The questions dug at Eugene, scratching right between his shoulder blades. It was as if by seeing Walker and Monnet in the flesh after following their story for so long, he was now connected to them by invisible string. They had tied themselves to his ribs, and where they went, he would follow.

He shook his head. It was a ridiculous notion. They had the same magnetism as any other charismatic criminal, and that was all.

Slipping the photo out of its chemical bath, he held it up to the red glow of the lights. It had developed just out of focus, blurry around the edges, but it caught Walker and Monnet from the chest up, black and gray against the stark white block of the bank. Despite the blur, Johnny Walker’s smile was immortalized clear as day, sly and curved on his perfect lips. Eugene shivered, studying the expressions on their faces. There was something knowing in Walker’s gaze, something dark and glittering, the one clear focus of the photo. He looked at Eugene like he knew—what? Eugene kept his secrets closely guarded. He didn’t like being looked at like he could be easily read.

He propped the picture up on his night table where he could see it in his peripheral vision from his bed. The ceiling fan turned in lazy circles, doing nothing to dispel the stagnant heat. Vines climbed the bricks outside, tendrils creeping in between the cracks to edge around his window, like fingers looking for a way to inch inside. He stared at the ceiling, his hands folded over his chest, as the water stain in the corner slowly spread. It was dark around the edges, and it grew a little larger every day. What must it be like to live somewhere else, somewhere better? Closing his eyes, he inhaled the smell of roses, strong enough to mask the mold, and he let the whining drone of the day's last cicadas wash over him and settle under his skin.

His stomach turned in memory of the cop’s blood. The cicadas had been screaming then, too, under the mid-morning sun. None of the reports that had come out over the course of the afternoon could agree whether it was Walker or Monnet who had shot him. Eugene wasn’t sure it mattered. Not to the cop, anyway.

The year before, Eugene had gone to see the place where Bonnie and Clyde were shot. The day after their deaths, he walked the highway shoulder under the bright May sun to where their car had stopped. It was easy to imagine them there, slumped behind the wheel of that bullet-ridden V8 Ford, bleeding out over the upholstery. People called it the Death Car now; there were rumors of it making the rounds in carnivals and state fairs, where people paid money to sit in the same seats where the infamous lawbreakers had died. Eugene found the whole thing gruesome, but he made his private pilgrimage to Sailes all the same. The dirt at the side of the road was trampled flat with footprints from a hundred different people, the bank robbers' blood turned to mud in the dust.