly wanted him to give me one. I left this note on his car. I know it was stupid, but I…well, I left it.”

She reached into her purse, extracted a wrinkled piece of purple notepaper. In perfect Palmer script, she’d written:

Mr. Falk,

Please leave me alone.

Karen Nichols

“The next time I went to the gym,” she said, “I came back to my car, and he’d put it back on my windshield in the same place I’d left it on his. If you turn it over, Mr. Kenzie, you’ll see what he wrote.” She pointed at the paper in my hand.

I turned it over. On the reverse side, Cody Falk had written a single word:

No.

I was really starting to dislike this prick.

“Then yesterday?” Her eyes filled and she swallowed several times and a thick tremor pulsed in the center of her soft, white throat.

I placed a hand on hers and she curled her fingers into it.

“What did he do?” I said.

She sucked a breath into her mouth and I heard it rattle wetly against the back of her throat. “He vandalized my car.”

Bubba and I both did a double take, looked out at the gleaming green VW Bug parked by the schoolyard gate. It looked as if it had just been driven off the lot, still probably had that new-car smell inside.

“That car?” I said.

“What?” She followed my gaze. “Oh, no, no. That’s David’s car.”

“A guy?” Bubba said. “A guy drives that car?”

I shook my head at him.

Bubba scowled, then looked down at his combat boots and pulled them up on his knees.