“Dennis Farman somehow found their house. He attacked her with a couple of wood gouges he stole somewhere. She’s cut up, but she’ll be fine.”

“Jesus,” Mendez muttered. “She’s the only person on the planet who ever tried to do a kind thing for him. Where’s the little shit now?”

“In restraints at Mercy General. Apparently, the little Morgan girl was at the scene and clocked him a good one in the head with a fireplace poker.”

“Way to go, Wendy.”

“He’ll be transferred to the juvenile detention center as soon as the doctor clears him to go,” Dixon said. “As far as I’m concerned he can rot there until he’s eighteen.”

Mendez shrugged his sport coat on and headed for the door. “Be sure to tell them to hide all their matches.”

Chapter 86

86

Dennis lay in his hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling. He couldn’t move his hands because he had been tied to the bed. His head felt like a pumpkin that had been bashed with a baseball bat.

Stupid Wendy Morgan. He’d show her one day.

He would show them all.

It wasn’t like he’d never been hit in the head before. One time his dad had knocked him in the side of the head with a beer bottle and he had gotten half knocked out and started puking and everything. He’d had a ringing in that ear for two weeks after.

Miss Navarre hadn’t come to see him. He hoped that meant he had killed her and she was dead now. That would mean he had killed two people, and he wasn’t even a teenager yet. Nobody was ever going to mess with him again. He felt like a pretty tough guy thinking about that.

Then he thought about what would happen next, and he didn’t feel so tough, after all. He wouldn’t be sent back to the hospital on account of he had tried to burn it down. He would be sent to juvenile detention, and no one would ever come to see him. Ever.

Nobody wanted to help him. Nobody would ever care how he felt or what he thought ever again. He had killed the one person in his life who would have done those things—Miss Navarre.

He had no one. No one at all. And he never would again. He was rotten and bad and good-for-nothing like his dad had always said. And not one person in the whole world cared. He was all alone.

For the first time in a long time, Dennis Farman cried himself to sleep.

Chapter 87

87

“So, what’s this all about, Cal?” Bruce Bordain asked.